Stay Off My Operating Table
I was a morbidly obese heart surgeon. All through high school, college, med school and surgical training, I followed the U.S. dietary guidelines for both diet and exercise. Yet nothing I did kept the weight off. I just kept getting fatter and fatter. Each day in surgery, I would split open the chests of people just like me. I knew I was heading for the operating table myself if I didn't find solutions that worked. In 2016, I finally found a way to lose 100 pounds and keep it off. Now - in addition to doing heart surgery - I work to help people just like me get healthy, lose the weight and keep it off. I'm Dr. Philip Ovadia, the rebel M.D. and cardiac surgeon who is working to keep people off my operating table. http://ovadiahearthealth.com/whitepaper/ Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Dr. Philip Ovadia.
Episodes
Your body already knows how to heal itself. The question is whether anyone is giving it the right signals.
Dr. Adeel Khan trained as a conventional physician before following a thread most doctors ignore: what if we could restore the system, not just manage the symptoms? That thread led him through sports medicine, global laboratories, stem cell research, and a fundamental rethinking of what aging actually is at the cellular level.
I...
Nick Norwitz has an MD, a PhD, and a cholesterol level that should have killed him — at least according to the standard model of cardiovascular disease. For seven years, his total cholesterol held above 700. His LDL sat in the high 500s. Every clinical algorithm flagged him as a cardiac emergency. He took none of the prescribed medications.
His just-published case report shows zero coronary plaque. Not reduced. Not minimal. Zero.
Thi...
You got the tests. You got the diagnosis — maybe more than one. You took the medication. And you still don't feel like yourself.
Reed Davis has spent 30 years working with exactly those people. As the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, he's trained over 5,000 practitioners in a methodology built on one counterintuitive premise: chasing a diagnosis may be the wrong move entirely.
Instead of narrowing in on a label, ...
Medicine has always positioned itself as the authority — the place you go when something is wrong, on its terms, in its building, by its schedule. But the infrastructure built to support that model may now be its biggest liability.
Dr. Ami Bhatt, Chief Innovation Officer of the American College of Cardiology, has a front-row seat to what's breaking down and what's quietly beginning to work. What she sees isn't a techn...
Darius Sharpe has spent over two decades watching the same patients cycle through emergency rooms with the same conditions, the same medications, and the same unaddressed root cause. As a paramedic-turned-ER nurse, he started asking a question nobody around him wanted to answer: why are we treating the result instead of the cause?
What followed was years of self-experimentation — continuous glucose monitors, serial lab draws, corona...
Every woman will go through menopause. Every partner, spouse, child, and close friend will feel it too. And almost none of them will understand what is actually happening — or why the standard medical response of "just add hormones" so often falls short.
Cynthia Thurlow joins Stay Off My Operating Table to explain why so many women hit midlife feeling like their bodies suddenly stopped cooperating, despite doing “all the r...
Dylan Gemelli went from prison to Milan runways to millions of YouTube subscribers — and then a calcium score of 120 and an LP(a) of 330 stopped him cold at 40 years old. In this conversation with Dr. Philip Ovadia, he breaks down what both the biohacking and conventional medical worlds are getting wrong, why confusion is the real enemy of public health, and how he dropped his LP(a) from 330 to 94 without following his doctor'...
Dr. Lori Calabrese is a psychiatrist whose trajectory changed when a patient with 15 years of treatment-resistant anorexia went into full remission after a ketogenic diet. What followed was a research journey — pilot studies, peer-reviewed case series, and a now-funded randomized controlled trial — consistently showing that depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, and other conditions could achieve complete remission, not just s...
Dave Feldman, a software engineer turned citizen scientist, went on a ketogenic diet and watched his LDL cholesterol spike dramatically while his family members on the same diet saw no such change. Unable to get cardiologists or lipidologists to study the phenomenon, he built a public charity from scratch, crowdfunded the research, and designed the Keto CTA study — enrolling 100 metabolically healthy people with very high LDL and s...
Moira Newiss spent 20 years running hospitals for the UK's National Health Service before her body and mind staged a slow, invisible collapse that no blood panel could explain — and the system she'd devoted her career to had nothing to offer but a prescription she didn't want to fill. What she found instead was a framework rooted in mitochondrial biology that reframes mental illness, chronic fatigue, and burnout as p...
Kemi Blake started training contortion as an adult with a body that wasn't built for it — no childhood conditioning, no natural flexibility, just a fierce refusal to quit and an unusual willingness to pay close attention to what her body was doing in the moments before she lost consciousness. What she found wasn't a performance hack. It was a map of the nervous system, the body's hidden pressure architecture, and the...
Sally K. Norton, a Cornell-trained nutritionist with a master's in public health, spent decades sick while eating all the "right" foods before connecting her arthritis, chronic fatigue, sleep dysfunction, and other symptoms to oxalate accumulation. Her research — drawing on tens of thousands of peer-reviewed articles — reveals that medical and nutritional institutions have long known oxalates cause problems, but the ...
Dr. Sandeep Palakti spent years at Harvard and Mayo Clinic before realizing the American healthcare system isn't designed to keep people healthy. In this conversation with cardiac surgeon Dr. Philip Ovadia, he breaks down why 70% of physicians are now employed by large health systems or insurers, how that institutional capture prevents real preventative care, and what both doctors and patients can do about it. He explains how ...
Two cardiac specialists—one who performs open-heart surgery, the other who places stents in blocked arteries—sit down for an honest conversation about what they see on the operating table and in the cath lab. Dr. Philip Ovadia and Dr. Arasi Maran treat patients at the end stage of heart disease, often when it's too late for interventions to make a meaningful difference. Both physicians share the same conclusion: you don't...
Dr. Amie Hornaman to discuss one of the most underdiagnosed and misunderstood health issues affecting millions—especially women over 35. Dr. Amie shares her personal journey from being a misdiagnosed fitness competitor who gained 25 pounds despite extreme dieting and exercise, to becoming a leading thyroid hormone specialist.
Discover why 95% of hypothyroidism is actually Hashimoto's disease, why standard TSH testing fails most...
Julia Greenblatt shares how she overcame chronic illness and pain and restored her own vibrant health by adopting a carnivore diet. She highlights her rapid recovery from debilitating hemorrhoids, mental clarity, and overall life improvements.
Carnivore diet recovery takes center stage as Bella Ma (Steak and Butter Gal) returns to share her transformation from sick vegan to thriving carnivore. After six years on a plant-based diet that left her without a period, covered in cystic acne, and constantly starving, Bella made a dramatic overnight switch to eating only animal foods. The results speak louder than any nutrition debate.
This is a special episode. We had a bunch of unforeseeable and unpreventable occurrences in the month prior to today, and as a result, none of our scheduled interviews happened.
So, we took the opportunity to look back and highlight the 10 most popular episodes, so far. They're listed here for quick and easy access.
What happens when a heart surgeon who's performed over 3,300 operations decides the healthcare system is fundamentally broken? Dr. Philip Ovadia built a medical practice where the goal is making patients healthy enough that they don't need doctors anymore.
This conversation reveals how Ovadia Heart Health operates across all 50 states, why they celebrate when patients leave, and the uncomfortable truth about why your docto...
Jenny Mitich started carnivore to lose 70 pounds after having twins. Her anxiety vanished, depression lifted, and undiagnosed Hashimoto's finally made sense. This conversation moves beyond weight loss into mental health transformation, blood work interpretation your doctor won't discuss, and raising carnivore kids who refuse birthday cake. She shares sardine fasting protocols, functional medicine ranges, and why she'...
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