Lyle Hurd: Welcome back, Dr. LaValle, nice to have you hear again.
Jim LaValle: Great being here.
Lyle Hurd: When we talked earlier, you mentioned something about your clinic—
Jim LaValle: Right.
Lyle Hurd: Could you tell us how you went from being a pharmacist with some concerns and
a lot of education and then started a clinic—what it does and where it’s going?
Jim LaValle: Well you know, what’s interesting is how it really started. I was working as a
Grouter pharmacist—Grouter’s a big corporation—working in the pharmacy and I
had this idea. I had a diabetic woman come up to me and she had her medication,
it was late at night—I was always put in rough neighborhoods because I was kind
of a big guy, worked out a lot—and I saw her come back to me with a grocery
cart full of foods that were…really bad for her diabetes. Diabetes runs ramped in
my family, so I’m very familiar with it. I looked over the counter and I said to her,
“do you mind if I take you around the store for a minute?” because nobody was
there, I mean, at night nobody came into my store. She was only one of two
customers. I showed her around the store and I felt pretty good about that. It was
like, more than giving her, her medication and I felt pretty good about giving her
some guidance… this is a healthier way to go. Well, I got an idea, so I walked
into the president of Grouter’s nationally and I said, ‘why don’t we tag all the
foods and produce for heart healthy and diabetes friendly foods?”
Lyle Hurd: What year was that?
Jim LaValle: That was back in 1985-86, I think.
Lyle Hurd: Way ahead of its curve.
Jim LaValle: It was a little bit ahead of its curve. Well, the president of Grouters said to me,
“why don’t you go back to practicing pharmacy, son.” But luckily my pharmacy
coordinator believed in me. He said, “We’re going to do this.” We ended up doing
events where we would screen people’s cholesterol, we would do their blood
glucose, we would teach diabetics how to use their glucose monitors. We had a
deal with the hospital of Cincinnati that I wrote a shopping guide with; with the
dieticians there and the head of the Jewish hospital cholesterol center. Hundred of
people flocked into the Grouter’s stores and everywhere there was a tag for food
that said heart healthy or diabetic friendly, coming off the shelves. What
happened is that was the birth of tagging food for heart health, low sodium, and
diabetic friendly. That kind of gave me my emphasis to really get into helping
people with proactive health; because what happened when they got their shelf
full, they said, “you know, you did a great job, [but it’s] time for you to go back to
the pharmacy.”
Lyle Hurd: Back to the pharmacy.
Jim LaValle: That’s when I left the job and decided I really needed to help people on a more
regular basis become more proactive and helping them make intelligent decisions.
Lyle Hurd: That’s great. So basically, from that standpoint, you went out and began to create
what’s going on now.
Jim LaValle: Yes. [In] the mid eighties I started doing that and I went into clinics, where I
worked in a small clinic. [I] did that for several years, working with different
chiropractors and medical doctors, doing assessments on people for their
biochemistry, looking at their drug-induced nutrient depletions, or their drug
interactions, what’s the right thing to give them for their condition, specific to
their needs. Then that all kind of snowballed over the years. [I] did a lot of
lecturing all over the world, and one day when I was retired—I had just finished
writing my second database and my 13th book—had a doctor call me from Good
Samaritan Hospital and said, “We heard you never hurt anyone. We’d like you to
come into our integrative medicine center and see if you could straighten it out for
us.” I ended up at Good Samaritan Hospital and I worked on their integrative
medicine program and got it turned around. From there, that’s where I landed
today. I’ve got an institute now that has physical therapy, a fitness center; I have
my medical docs there that really are the directors of medicine there. I have
dieticians there that are really prone towards proactive health; nurses,
acupuncture, massage therapy. We even have MRIs and cat scans that are in the
building, affiliated with us, so that we can do research on dietary supplements.
Lyle Hurd: What I’d like to do is ask you if you’ll come back and visit with us, so we can talk
about some of your books.
Jim LaValle: Well, that’d be great.
Lyle Hurd: Thank you very much.
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