Originally titled GREY MATTERS: Dr. Ken Grey
Forging a Path to Wellness & Longevity | published •Vol 44 • Extraordinary HealthTM • www.GardenofLife.com
When Dr. Ken Grey, a licensed doctor of Oriental medicine and acupuncture talks, his patients don’t just listen. They lean in, eager to hear every word. They do so because what he tells them makes them feel better.
But Dr. Grey can’t be everywhere, all the time. So, he and his team created the VELL Health – Holistic Platform and Mobile App for anyone who would like to learn how to optimize their health on demand.
Holistic Healing On Demand
From chronic pain to mental health, and endocrine and reproductive issues to common diseases like hypertension, asthma, and diabetes, the app can pinpoint triggers and steer users in the right direction. They can also continuously track progress and plan custom care programs in real-time.
The VELL app gives you the tools to supplement and integrate whole solutions into your life based on your imbalances and other health issues, said Dr. Grey. “Based on the list of your symptoms, the AI will design an integrated five-pillar approach to focus on that issue holistically.
The Five Pillars are Nutrition, Supplements, Fitness, Mind-Body, and Treatments such as physical therapy, acupuncture, chiropractic, and cranial sacral therapy.
The app returns real-time feedback over one week, one month, or more, revealing users’ successes in relation to their symptom reports, and areas for improvement to help reach desired goals.
How VELL Health Works
After the download, the app prompts users to answer a few basic questions about their health and then introduces the Five Pillars. Under the Nutrition Pillar, the app suggests which foods should be consumed and avoided. The Fitness Pillar provides helpful tips that focus on the area of physical concern. The Mind Pillar directs users to a vast library of stress-reducing techniques such as binaural beat audios (therapeutic sound patterns), healing nature sounds, and guided meditations.
The app’s ‘My Stuff’ section contains customized recommendations that a user can follow and track.
“If people just take a few minutes a day to meditate, for example, they will see the real change. The same is true with diet. The app suggests foods to restore physical balance and help combat disease,” said Dr. Grey, who is also the author of the Health in Balance books.
Healing The Root Cause of the Problem
While conventional medicine excels in acute situations where drugs can be virtual miracles, Dr. Grey’s VELL Health platform addresses the body holistically, including its physical and emotional state. Words like ‘happiness’ and ‘joy’ are right at home with medical terminology, supplements, and treatments. Dr. Grey observes how serious syndromes have worsened over the decades where issues such as digestive disorders which would occur later in life are now being experienced at a younger age.
VELL helps users of all ages get to the root cause of the misery, much of which can be traced back to a poor diet which often includes sugar and processed foods.
“Anything chemical-based is hard on the body, so if the goal is to be healthier overall, it’s better to learn and feed our bodies elements that they can recognize and process,” said Dr. Grey. “Sugar is a no-no because it lowers the immune system and creates more mucus, so then congestion gets worse, people reach for antibiotics and their bodies are taxed even more. Imagine how many doctor’s visits it would save if we could simply cut out sugar!”
Listening to early warning signs can also help. Reaching for echinacea or golden seal at the first sign of a scratchy throat as opposed to rushing toward antibiotics or steroids can help stop the sickness before it does its damage. There is a connection between the profound overuse of antibiotics that destroy gut flora and lead to more inflammatory issues. As a result, we are seeing the rise of digestive issues and new types of allergic responses in people of all ages.
Ancient Medicine is Here to Stay
While VELL’s AI may be cutting-edge, whole-body wellness is rooted in ancient medicine. The liver, spleen, pancreas, lungs, kidneys, and heart are all tied to different emotions we experience every day.
“We know that the nervous system is related to energy components and that the liver is tied to emotion—stress, anger, and the feeling of unanswered will,” said Dr. Grey. “Taxed or deficient brain cells lack their cognitive function, while the lungs can reflect grief and unhappiness.”
The VELL Health app explains it all with daily practices, in a simple and comforting way. The difference between Dr. Grey’s platform and other apps is that all of the information has been thoughtfully curated in one place, as opposed to multiple resources and disparate programs.
“Being a healer and helping thousands of patients get better where conventional methods have failed, VELL Health can give them guidance to overcome their issues and give them hope, which is something most people lose when their health fails,” said Dr. Grey. “VELL users can learn why and how imbalances happen in the first place.”
Living a Life Well with VELL
Stress also plays a major role in the inflammatory process inside our bodies. Time spent on the VELL Health app gives users a pause for mindfulness. And while, as Dr. Grey says, a patient can’t meditate away a ruptured disc, selecting supplements that don’t conflict with current medications while reducing stress does help.
“When you change your lifestyle patterns, your entire body changes,” said Dr. Grey. “Everything is food—the air we breathe, our environment, putting out words, how we nourish our mind and spirit, the things we smell, the colors around us, what we put in our bodies, it all matters. That’s why we believe in the holistic approach to living a very well life, the moniker for VELL.”
Dr. Grey credits Garden of Life as an essential partner in helping patients. “Some patients try to get everything from an organic diet, but in many cases, the soil doesn’t have all of the nutrients we need, so Garden of Life supplements help us put the proper nutrients back into our bodies,” said Dr. Grey.
Among what his patients can do to gain the most benefits to change their lives, he lists juicing (as opposed to smoothies), Yoga, and Tai Chi, plus beginning each day with some form of devotion, prayer, or meditation.
“Predisposition to a disease doesn’t mean you can’t change,” – said Dr. Grey. “ However you can acquire a different life. It is my dream that patients will visit their doctors and instead of asking, ‘What will you give me?’, they’ll ask, ‘What will you teach me?”
Dr. Grey hosts the radio show, ‘Quality Living’, which airs at 10 PM every Friday on the National Public Radio on 88.9 FM, WQCS-NPR. The VELL Health App is a free download with a modest monthly charge if you choose to subscribe. It’s accessible via Google Play and the App Store.