"Son, you're bad for business."

Bob's father was a mortician. So was his father's father. It was the family business, Bob was the oldest boy, and the plan was simple: he'd be an undertaker.

Instead he went into medicine. His own explanation: "to save people from having to see my dad."

His dad took it well, mostly. One day he put his arm around Bob and said, "Son, your mother and I are so proud of you and all the life-saving awards you've won. But Son — you're bad for business." Bob still calls it the best compliment his father ever gave him.

The other side of the family was different. His mother was a professional musician. Her father was a famous research chemist, and there are something like 150 patents in that family line. Bob says invention ideas show up in his head all the time, uninvited. Keep that in mind. It matters later.

He got a degree in physics with a focus on nuclear physics, then went to a prestigious medical school to work on a PhD in medical physics — the physics of treating cancer with radiation. Eleven years of school in all.

"How can two things that cause cancer cure cancer?"

The heat discovery wasn't the only thing eating at him. He remembers cornering some professors with a question he couldn't shake.

Exposure to radiation can cause cancer. That's why we wear the detectors. Exposure to chemotherapy drugs can cause cancer. That's why we gown up. So how can two things that cause cancer cure it?

The answer he got: It doesn't. We're just trying to kill cancer cells.

And Bob's follow-up: but we know those treatments suppress the immune system. How is the immune system supposed to clear out the dead cells if it's been weakened?

He finished his internship at a hospital in Oregon and walked away from traditional cancer therapy. He calls it, as he calls most of the hard things in this story, "a beautiful gift" — because it forced him to focus on the only question he actually cared about: how do you help a body heal itself?

He went into emergency medicine instead. Joined a fire department's EMS reserve. "In emergency medicine we're the best in the world," he says, without hedging. "Absolutely the best in the world."

One quick story from that work, because it explains how Bob thinks. His unit covers the Rose Bowl. He'd be assigned to, say, tunnel five, and he'd get a thought: go to tunnel one. Tunnel one was another team's district. Made no sense. So he'd go. And within about thirty seconds of getting there, someone would need him. Every time.

"If it doesn't make sense, I know it's a good hit and not just some thought I had. I've brought two people back from the dead because of that." Bob Ross

Bob calls these "intuitive hits." He learned to listen to them the hard way, the Sunday a voice told him not to park on Colorado Boulevard, he parked there anyway, and an usher handed his pastor a note during the service: someone had just totaled his Lincoln Town Car. No insurance. "Dude," Bob says, "I told you not to park here."

A twisted ankle explains the whole thing.

Here's the frame Bob uses, and it comes straight out of the ambulance.

You twist your ankle. The body's response is inflammation. It doesn't feel good — but the biological response always has a positive purpose. In this case, more blood and oxygen to the site so it heals faster. And when the ankle is healed and the inflammation isn't needed anymore, what does the body do with it? Takes it away. On its own. Nobody told it to.

So: trauma, then a response that's uncomfortable but purposeful, then healing. Three steps, every time. Which means that everything we spent decades doing to a twisted ankle — wrap it tight, ice it, take something to kill the inflammation — was fighting the body's own repair crew. Even the doctor who coined "RICE" has since said: don't do that anymore.

Bob had a thought when he was eight or ten years old, watching his grandmother go through cancer: I wonder if an emotional trauma caused this. He knew nothing about medicine. The thought came back to him about a year and a half ago, and he started digging. He remembered that when he was treating cancer patients, something like 80 to 85 percent of them had unresolved emotional trauma. Around the same time he found a physician in Europe who had documented the same pattern across tens of thousands of patients — and who described the disease as a biological response, like inflammation, that stops and reverses when the trauma underneath it resolves.

You don't have to accept all of that to see where it leads. If the body's response to trauma is purposeful, then treating it as an enemy is the ankle mistake all over again. And treating it as an enemy is exactly what "war on cancer" does inside a person.

Cancer cells are your own cells. They started duplicating too fast. They got selfish, they hog the glucose, and yes, that's a real problem. But when you hear war, what does your body do?

It tenses up.

And the body needs the opposite. That's the whole reason Bob says to love them: not because they're harmless, but because "I'm at war with myself" is a state your body can't heal from, and "thank you for trying to keep me safe — you can stand down now" is one it can. In his words: "I'm so thankful and grateful that my body has the ability to heal. I'm so thankful and grateful that it knows what to do."

He also recommends, every time, that people work with a functional medicine physician or naturopath — someone whose whole job is helping the body do its own work. This isn't a replacement for care. It's a change in the state you bring to it.