"A Paradise for Parents" is not your ordinary assisted-living facility. While the past four years have witnessed elder care descend to what can only be described as abusive levels of isolation and neglect, Hal Cranmer, who heads up "A Paradise for Parents'" five locations in Arizona, does things very differently.
We talk about Hal's approach to giving his elderly residents their best possible lives, including a commitment to dietary and exercise regimes that have helped many to improve both physical and mental health. Hal says they've actually had seven residents go back to their own homes because their conditions improved to the point where they no longer needed supportive care.
We talk about the remarkable effects of a low-carb diet and the promise it holds for those struggling with memory issues, and about Hal's partnership with "A Mind for All Seasons", an organization that is doing groundbreaking work to slow cognitive decline.
We also talk about Hal's recent Twitter spat with former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who was not happy to hear that "A Paradise for Parents" was not locking down its residents out of fear of a virus.
The elder-care industry could stand to learn a lot from Hal Cranmer.
Links:
A Paradise for Parents (with the Bohemian Rhapsody parody video).
A Mind for All Seasons.
Apollo Health.
The Bredesen Protocol.
"A Paradise for Parents" is not your ordinary assisted-living facility. While the past four years have witnessed elder care descend to what can only be described as abusive levels of isolation and neglect, Hal Cranmer, who heads up "A Paradise for Parents'" five locations in Arizona, does things very differently.
We talk about Hal's approach to giving his elderly residents their best possible lives, including a commitment to dietary and exercise regimes that have helped many to improve both physical and mental health. Hal says they've actually had seven residents go back to their own homes because their conditions improved to the point where they no longer needed supportive care.
We talk about the remarkable effects of a low-carb diet and the promise it holds for those struggling with memory issues, and about Hal's partnership with "A Mind for All Seasons", an organization that is doing groundbreaking work to slow cognitive decline.
We also talk about Hal's recent Twitter spat with former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who was not happy to hear that "A Paradise for Parents" was not locking down its residents out of fear of a virus.
The elder-care industry could stand to learn a lot from Hal Cranmer.
Links:
A Paradise for Parents (with the Bohemian Rhapsody parody video).
A Mind for All Seasons.
Apollo Health.
The Bredesen Protocol.
Welcome to the podcast that's all about solutions. If you're tired of complaining about tyranny and you want to take action to create a freer world, this is the place for you. Join us as we ask what, then, must we do? All right, I am here today with Hal Cranmer. Hal and his wife are the owners of a paradise for parents. I am very excited about this. I found you on Tom Woods School of Life and then I've seen you on Twitter and it sounds like what you're doing and this is correct me if I'm wrong, but this is like. This is an elder care facility, an elder care home, and I'll ask you to sort of describe everything that you do, but it sounds like you're doing. You're really doing things your own way, in a lot of different, on a lot of different levels, which is very unusual in this industry. So welcome to the show, and could you maybe just start by telling us what is a paradise for parents?
Speaker 2:Sure, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. So we own my wife and I own four assisted living homes in the greater Phoenix area. If people know Phoenix they're in surprise Goodyear and Mesa, arizona, which are kind of suburbs of Phoenix, and they're basically residential homes that have been converted into assisted living facilities. They're large homes, they're one story, so people don't have to go up and down stairs and each of them are licensed by the Department of Health Services for 10, up to 10 residents at a time, and currently we have all of them filled except one. We have an opening one. So we basically take care of elderly people.
Speaker 2:What you imagine is assisted living with basics, but it's in a residential home rather than a big facility. People don't have apartments, they have rooms like bedrooms here, but then they live and interact like it's a regular home. We have usually two, maybe three caregivers, depending on how much care is needed here during the day, and we have one caregiver who's here at night. When I got into this industry it really bugged me to see people sort of being warehoused. I don't want to disparage this industry. There's an awful lot of really good caring people but sort of the system is it's a big compliance industry. We have to follow a ton of health care regulations, many very well-intentioned and understandable but the emphasis seems to be on pharmaceutical drugs to help our residents. There doesn't seem to be any emphasis on hey, we got to really work on making them healthy, because it's sort of the later stages of most people's lives, so it's sort of let's manage the decline better and I don't know.
Speaker 2:I'm a big believer that God gave us one life to live and that every day is precious. We have the first day, the middle day or the last day of your life, and so why not fight for every one of them? And so I thought well, it seems like there's other stuff we can do and, like I said, martin Health's very particular about regulating what medications we give them, that doctors are overseeing them, that all safety procedures are followed and doctors' orders are followed, all that kind of stuff. But there's a lot of lifestyle stuff that could help these people and I'm seeing help these people. That doesn't really get emphasized.
Speaker 2:I mean, everyone wants to see their mom participate in activities, everyone wants to see their mom be happy and things like that. But it's not a requirement. I don't know how you'd really make it a requirement. I used to call that mandatory fund with my kids. But that activity, that moving and things like that helps your body at any age. Good food helps your body at any age. Sunshine, good sleep there's a bunch of stuff that can help and improve the quality of the life you have left, and that's kind of what we're trying to do here.
Speaker 1:I can just interject there because I've got a personal story I want to share An elderly family member in my family. When you say exercise can improve the quality of your life, that's an easy thing. People say that all the time. I think it actually saved the life of this family member. This person had a heart attack and when they went in they got all the scans and everything and they were told well, your body has created these. What are they called? Corollary arteries? Is it corollaries? Yeah, it's corollary. It creates its own Corollary arteries. No, they're called. I'm pretty sure they're corollary arteries.
Speaker 1:It's like your body creating its own bypass. So you've got a corollary artery and your body creates this thing that goes around the blockage. Yeah, that goes around the blockage. This person had created three of these. No, this person was in their 80s, still was in their 80s and had been doing tai chi and shigong several times a week, and the doctors said that's why that activity is what allowed your body to be strong enough to create these corollaries. I know that's the wrong word. Now I'll think of what it is.
Speaker 2:But it makes sense what you're saying, that it creates a bypass around the blockage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So it's not trivial to just say exercise is good for you. It can actually save your life. It can actually make you strong enough that you can withstand a lot of things.
Speaker 2:Oh, I totally believe it. Yeah, I mean, I see people transform with exercise, not just to lose weight, but just it improves your metabolism and gets things healing. Yeah, not just weight. You're feeling better, yeah. Yeah, it's not just to make you a new bodybuilder. It's really good for people. I mean, my parents are in the eight. They're eighties and I call them up and ask them if they're exercising all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's one of the most important things I actually. I wanted to also ask you, though, because you mentioned you talked about regulations, and you said that they're really they're aimed at that. The focus is getting people in these homes to be on pharma solutions. Can you explain a little bit how that works? How is it that the regulations encourage or sort of push people in that direction?
Speaker 2:Okay, sure. So everyone who comes in our home has a what we call a PCP, a primary care physician, and even when they go on hospice they use the hospice doctors, their PCP, and that physician, primarily, is just in charge of administering medications. So the regulations really are skewed towards. How should I say it? You know there's lots of regulations around the medications. We can't give a resident title, and all without a doctor's prescription. Okay, we can't give them skin ointment without a doctor's permission or documented prescription authority. You know, anything you can order off Amazon is doctor prescribed. The only thing we can do is non-alcoholic beverages and food that we can put in a resident without a doctor's prescription.
Speaker 2:So, that being said, you know I often wonder could a doctor prescribe heroin, and everyone's fine with it as long as we're giving the right dosage? You know I'm being a little facetious, but it's amazing. You know I've had doctors prescribe marijuana. Obviously now that it's legal and no problem from the Department of Health standpoint, you just have to have the prescription. We are looking at some protocols that have supplements. So if we, you know, order vitamin C or something like that, it has to have a doctor's prescription. So everything is geared towards don't give them anything without a doctor's prescription. Well, that just leads into you know. Well, they've got this wrong with them. There's a pharmaceutical solution to that. And then when they have a side effect from that, Because another person.
Speaker 2:They don't want to like take them off that medication, so they prescribe something else to you know fix the side effect.
Speaker 1:And is this because of? Is this the Department of Health that's imposing this?
Speaker 2:Is this your like? Well, I think it's a combination of, I mean, I think, the CDC, fda, all the federal government sort of set the standard of care guidelines.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And that flows down to the Department of Health and then they say, okay, this is how you do it. I know that's the case because we have to do a bunch of tuberculosis testing when people come into our homes, do a TB test, and then we were supposed to do that every year. Well, the CDC guidance now says if you know they get an initial test and they don't show any symptoms, you know, you just need to sort of, you don't need to give it to them every year. Well, as soon as the CDC came out with that, the Arizona Department of Health lifted our requirement to test them every year. And now it becomes we just fill out a form saying they don't show any symptoms. So it starts up high and then it gets blowed down. The Department of Health sort of puts their own spin on it. Locally. We don't really deal with a county Department of Health, our city. We deal with the state pretty much.
Speaker 1:Okay, and that's because of your licensing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're licensed by the state, so we follow the state regulations. The only interaction I've ever had with the Maricopa County, which is our county's Department of Health, is they call us to offer the COVID shots. Other than that, I've never dealt with them at all.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, okay, the reason I'm interested in that is that I'm very interested in the private membership association model. I don't know if you're familiar with that, so my grandmother was. So this is something that used to be very prevalent in America were private associations, and they had schools, care facilities, hospitals and also just sort of welfare type insurance. They were like fraternity associations, where you provide a certain level of insurance or welfare for members, so if somebody gets sick or if somebody loses their job or whatever, there's this pool, but it's a voluntary, it's private. My grandmother was part of one called the PEO in the Midwest and what it was was. It was an association for women's school teachers and they did a lot of things. They have a university that's still operating. They funded women's education, but one of the things they did was if you were a member in good standing and you were ready to go into assisted living, you could go into any one of their homes and they were a little bit as you described. They were not institutional at all, they were actual homes.
Speaker 1:The one my grandmother was in was like this Victorian home in Nebraska Everyone had a room, it was nicely appointed, everything was felt homey, they ate together, and it was because it was a private membership association.
Speaker 1:They were not licensed, they were not subject to licensing requirements and health and safety stuff. It was within the private realm. And so I spoke at length with the woman who was running it at the time and she described how they were able to provide an excellent level of care really, really low ratio of staff to residents or I should say, high ratio of staff to residents, just amazing care. We just always felt like she was very, very well cared for there, and the director told me a big reason for that is that we're not subject to a lot of the very costly requirements that we would be if we were a licensed facility. So I was here. I didn't know when I first talked with you, I didn't know if you guys were operating as a PMA or if you were licensed, but it sounds like you're within the system, working to do things your way.
Speaker 2:Right. I think that might be very hard to do. In Arizona the rules are if you have more than like two residents in your homes, you have to be licensed. So I mean I'd love to have that much not be inspected.
Speaker 1:I can send you more information about it. It's oops, you froze up a little bit there.
Speaker 2:At the present time, and if you hear about that in Arizona, I'd love to learn more about it.
Speaker 1:I'll send you some. Basically, the idea is you're taking your. It's no longer a business. It's not serving the public, it's you know it's kind of like the part of the association right. Right, you're serving members rather than the public.
Speaker 2:I'll send you some information. How do they fund it? Do they pay? From the pool of everyone putting money in.
Speaker 1:Basically, yes. So that was funded at the time and the state, the state of Nebraska, actually did end up cracking down on this. I think they might have been able to fight it, but they didn't. But at the time when my grandmother was there, the way it was funded was when you were ready to go into one of these homes, you would sell your property Like you had a home. You would sell your home and then give a some percentage I'm guessing a large percentage of what you got for your home to the association. They would then invest it and, you know, with their other funds.
Speaker 1:And so basically what ended up happening was you know, some of the members you know might have a million dollar house my grandmother in a small town in Nebraska and I think her house, you know she sold it for like less than $20,000. It was, you know it was to keep you going at a commercial facility for maybe a few months, but they pooled resources. I mean, I was kind of amazed that they were able to do what they did financially, but there was that there was, you know, the contribution that you make as you when you come in. And then there were the funds, the membership funds you know from the organization as a whole. Again, I'm, I'm. I look at that as like how can that possibly be enough? But it was pretty, pretty amazing.
Speaker 2:I may that you said they I think you said they have like sort of monthly dues for regular medical care and stuff like that as well, too right.
Speaker 1:No, I think the dues were just for membership, and so that would be, you know, pretty. You know, maybe a hundred a year or something nothing.
Speaker 2:Oh, very low. Okay, I thought maybe they pooled it like an insurance thing.
Speaker 1:No, but. But anyone living in the homes, I think, would again at that time still had their own insurance. So their insurance would cover like medical things.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:It wouldn't, you know, it wouldn't cover.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, I was thinking like younger families might use it also to pay the doctors and things like that.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2:It wasn't like that this is more to get you ready for an investment early on, to get you ready for what's coming later.
Speaker 1:Um, yes, yes, it really only applied. That that particular benefit really only applied when you were at the stage where you're ready to go into assisted living. You didn't get any, any other benefit, any.
Speaker 2:Okay, because I'd heard of associations of like lower income people and they they'd hire a doctor, like a hundred of them, and just say we'll pay you a salary, just be available with one of us get sick, kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and that's what the, that's what the fraternal associations used to do back in like the 19th century was. There was, say, an association of, you know, I don't know factory workers or dock workers or something, or or immigrants, and they would very often they had this lodge doctor and the lodge doctor would serve that group of people. Might you know? They might come in once a week and say, okay, we've got lodge doctor hours or when can come in and get seen, or whatever. They would do house calls. They would, you know there was a sort of dedicated person and so you know, the AMA really cracked down on that. They. They started once they sort of got a grip on medicine, on doctors, they started saying, if you're going to be, you know, if you're going to be one of us, you can't be a lodge doctor anymore, you can't, Wow, yeah yeah, it's a racket, total racket, total racket.
Speaker 1:But anyway, let's get back to what you're doing.
Speaker 2:That's really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the whole history of that is really fascinating. I can, I'll send you. I'll send you more stuff about that because it's very interesting. But so what do you do? That's different. How are you able you're up against this sort of regulatory structure that's pushing the pharma model, that really restricts you know what you can do with your residents. How do you fight that? How do you? How do you?
Speaker 2:Well, it doesn't restrict what you do with your resident. It really restricts. It's very. It oversees the pharma, suitical aspects of it in great detail. What it doesn't do is you know what kind of activities you do? They don't seem to be. There's not a real big emphasis on what kind of food you serve them, things like that. So I mean, their restrictions are a lot of sort of compliance stuff.
Speaker 2:Do your caregivers have all the certifications and training they need? You know, have you, as your house, been inspected by the fire department recently? You know, is there is the food in the fridge past its expiration date or not? Those kind of things. You know paperwork, compliance kind of stuff. But in terms of day to day, you know they come in and check that the residents seem reasonably healthy and happy. And that's kind of hard to say because you know there's a bunch of residents that are on hospice or something that you know might be a week away from passing away and it's hard to say, oh, you're abusing them. You know as well they're pretty close. You know, as long as there's not bruises all over their bodies, they're probably not.
Speaker 2:So, that's every assisted living. I mean, that's the purpose of assisted living. We, they don't like. Most people don't leave assisted living alive, put it that way, right? You know, if they do, most of the time it's because they're dissatisfied with how the assisted living is treating, and fortunately I haven't had much of that at all. We've kicked some people out, you know, but we have a very low rate of voluntary people leaving, unless we do have a bunch that left because they were healthy enough they could go live on their own at home again, which is wonderful.
Speaker 1:They came and got healthier.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:They came to you and they got healthier.
Speaker 2:And they got healthier, exactly so. So the food, the Department of Health their big emphasis on food is that you have a menu posted that you can show for the next week what you're going to serve and that you're probably going to serve that. And those change because people are like I don't want, you know, steak today or something like that. I don't want fish, I don't like fish. So we we vary. You know we try to project a week out but if you know, if they say no, adjust it. But they want to see it posted and you know there's no, they don't check. On exercise, you know if, if a physical therapy comes in to our assisted living home, they'll check. Do you have a prescription for physical therapy? They're not checking how the physical therapist do it. I'm sure they regulate physical therapists or whatever. So we have like a personal trainer that comes to our home and exercises with the residents, you know, ability permitting. There's a couple of bedbound and you know have serious dimension, it's not going to work, but as much as we can. And then we try to do very nutritious food and I've, you know, done a lot of research, gone through a lot of phases of different diets and what works and things like that and sort of came upon. A low carb diet seems to be the most healthy diet for lots of people, including elderly. Especially. It's very good for people with cognitive issues. It was developed for people with epilepsy, so it's already a brain kind of diet. And then people with dementia have a really hard time using glucose in your brain for energy. But they can use ketones that are come up in your body when you're doing it in a low carb state and help burn those ketones for energy. And having that energy helps the brain heal and it has been shown that the brain can heal, yeah. So so the big thing is we do nutrition, we do exercise. We have For the dementia stuff.
Speaker 2:We have been lately working with a company called a Mind for All Seasons. They're located in Idaho and implementing some cognitive protocols that help people's memories improve or at least decline a lot slower. We did have one lady who got back in the normal range for her memory. She came to us early on in their dementia journey and she's living in an apartment in Washington now. She moved out in September. We've seen this can work that other people are working with. We do see memory improvement. We do see improvement in health overall. We see people on diabetes. We've got one lady here who's offered diabetes medicine, who's offered insulin. Came to us taking a lot of insulin. She doesn't take any anymore.
Speaker 1:That's all diet and exercise.
Speaker 2:Diet and exercise. We get them out in the sun the dementia ones. There's other protocols we use. We use some red light therapy, we use saunas. We have something called audio visual entrainment, which is a pair of glasses and a headset and two little electrodes that clip on the ears. It sends different wavelengths of light and different wavelength pulses of sound, and some electrical simulation Was developed in World War II when they first came out with radar.
Speaker 2:The guys who were watching the green screens with the line going around for radar were falling asleep at their screens a lot. Once they realized they're not just lazy, they found that the wavelengths of light that were coming out and hitting their eyes were actually training their brain to slow down and relax. It was putting them to sleep. This has different wavelengths of light, either to help you sleep or to get you excited. The brain will follow what those wavelengths are doing. There's certain programs that work to help relax the brain and allow it to heal. We use that as well. We're trying to do some hyperbaric oxygen therapy, but it's very difficult logistically. They're quite a ways away. We have to sit in the chamber with them because a lot of the dementia people don't know what's going on. They either get very claustrophobic in a small chamber or they want to get up and walk out, and so you have to sit with them because they have to wear oxygen masks or breathing pure oxygen when they do it. It's challenging one, but the other therapies seem to be helping.
Speaker 2:We take a lot of blood and do a lot of blood work and testing, because there's a whole lot of things that contribute to dementia that scientists are finding more and more. It's not just you get plaques in your brain and you've got dementia. What causes the plaques? How did they get there? What can we do to reduce them? And all this kind of stuff Turns out dementia has three main components Inflammation, lack of vitamins, minerals and toxicity. If you've got a lot of toxins in your body, it can contribute. We take a lot of blood work to see what your levels are. For each of those things, this company I work with creates a plan of okay, this is what we need to do. Besides the exercise and diet and all that, we have a supplement program that will help boost a lot of those markers. Some of those markers can be changed by diet and exercise. Some of them might need supplementation. We do that.
Speaker 2:It's taken me a while but I found a doctor who is willing to prescribe a bunch of those, because there's some stuff like hormones or big contributor to dementia. We find a lot of people are very deficient in hormones, especially at that age. However, prevailing wisdom is that if you have a history of breast cancer or cancer of any kind, giving you hormones might reactivate that. A lot of doctors are like I don't want to touch hormones because there's a cancer risk. If you don't have a history of cancer, there's really practically no risk if you've died.
Speaker 2:In the science Interesting it's kind of dependent on well, how long ago did you have it, what are the risks, when did you have it? There's a bunch of stuff that goes into it, but it's still possible to do some kind of hormone therapy. It took me a while I had to find a doctor who is on board with all this. She's actually a nurse practitioner. She very much helps us with the prescriptions and things like that. We stay implying with the Department of Health but we're doing stuff that's not just you know what Merck and Pfizer recommend.
Speaker 1:Right. Can I ask you about a specific kind of going out of a tangent here? Are you familiar with pro-resolving mediators?
Speaker 2:No, not at all.
Speaker 1:I'll send you information about that too. So our daughter has a genetic condition and it results in she was having seizures. She's not now, thankfully, partly because of the ketogenic diet, but one of the things that really made a difference for her cognitively and the reason I found out about this was by talking with a doctor who was working with dementia patients and gave them pro-resolving mediators. It's kind of like it's fish oil based and it's kind of like we get a lot of fish oil here.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll send you information about this. It's kind of like fish oil on steroids, but not literal steroids, but I'll send you some stuff on it.
Speaker 2:One of the big components we look at is the ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 and see if we can improve that, because a lot of people come here with lots of Omega 6 and not much Omega 3. We serve a lot of fish here, a lot of salmon, a lot of proteins, oysters, things like that.
Speaker 1:Can I ask you how are you funded, how are your centers funded?
Speaker 2:Most of my residents are private pay. Assisted living is kind of a tough business because it's part of medicine that isn't funded by Medicare. There's no Medicare thing. If you want assistance in paying for assisted living, there are basically three ways you can do it. One is long-term care insurance. If people bought that when they were younger, a lot of insurance companies realized people are living a lot longer than we were planning on. They're really cutting back on that insurance policy. It's great now because when they introduced it it was 20, 30 years ago. All the people are coming into assisted living and had it. I think that's going to decline as companies get out of it or charge crazy amounts for it.
Speaker 2:The other way is if you're a veteran. The Veterans Administration has a benefit called aid and attendance that will pay, I think, for the veteran will pay $2,000 a month. For the spouse they pay something like $1,600 a month. Don't quote me on that, but something like that. They pay it to the family, so I don't see it. It's included in the check they write me. You have to be below a certain income level. If you're Ross Perot that was a veteran but a mega millionaire you're not going to be eligible for it.
Speaker 2:The only other way is beyond Medicaid. They have Medicaid programs to pay for assisted living. I have two homes that qualify for Medicaid. I'm not a big fan of it because they don't pay much. They have all kinds of rules that make it very hard on the assisted living homeowner. That is a way, but those aren't the people necessarily that I can do a lot with, because I just don't get much funding to do stuff with them. Unfortunately, we still get creative and try but it's not as good as a full-blown protocol to try to help people with dementia and stuff. Their assisted living is pretty much mostly private pay and Medicaid is the vast majority. Lots of people sell their homes or get reverse mortgages or something to go into assisted living.
Speaker 1:You got into a Twitter spat recently. You want to talk about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was with the Surgeon General of the United States, and for the ex-surgeon general, he was the Surgeon General under President Trump. So he loves to post about masks and vaccines and I'm not a big fan of either one. When COVID came through my homes, the more I read about masks, the more I realized they don't really do anything. So, yeah, we followed all the Department of Health rules. We didn't let people in here, at least until I could, but I found ways around it. But we took our residents, we fed them a lot of vitamins, we put them outside. This was before any vaccines came out or anything In the sunshine. Now we can do that in Arizona better than a lot of other places. All of them had mild symptoms. No one got really sick. We had people approaching their 100th birthday and we're doing, you know, with all kinds of issues, and they all survived just fine. I had one guy who refused to do any of it, wanted to hide in his room, for it got pretty sick and we sent him to the hospital and they put him on a ventilator and then actually he passed away. But other than that, we had like no problem with COVID. We had COVID come through, but it wasn't. And I just think you know, the masks, the vaccines, obviously don't seem to be working anywhere near how they were touted. So one morning he put on or no, it was a Friday night he put on his Twitter and he drove nine hours to see his mom. And this is, you know, a week or two ago we're talking 2020, end of 2023. And they turned him away because his mom tested positive for COVID was having to wear a mask and lock the place with lockdown and I'm like that's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:And we just had an outbreak of COVID. Like three or four people got in one of our homes. We didn't do a whole lot, you know. They kind of stayed in their room during the day, but we're a house so bad to come out and eat and everything. You know, people who wanted to could wear a mask if they wanted, but I'm not enforcing it. We're like over all that stuff.
Speaker 2:So I said we didn't really do anything and in a two or three weeks everyone was fine and so that blew up with tons of people liking it and saying great job, you know, and I did say we did, you know, feed them nutritious meals, did some white exercise, took them outside, which is what we do, regardless if they're sick or well, and they had a whole bunch of people like you know. How dare you neglect them? And you're going to kill all these people and everything. And I'm thinking well, first of all, they're all supposed to be vaccinated, so why are you worried, right? Secondly, you know, no one died, like everyone just got a cold and got over it. There's no, you know. But everyone was saying, oh, you're going to get long COVID and all that kind of stuff. Well, no, everyone. I'm at the house right now, it's fine.
Speaker 2:And so then I had, like some people, put reviews on my website, like on Google. You know this house killed my uncle due to their poor COVID protocols. You know they should be sued out of existence and all this stuff. So I'd put comments like I'm recording this to Google. This person's never been in my house before. And most of them got taken down. I just got a. I just got a notification from the nursing board, who licenses me as an assisted living manager, that they have a complaint from a reporter and that I have to justify you know my own professional conduct, so don't matter now.
Speaker 1:Not a customer.
Speaker 2:No, no, because some said it he was a concerned citizen. No, if you look at my website and the Google reviews, they're all five star. We love it here, kind of thing, and I try to keep a very good and I think I have a very good reputation. I guess I've got three calls today of people who are interested in moving into my home. So I don't, I really go out of my way to treat the residents of my home with the utmost care and caution. I thought lockdowns really worked and I thought masks really kept people from COVID. I'd be more than happy to do those, but I just don't. So yeah, and then you know, it went back and forth between me and Jerome Powell. He said something like I, or Jerome Adams sorry, jerome Powell's, the head of the Fed, you know he said I don't have any compassion. I'm like compassion, you're locking your mom away, you know, and you're the one touting the vaccines how great they are. So I just ended up deleting the tweet because I'm like I'm probably going to get in trouble for this.
Speaker 1:So I can't link to that and show people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm sorry, but it just it's story. It just blew me away how much of a religion COVID still is. You know, no assisted living homes other than Jerome Adams mom's assisted living homes seems to be doing that anymore. And I told my caregivers the story. They're like what are you talking about? No one's doing that, you know, but all of a sudden everyone just totally freaked out about it. So I'm like I don't know, I think I'll stick with. Hey, you know, we had another resident come off hospice today because we fed them well rather than. You know, all these COVID measures suck. I need to get out of that COVID debate.
Speaker 1:Right, right, right. And I mean, as with the vaccines, they don't want people like you, they don't want a control group, they don't want, they don't want to have people like you who are doing it differently. And hey, not only is everyone not dying from COVID, but they're getting better and going home.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Doesn't make their methodology look that.
Speaker 2:No, it's not profitable.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's not profitable for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah no-transcript.
Speaker 2:It's crazy to me that someone who tops the vaccine so highly, my Medicaid homes I had to have everyone vaccinated. That was the rule to accept Medicaid. So we did. But all of my private pay homes I was like up to you, if you want to get vaccinated, I don't care. Yeah, and same with the caregivers. So not everyone had to be vaccinated and I think, like any medical decision, it should be your personal choice to do it or not. But the freakish nature of the response to my tweet tells me that deep down, they know the vaccines don't work, or else they'd be like is everyone vaccinated? Yes, ok, then no problem right.
Speaker 1:Because that was the whole narrative, right. I mean, that was the whole idea. Was well, once we've got the vaccine, we can stop all these crazy lockdowns and isolating elderly, which I think is one of the greatest crimes that happens during this time. That was the whole flame. Was well, once you have the vaccine, you don't have to have the masks, you don't have to isolate, you don't have to drive nine hours to see grandma and then get shot. I mean, their narrative doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2:No, it doesn't, it's just pure emotion and it just it's weird to me that it gets that way. It's sort of politics, religion and COVID now, because it you know, off limits to talk around the dinner table and I don't know how it got that way, but it really did, and it's really sad. Fear. There's so many other medical conditions that are a whole lot more serious Dementia, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, all these things Right, no one really talks about those all a lot, but COVID, oh my God, you know everyone's going to die.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, it's all I think it just it was a campaign of fear and unfortunately it worked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it broke a lot of people, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a question about something that you mentioned earlier. Oh, you mentioned a mind for all seasons. Can you just say a little bit about, like you talked about, some of the protocols? Who are they and like what? Is this something that like, say, somebody has an elderly relative who could possibly benefit from their protocols? Can they contact them? Can they work with them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can't stand up for things about a mind for all seasons. I love them. So I found them when I was researching. Ok, I just started looking out how can we help people with dementia and I found this doctor named Dale Bredesen, who used to run the UCLA Center on Aging, who dedicated pretty much his life to the study of Alzheimer's and he's come up with a way to reverse Alzheimer's and he's done it in several thousand people.
Speaker 2:Lots of caveats got to catch it early. You know it doesn't work for everyone, all these kind of things, but he's the one who came up with those three things of contributing factors, alzheimer's, all that. So he developed this thing called the Bredesen protocol. So I signed up with his company called Apollo Health to do the Bredesen protocol and so we use their resources. But basically what they say is you've got to work with one of our certified health coaches, practitioners, medical personnel, doctor, nurse that's certified in our protocol as part of the ongoing because it's a six month to a year long process at least. So I started, I got the list when we signed up of practitioners and I called a bunch of them and came upon a mind for all season. It was mind for all season was actually started by Excuse me a guy who was an executive director at a large assisted living facility, who is kind of same as me. What can we do better? And so he started.
Speaker 2:It got a bunch of really top notch medical people, got certified in the Bredesen protocol and then they sort of do their own research on top of that to sort of enhance it. In fact, their protocol is called the enhanced protocol and so I you know I use the resources of Bredesen a lot, but they're sort of our health coach, if we use this part of the Bredesen protocol. They're located in Boise, idaho. We do everything virtually. They actually came down here for a clinic for high school kids because they work with a lot of people with concussions and things like that and the problems there, so any kind of brain problems they work with. I met a lot of NFL players through them or ex NFL players.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So they work with people virtually all over the country. They work with people in my homes. We do Zoom meetings like this all the time and you know they have a nationwide contract with LabCorp. So you know, if you sign up with them they'll send sort of their lab requests and then we take our residents to the local LabCorp and they draw the blood and then they send the reports up to a mine for all seasons. But they can work, they work. My best friend from college took his father in law and mother in law and signed them up. They're in Nebraska and they're doing it at home and I think a lot of people can do it at home and ideally that's the way to do it when you first get that dementia diagnosis, first get.
Speaker 2:You know I'm forgetting everything here. You know, call these guys up and it doesn't hurt. You know I'm signing up to do a blood work to see am I at risk? What do I need to do now? Because dementia can start in your 30s and 40s and 50s and just don't see the symptoms of it other than you know I left my keys at home until you know 50s, 60s, 70s. But people are starting to see it more and more and as our diets decline, you're going to probably see it more and more. So I can't emphasize. It's not how early. You should look into it. But yes, I think you know I joke to people in my job. My goal and vision is to get rid of the assisted living industry in the United States. That people can help themselves fix themselves at home and do that, and a Mind for All Seasons is a wonderful resource to do that with, as is the Bredesen protocol and the Apollo Health Group out in California that help people tune.
Speaker 1:Wow, can you? I mean you talked a little bit about the results that you've seen. Can you quantify that in any way? Like of all the people that have come through your homes, can you put a number?
Speaker 2:I'm coming up on my eighth year and I've sent seven people home, so it's not a lot. It's not like I'm going to fix you completely If you're 80, 85,. I've got a 95 year old lady. The family called a mind for all season and they said I'm sorry, it's too late, she's on hospice, let's make her comfortable, kind of thing. But I do have people getting out of bed, getting from wheelchairs to walkers, from walkers to walking again, and I have a lot of that.
Speaker 2:I have a lot of people get off hospice. You know, eventually they're probably going to go. We're all going to go on hospice someday. But you know we're still extending their lives and quality. What I'm trying to do is improve their quality of life so even if they don't go home, they can go out to dinner at a restaurant with their family. They can go home for the weekend, they can spend Thanksgiving or Christmas at home and not at my home. We had a 98 year old guy go on a cruise with this family and we let them borrow a caregiver. She got a free cruise out of it and she kind of took care of them while he was on the cruise. But you know, he came back smiling from ear to ear, just had a great time and passed away six months later. But you know 98 and you're happy at the end of your life. That's a great thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's to me it's improved the quality of life. Like we take them out every month or two to like a big outside the home activity and it's just. It's very logistically challenging because we've got four houses we're trying to put together and rides and everything, but we'll take them on a boat ride around the local lake. There's an air force base here that has air shows. We take them to that. We take them. We.
Speaker 2:Actually a friend of mine I used to be in the air force has a charity thing where they fly old World War.
Speaker 2:I stear and buy planes around and take vets up and we kind of hey, you know I don't have a ton of vets in my home, but I've got people who know vets or we're married to a vet, can we count? And he was very lenient about that, and so all the ones that could, you know, do it, climbed up in the buy plane and we gave them rides around Phoenix, you know, open air, with the leather helmet on and the goggles and that kind of thing. So we take them to movies. You know, spring, spring training is a big thing for baseball here, so we take them to spring training games every year. We've had some of our veterans be ridden around in the car and veterans parades and stuff, so we want them to feel like they can live a life still, that they're not just, you know, a hospital that looks like a house kind of thing, and I think that motivates them to and, as we can get them a little healthier and a little healthier, it allows them to do more and more of that and have some fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's amazing. That just that sounds fantastic. Yeah, I mean, you know, again, from my own experience, I've seen tremendous contrast between what my grandmother experienced and what most assisted living or care homes look like, and it's a world of difference. And I think you know. It's encouraging to hear what you're saying because you are within, you know you're within the licensed system and yet you're still finding a way to focus on the well-being, the quality of life. You know all these things that make people's lives better. You know, at the end of their lives, it can be so much better even within the licensed system. I think it's just a fantastic example.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know the surveyors that come out and audit us and everything like that, most of them are all for this. They're not. They're not trying to take us down or you know I'm going to find something. You know they're very much encouraging of it. And you know I had one surveyor say, yeah, you missed a couple of things in your paperwork, but, man, your residents are just happy as can be. That's awesome. And they, you know she said I'd much rather have that than you guys be absolutely perfect on your paperwork and everyone just lying around waiting to die Right. So you know they get excited.
Speaker 2:We made a music video which I can send you if you want, but we took Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and we turned it into assisted living rhapsody and we made it over three or four weeks. On the weekends we brought my son, went to Arizona State and he had a friend that majored in film, so he and his buddies came out and made it for us. So they had all these college kids running around setting them up, doing a little makeup on them and stuff, and everyone had a great time doing that. Well, I showed it to one of our inspectors and she showed it to the staff meeting at the Department of Health. So I think they're, you know, I think they're all excited about this stuff and it's nice that they're not like well, we're going to clamp down on that, you know, and make sure you're not exercising, and where they're going to hurt themselves and all that they're like, go for it. You know they're very open to it, which makes it wonderful to work with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fantastic. Where can people find you what's online Is?
Speaker 2:there Go to Jero Madams. So our website is the letter A, and then paradiseforparentscom. We on Twitter, obviously, at Hal Cranmer, or our Paradise for Parents. You can probably search for it too. We have a Facebook page that is Paradise for Parents Assisted Living, where we post fun photos of stuff we're doing. I think those are the main ones. I've got an Instagram assisted living Hal Cranmer, but I'm really bad about posting on that one. But yeah, the website's the big one. It'll have some videos. That, though you mean, raps these videos right on the front page there to scroll down a little. I can send you the YouTube link too.
Speaker 1:Okay, great, that would be great, thank you. Anything else you want to add?
Speaker 2:No, I just thank you for letting us do this. I actually met your dad when I lived in Minneapolis. He came up there for a conference with Tom Woods. I loved all of the articles he used to write. I love your articles you write. I see those on lorakwellcom. It's great to meet you as well. I guess that's the big thing I wanted to say.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you. Well, it's been wonderful to meet you and I'm so thrilled with what you're doing. I think part of it is just it's so wonderful to get an example out there of what can be done, because then it's like everyone else what's your excuse?
Speaker 2:Right, that's what I'm hoping. Senior I have a grandson now and he's the cutest thing in the world and he's everything to me, but he gets attention all the time. All the little kids are like everyone thinks they're so cute, want to have the pictures spent tons of time. All people kind of get neglected, in my opinion, in the United States.
Speaker 2:We isolated them, I mean yeah, you know, everyone's so worried about their safety that they just don't let them do anything, and that's going to kill us fast as any disease. So, and those are the people that really built America. You know, the kids are wonderful, but they haven't done anything. You know, they're all potential, so we should pay them back by treating them as best we can and making sure they you know they get their best life as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:It's great, sandy Brittany. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Great, it's great to meet you. You've been listening to what, then, must we Do? The podcast? For those who understand the state is the problem and are seeking solutions For more episodes, go to bretneysubstackcom I G N E dot substackcom and subscribe.