“Dr. J.” The Other Side of Medicine — four decades of telling people their body was built to heal.
He is a Doctor of Chiropractic in Ohio who has been practicing since 1986, hosting a health program on Cleveland radio since the 1990s, and publishing on gut health, food and inflammation for so long that the rest of the world has only recently caught up. He wrote Carbs from Heaven, Carbs from Hell in 2004. He has 641 videos on YouTube and 113 podcast episodes. He is 76 years old and competes in sprint triathlons.
In his own words
“At 76 years young, I run full-court basketball, compete in sprint triathlons, swim, cycle, run, and lift weekly.
I’m not extraordinary. I’m consistent. If I can do it, so can you.”
— from the description of his YouTube channel
Who he is
Most people in natural health sell you a future version of yourself. Dr. James Krystosik is already living in it. He is 76. He plays full-court basketball. He races sprint triathlons. He swims, cycles, runs and lifts every week — and he does it while telling people over 40 that decline is not the deal they signed.
He has been making that argument since 1986, which is the year he began practicing as a Doctor of Chiropractic in Ohio. That is thirty-nine years of saying “food first, drugs last” — most of them spent well outside the mainstream. The Cleveland Clinic did not open its Center for Functional Medicine until 2014. Dr. J had been on the radio talking about gut health, inflammation and hidden food sensitivities for the better part of two decades by then.
He is not, and does not claim to be, a medical doctor. He is a chiropractor with an undergraduate degree in nutrition who spent forty years reading the research on digestion and building a practice around it. What makes him worth listening to is not a credential. It is the length of the track record and the fact that he is visibly, athletically living the thesis.
The philosophy
Three words that sit on the front of his website, and the most interesting thing about him. The stereotype of alternative medicine is intuition, vibes and supplements sold on faith. Dr. J’s entire model is the opposite: comprehensive stool analysis, micronutrient panels, delayed food-sensitivity blood work, toxic metal screening. Find the mechanism, then treat the mechanism.
It is a strangely rigorous position for someone the establishment spent decades ignoring — and it is why his content ages well. He is not chasing a wellness trend. He is running labs.
His flagship work is GUT 911 Rx — a protocol built around restoring digestion first, on the argument that skin, mood, joints and immunity all report back to the same place. SIBO, leaky gut and hidden food allergies are his home turf.
Long before the low-carb wars, he was drawing a line between the carbohydrates that heal and the ones that hurt — and defending the humble potato while he was at it. Hence the second nickname: Dr. Good Carbs.
His show has lived on Christian talk radio in Cleveland since the 1990s. The faith came first and the platform grew out of it — the reverse of how most wellness brands arrive at it. His own show description promises “natural cures based on biblical principle (laughter included).”
The platform
The Other Side of Medicine has been on the air in Cleveland for roughly thirty years, most recently on AM 1220 WHKW. His personal email address is still drj1220 — the call number is part of his identity. It was already described as “a weekly radio program” in his 2004 book jacket, which means the show has been running continuously for at least twenty-two years by the public record, and by his own account about thirty.
The show became a Facebook Live webcast. The webcast became a podcast. The Other Side of Medicine Podcast is 113 episodes deep and still shipping weekly — the most recent one went out this month. On YouTube he has published 641 videos since 2019, and one of them — a one-minute calf exercise he calls activating your “second heart” — has been watched more than 200,000 times.
That is four decades of practice, thirty years of broadcast, a published book, a podcast, a YouTube library and a private community, built by one man in Ohio without a media company behind him.
The book
Published by Square One in 2004. 289 pages. ISBN 9780757001772. It is a real book from a real publisher, and the framing — that the question is never whether carbohydrates but which — took the rest of the nutrition world another fifteen years to arrive at.
That book is also how Dennis and Dr. J ended up in a long conversation about the Blue Zones, the Pima Indians, satiety scores and why the potato is quietly one of the best foods you can eat. That conversation became a full article on BlitzMetrics — which quoted him at length but had nowhere to send anyone who wanted to know who he actually was. This page is that missing destination.
Where to find him
Dr. J and I go back years. He was one of our earliest health clients, and one of the most patient people I have ever worked with — including through stretches where we did not serve him nearly as well as he deserved.
Somewhere in there we had a long conversation about carbohydrates that I turned into one of my favorite articles. I quoted him throughout it — and then never built him the one thing he actually needed, which is a single page that pulls forty years of practice, a published book, a thirty-year radio show and 113 podcast episodes into one identity a search engine can recognize. Without that, the internet barely knows he exists: no press, no Knowledge Panel, a handful of reviews from 2015.
That gap is the whole point of what we do. So this page is a link, an apology and a thank-you at the same time. Meet the rest of the people Dennis builds with →