Hiking Machu Picchu at Sunrise.

The year before medical school, I’m sleeping on the floors of strangers, cheap hostels, on freezing-cold buses. Seeking adventures, street cred, and answers to life’s big questions:

Why do we suffer? How do we heal?

I wander refugee camps, conflict zones, and ghettos. Sightsee world-class cities, ancient ruins, and holy sites. Befriend mystics, wisened elders, and everyday sages.

By grace and fortune I survive a kidnapping, military teargas, multiple robberies, riots, a gun to my head, shamanic potions, and uncountable diarrheal illnesses.

But these heroic tales and inspiring gifts are hard to appreciate because between classes and endless studying, I double-over in gut-piercing pain and scramble to the bathroom every hour and a half.

Mornings I wake up shaking. Sweat-drenched sheets and a pillowcase littered with premature balding. Restless nights, unbearable days. Barely enough energy to endure my life, nevermind enjoy it. An irritable, inflamed insomniac.

Desperate for help I seek the University’s best specialists who order thousands of dollars of tests and procedures.

Life is Looking Up.

Two weeks after my birthday it’s pouring down rain and I’m anxiously waiting in a dreary lobby. Nervous but confident I’ll soon have answers. A treatment, a pill, a cure. Something. Anything.

Overhead calls me to my exam room where I wait and wait. Finally, a doctor I’ve never met comes into my room and calls me the wrong name. Heavy-set with bags under his eyes he looks more exhausted than I feel.

For several minutes he stares at his computer screen, interrupted by his beeping pager. Suddenly he blurts out, “You don’t have Crohn’s or Ulcerative Colitis. It’s only Irritable Bowel Syndrome. We see it all the time. You don’t need surgery.”’

“Good news,” I sigh. “What medications treat this?”

“We don’t have any treatments,” he says getting up, his hand on the doorknob.

“What do I do?” I despairingly ask.

“Learn to live with it. Call our office if you need an appointment.” He leaves.

I’m angry and afraid because my intestines are twisting, burning, cramping in knots, sweat dripping from my forehead, and I’m alone and abandoned. I’ve got answers, but no hope of a healthy future. I’ve got a diagnosis, but no directions to get well.

I rush to the bathroom. Trembling, I sit down. Movement, but no relief from excruciating pain.

Suddenly, in this moment of absolute desperation and despair I hear a voice emerge from the center of my heart...

Healing with Real Food and Connecting with Nature.

Right then and there I vow to become a different kind of doctor. A doctor who cares about people, who will travel any distance required to help them find solutions to their most troubling questions and challenges. Whether those solutions are in research papers, the minds of mystics, the wisdom of ancients, or in the center of their very own hearts and souls.

My journey of self-healing takes me on a journey over 8 years, training with hundreds of physicians, practitioners, and healers, reading hundreds of books, thousands of research papers, and countless self-experiments. I’m beyond grateful to now have a perfectly healthy gut, a lean and muscular physique, and the ability to eat everything I love.

I’m on a mission to empower you to become your greatest healer and the sovereign of your domain, to reclaim your lives, to realize your wholeness, and to create the most beautiful and brilliant reality you can imagine.

In Radiant Love, Dr. Ben

PS: 8 years later I finally figured out what the doctors couldn’t. It turns out I had parasites from all my travels. This is why I’m committed to empowering you to figure out your health in a fraction of the time.