The Godbys: Running for Naturopathy

Jeremiah Godby got a lot of atten­tion that day—which was pre­cisely the plan. The 19-year-old was on a mis­sion to build aware­ness about natur­o­pathic med­i­cine. The run­ning was not some fringe activ­ity Jeremiah did to avoid a sum­mer job. In fact, his dad whole­heart­edly sup­ported it.

The pre­vi­ous year his father, natur­o­pathic doc­tor Dennis Godby, began The Run cam­paign to raise aware­ness about our nation’s bro­ken med­ical model. The Run boils down to deliv­er­ing this mes­sage: “To trans­form the nation’s health, the USA must undergo a par­a­digm shift in the way it thinks about health and dis­ease.” Last year’s inau­gural run hit 16 states, bring­ing the mes­sage to thou­sands of peo­ple, includ­ing 24 mem­bers of Congress; high school classes in Washington, DC; shop own­ers in Winnemucca, Nevada; and col­lege stu­dents in Dayton, Ohio. When The Run hit Boulder, Colorado, Governor John Hickenlooper declared August 26 National Alternative Medicine Awareness Day. Dennis wants The Run to evolve into a per­ma­nent orga­ni­za­tion to help trans­form America’s health. This past August, Dennis’s two sons ran across the West Coast push­ing baby strollers to get the word out about alter­na­tive med­i­cine. It may seem a bit ran­dom, but if you’ve been using run­ning as a vehi­cle for change for most of your life, like Dennis has, it makes pretty good sense.

An Ailing Healthcare Model

You’d think for a man who is such a believer in natur­o­pathic med­i­cine that work­ing as a prac­ti­tioner in this field would be the dream job. But the day-in, day-out “touch one per­son at a time” approach was lack­ing mean­ing­ful effect for Dennis. He found his work as a clin­i­cal natur­o­pathic physi­cian sim­ply not impact­ful enough to alter the path of our ail­ing med­ical system—a sys­tem he says relies on phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal drugs with nasty side effects that don’t treat root causes. “People are suf­fer­ing across a broad spec­trum, from life-threatening dis­eases like dia­betes to joy-threatening con­di­tions like anx­i­ety,” he remarks. “They need to learn that options exist out­side of drugs, such as diet and exercise.

“People sim­ply aren’t tak­ing care of them­selves. We have to real­ize that our health, what we eat and our exer­cise, is a per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity because it affects the whole soci­ety. So when we make these indi­vid­ual choices about how we take care of our­selves, they become com­mu­nal choices,” Dennis points out.

Alongside lack of aware­ness and respon­si­bil­ity con­cern­ing well­ness, Dennis was tired of alter­na­tive forms of med­i­cine con­stantly play­ing sec­ond fid­dle to drug-based med­i­cine. “I remem­ber one time when I went to this meet­ing of local busi­ness own­ers in Sacramento and nobody had ever heard of a natur­o­pathic doc­tor; nobody knew what it was that I did for a liv­ing. I mean, it was pathetic. There is a real lack of aware­ness about it. I felt as if this group was sym­bolic of the rest of the nation,”
laments Dennis.

Naturopathic Medicine

Naturopathic med­i­cine is based on the belief that the human body has an innate heal­ing abil­ity. Naturopathic doc­tors (NDs) teach their patients to use diet, exer­cise, lifestyle changes and nat­ural ther­a­pies to enhance their bod­ies’ abil­ity to pre­vent and com­bat dis­ease. Naturopathic med­i­cine uses a wide range of heal­ing modal­i­ties, includ­ing herbal­ism, acupunc­ture, home­opa­thy and nutrition.

Dennis doesn’t want to see main­stream med­i­cine disappear—just become more holis­tic. “I don’t see MDs as the enemy. I think that natur­o­pathic and con­ven­tional doc­tors are per­fect com­ple­ments to one another. MDs have access to a lot of needed equip­ment that we don’t have; we have lots of func­tional tests that they don’t. Naturopathic med­i­cine uses diag­nos­tic tests to gauge a host of issues, such as imbal­ances in hor­mones, inflam­ma­tion and diges­tion, in order to deter­mine under­ly­ing causes.

“Conventional med­i­cine is great for emer­gen­cies and surg­eries, things like that,” Dennis says. “If a car hits some­one, they go to a hos­pi­tal. If some­one is in a dia­betic coma, they go to the hos­pi­tal; but then they can see us to pre­vent that from hap­pen­ing again. I think that if we can get our egos out of it and do what is nec­es­sary and best for our patients, then we can move forward.”

Dennis believes the rela­tion­ship between atti­tudes and beliefs and one’s health is also some­thing that main­stream med­i­cine doesn’t pay enough atten­tion to. “We don’t talk about it, but I see it all the time in my patients—how atti­tude affects our health. There is so much pres­sure to be per­fect these days. It’s par­tic­u­larly evi­dent among patients who are moms, and it results in adrenal fatigue. A pos­i­tive, grate­ful atti­tude is very impor­tant. I often cite the story of Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, where he attrib­utes his sur­viv­ing a German con­cen­tra­tion camp 100 per­cent to his atti­tude. I think we can have a lot more con­trol over our lives than we think, with attitude.”

Great Doctors, Not Great Promoters

Where natur­o­pathic med­i­cine does fall down for Dennis is in the area of pro­mo­tion. “For some rea­son natur­o­pathic doc­tors are the worst mar­keters; it’s unbe­liev­able. I don’t really have an expla­na­tion for it, but it’s very frus­trat­ing. I think part of it is this lack of belief in our­selves, not so much as prac­ti­tion­ers but from feel­ing beat up by the gen­eral lack of aware­ness of natur­o­pathic doc­tors. People ask all the time, ‘Are you a real doc­tor?’ It gets tir­ing after a while. We go to med­ical school for four years, we take more classes than MDs, we take 18 more exams, and we work really hard. But yet when we grad­u­ate, peo­ple say, ‘Are you a real doctor?’”

Dennis would like to see more alter­na­tive clin­i­cians in high-profile posi­tions like Dr. Oz and Dr. Weil, both of whom are MDs. “Sometimes when I see them I get kind of irri­tated, not really at them but at us. Again, we aren’t doing enough to pub­li­cize our­selves, and there should be NDs up there with MDs. That’s why the point of The Run is to get our name out in the media and tell sto­ries about how impor­tant nat­ural med­i­cine is; not that we are bet­ter, but we just need to raise our profile.”

There are orga­ni­za­tions that exist rep­re­sent­ing natur­o­pathic doc­tors; how­ever, Dennis finds they sim­ply can’t do enough. “There is an orga­ni­za­tion called AANP, American Association of Naturopathic Physicians, which I think does a great job but it results in small changes at the state level. Yet even with these we don’t really think ‘Let’s get the word out to peo­ple; let’s go in and intro­duce our­selves.’ We kind of hang out like minor play­ers; so it is not actu­ally reach­ing the peo­ple, in my opinion.”

Click any image above to enlarge.

Running, Again

It was these issues that had Dennis itch­ing to get out and edu­cate peo­ple about nat­ural med­i­cine. “I just thought that I would be more effec­tive out­side of the office. I felt like I had a mis­sion to get out and tell American peo­ple about alter­na­tive health­care and raise aware­ness, because just teach­ing indi­vid­u­als one by one, we are not going to accom­plish any­thing. Sure, we are going to help those who come to us, but when­ever I turned the cor­ner, obe­sity and dia­betes con­tin­ued to worsen.”

It becomes eas­ier to under­stand how a doc­tor in his fifties would run across the coun­try to pro­mote a cause when you real­ize he’s done it before. In 1978 Dennis was a recent uni­ver­sity grad­u­ate with a degree in exer­cise phys­i­ol­ogy and nutri­tion, and he was feel­ing com­pelled to do some­thing about the lack of aware­ness of exer­cise that per­vaded that era. “Back in 1978, very few peo­ple exer­cised. There just wasn’t the under­stand­ing of the impor­tance of either phys­i­cal fit­ness or nutri­tion like there is now, so I decided to do a cross-country run to pro­mote it,” he says. From Corvallis, Oregon, to Calgary in Alberta, Canada, Dennis would cover a total of 1,420 miles, run­ning about 39 miles a day. He ran again in the 1980s, from San Francisco to Washington, DC, to pro­mote peace in Central America.

The polit­i­cal run gar­nered some pub­lic­ity, includ­ing a photo op with the then gov­er­nor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. But it also had a spir­i­tual impact on Dennis. “I was run­ning 30 miles a day. I didn’t always know where or when I’d get food and drink or a place to sleep. I remem­ber one time dur­ing the 1978 run I had hypother­mia; another time I encoun­tered a bear. I learned a lot about appre­ci­a­tion and grat­i­tude and a real­iza­tion that run­ning like that can make a difference.

“It comes down to mak­ing a judg­ment call of what’s the best use of your time. People say, ‘Why don’t you spend your time teach­ing peo­ple nutri­tion, or some­thing like that?’ I guess I am an activist and I need to cre­ate momen­tum, and teach­ing one by one is too slow. We need momen­tum and we need to get organized.”

The 2012 Run

Running 30 miles a day, suf­fer­ing cold sores, cramps and sun­burn, is not how most col­lege kids spend their sum­mers. But Isaiah and Jeremiah want to spread the mes­sage they’ve acquired first­hand from being raised in a house­hold that prac­tices holis­tic med­i­cine. “Growing up with my dad doing natur­o­pathic med­i­cine, we were amazed at how few peo­ple knew about it. We’d see peo­ple get sick and then just become sicker with con­ven­tional med­i­cine. My brother and I got to learn first­hand how cool and effec­tive natur­o­pathic med­i­cine really is,” Jeremiah says.

This year’s run kicked off in August with Jeremiah launch­ing his 1,000-mile run in Blaine, Washington. Isaiah ran 760 miles begin­ning near the California-Mexico bor­der town of San Ysidro. Their routes had them meet up at a rally in Central Park in Davis, California, on September 13, the last day of The Run. They blogged and tweeted through­out The Run, and Dennis helped orga­nize the ral­lies and events along the route.

The broth­ers ran a com­bined 1,760 miles over the course of a month with­out the sup­port of a chase vehi­cle or med­ical expert. They pushed their belong­ings in a jog­ging stroller. Their deter­mi­na­tion to run is enough to get observers’ atten­tion. “People see us with messed up lips, weird sun­burns and push­ing strollers and they want to know what we’re doing,” relates Jeremiah. “Once they find out and they see this kid out doing this to try and change things, they get really excited and inspired.”

As word spreads of The Run, larger crowds gather at the ral­lies. But for the Godbys it’s often the chance inter­ac­tions with peo­ple that affect them the most. “I remem­ber last year I was in Ohio and we stopped in a bar to use the bath­room. There were these biker guys sit­ting at the bar and they asked what we were doing,” Dennis recalls. “We told them, and they were really inter­ested and excited about it; they were prac­ti­cally in tears. And these are men who maybe are steel­work­ers or retired steel­work­ers, who are at a dark bar drink­ing in the mid­dle of the day—not your typ­i­cal guys into holis­tic med­i­cine, but they were really into it.

“One thing that par­tic­u­larly stuck with me is that dur­ing last year’s run we talked to thou­sands of peo­ple and there wasn’t one per­son who said, ‘You know, there really should be more drugs; we need to use more phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals; we need more surgery.’ No mat­ter how lit­tle they knew about alter­na­tive med­i­cine, they knew intu­itively that we need to trans­form our model, not just rearrange the chairs on the Titanic, but really over­haul the system.”

The Run smacks of that once ubiq­ui­tous bumper sticker “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the mil­i­tary has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” The same logic can be applied to a group of men cur­rently run­ning across the coun­try to pro­mote doc­tors who use safe, pre­ven­tive, effec­tive med­i­cine instead of drugs. Maybe one day we will fund our schools as well as we fund our mil­i­tary. Maybe one day we will fully embrace natur­o­pathic physi­cians and their heal­ing modalities.

Until then, the Godby fam­ily will run.

For more infor­ma­tion on The Run, visit www.therun.org.