The Future of REAL Medicine: What's Next? with Doctor Craig Koniver
Dr. Craig Koniver is a true frontiersman of the coming age of independent and holistic healthcare. I've known Dr. Koniver for years now, as one of my best returning clients for biofield tuning, so I know he's truly hip to the mind-body-emotion synergy when it comes to health. But beyond that, he's also been a leader on the cutting edge for various treatments of the biochemical sort, an area that I have much to learn about, and I'm excited to share this conversation with you.
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In this episode
Core themes
Walking Away From The Prescription Pad
Koniver opened his Charleston, South Carolina practice in 2006 and describes stepping out of what he calls the pharmaceutical model, where the visit is spent managing a patient's medicines rather than the patient. He rejects the functional medicine label too, arguing it simply swaps pharmaceuticals for nutraceuticals and leaves people on thirty to fifty supplements a day while still treating this for that. He calls his own approach performance medicine, helping people perform at any age rather than chasing an abstract longevity target, and he tells Chance Garton that peptides, hormones and nutrients are a bridge, never the destination.
Cortisol, The Sun, And The Anabolic Night
On the architecture of the day, Koniver argues we are wired to be catabolic while the sun is up, driven by cortisol, and anabolic at night, when testosterone, growth hormone and melatonin take over the work of repair. He points to the stretch from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. as the period of heaviest growth hormone output, says his clinic uses saliva cortisol testing across a twenty four hour period, and contends that cortisol also acts as a buffer against inflammation. Chance Garton hears the word itself as core and sol, heart and sun, a poetic reading rather than an etymology.
Eight Hours Is Made Up, Dreaming Is Not
Koniver is openly skeptical that anyone truly understands sleep, calling the eight hour standard elusive and made up, and noting that people in primitive times woke repeatedly to tend a fire and napped through the day. He suspects dream time may matter more than repair time. Chance Garton answers with his own account: his daughter, six months old at the time of recording, announced herself in a dream before his wife knew she was pregnant. Both land on the same complaint, that we are qualitative organisms living in a quantitative world of wearables, lab values and invented reference ranges.
Symptoms As Messages, Not Enemies
Both men treat symptoms as information rather than adversaries. Koniver says pain and illness are there for us, not to us, and goes as far as calling a cancer diagnosis the greatest gift someone could be given because of the correction it invites. He lays out five questions he works through with people, what am I, what do I do, how do I do it, who am I, and why, plus three biological temperaments he names self worth, self love and self safety. He links the self love pattern to worn out mitochondria and argues negative self banter takes a real toll.
Informed Consent And A Doctor's Own Emergency
Late in the hour Koniver describes the mitochondrial tools his practice is known for, NAD plus and methylene blue, framing them as the early tangible wins that give people confidence to think bigger. Chance Garton raises the criticism methylene blue has drawn online, and Koniver replies that he has found few negatives in his own clinical experience. Both then turn to informed consent, which Koniver argues no longer exists in medicine because patients are told only part of the story. He closes with his August 2020 hospitalization, which he frames publicly as the moment he felt closest to God, and with his refusal to franchise, wanting better rather than more.
Quotes
“All healing is self-healing and all self-healing is just remembering who we are.”
“It's true that the body follows the mind, but it's also true that the mind follows the body. It's a two-way street.”
“The more I think about sleep is the more I think that the dream time may be more valuable than the repair time.”
“That's where medicinal science has a lot of troubles with these non-quantifiables, yet they make up such a disproportionate spread of the overall equation for health and wellbeing, energy, and vitality.”
“For many of us, we come to grow and learn through that suffering and understand that it's there for us, not to us.”
“If you're constantly telling yourself you're a bad person because you ate that piece of cake, no wonder it catches up with you, right? Because your cells are listening.”
“My highest value is when I'm full of energy. My highest value is at the highest level of charge. I'm most valuable when I am most rested.”
“I've been asked lots of times to franchise and have clinics all over. I don't want any part of that. I don't want more. I just want better.”
Dr. Craig Koniver is a physician who pioneered peptide therapy in clinical practice and runs Koniver Wellness, an online holistic-medicine clinic focused on personalized, root-cause healthcare rather than conventional insurance-based treatment.
See all Craig episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
