Episode 30: Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon

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Today I’m speaking to Dr Rahul Jandial – an American dual-trained neurosurgeon and scientist at City of Hope, a research centre, hospital and postgraduate training faculty in Los Angeles.

He’s well known for his cutting-edge approach to brain surgery and neuroscience and has transformed the lives of his neurosurgical patients by putting them through his specially developed boot camp for restoring brain function. He’s written an eye-opening, informative and accessible guide “Life lessons from a Brain Surgeon” where he uses his years of expertise to show how healthy people can rewire their brains to work in a higher gear, and this is what we’ll be chatting about on todays show.

Mixing smart brain hacks with case studies and storytelling from his own experiences on the operating table, his book is a powerful and trustworthy insight into the brain.

If I could give you three challenges on the back of this podcast they would be:

For 1 week, try using your non-dominant hand when using your iPhone or brushing your teeth – it really is tricky at the start but the more you do it, the more dexterity you get in your other hand.
Try meditation this week. Try and do at least 10 minutes twice a day – book it in for 7 days, whatever you are doing. It may have some benefits to the cortices of your brain – it may have some benefits to your working memory as well and emotional intelligence.
Look at your diet and look out for the ‘mind’ diet – essentially a modified Mediterranean diet, where the focus is on vegetables, colours, but particularly greens.

There is A LOT of evidence based, safe dietary and lifestyle change that we as practitioners can be confidently discussing with our patients and that’s what we hope to chat about today. You can find all of this information and more at www.thedoctorskitchen.com. Subscribe to the newsletter for weekly science based recipes and listen to the end of the pod for a summary of our discussion and how to improve your overall wellbeing,

Summary

‘in some ways we’ve become adversarial – I’m proud that there are pills that can help, but if they become the drivers, they’ll (people will) see that pills are this option for them – pills are their partner. If their own changes and their own modifications to their diet, their wellbeing, their thought, their lifestyle. If that’s not enough, we can supplement a little bit.
If you change your diet and your cholesterol doesn’t go down as much as we need it to, then we’ll bring in a pill at a lower dose. That way, people respect what doctors and medics do and medics respect that people need to be treated as individuals and drive their own care’.

Dr Rahul Jandial

I hope you enjoyed this podcast as much as I did – what a fascinating conversation with Dr Rahul Jandial – I’m sure you will agree. You can follow Dr Jandial and read more about his amazing work via the social media pages linked here or Dr Jandial’s own website where you’ll also find some fascinating writing.

I also highly recommend you pick up a copy of Dr Jandial’s book – ‘Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon‘ – available now in all good bookstores.

Guest:

Rahul Jandial, MD, PhD. is an American dual-trained neurosurgeon and scientist at City of Hope, a research centre, hospital and postgraduate training faculty in Los Angeles.

When he isn’t performing surgery he is leading a team of scientists in Jandial Laboratory, known for its cutting-edge approach to brain surgery and neuroscience.

He has appeared on Today, Nightline and Superhuman (Fox) and has written first-person columns for VICE.

Social media: @drjandial (Instagram) @RealDrJandial (Twitter) Dr Jadial (Facebook)