The Curious Case of The Mysterious Raisinoma

What happens when a seasoned physician examines a frightening, melanoma‑like lesion on his own father’s foot… only to discover something so unexpected it becomes a brand‑new “diagnosis” in medical history?

This unforgettable holiday story swings from fear to laughter in the blink of an eye—and the lesson it reveals might just change how you think about your life and your health.

In this special year‑end episode of Wellness Connection MD, Dr. McMinn shares a hilarious and true Christmas tale from the family farm. What begins as a deeply concerning medical mystery quickly unravels into one of the most surprising—and comical—diagnoses of his career: McMinn Raisinoma Syndrome.

But this episode isn’t just about the laugh (though you’ll definitely get one). Dr. McMinn uses the experience to explore how easily our minds leap to worst‑case scenarios, both in medicine and in everyday life. He reflects on why things aren’t always what they seem, how curiosity can prevent unnecessary fear, and why functional and integrative medicine invite us to look beneath the surface for root causes rather than settling for symptom‑pill thinking.

You’ll hear:

• A suspenseful and hilarious holiday medical mystery
• How a raisin, a barefoot walk, and a few dog hairs created the perfect diagnostic illusion
• Why paradigm shifts matter in life and in medicine—and how they can transform your health
• The four major root causes of disease and why they matter
• A heartfelt invitation to bring curiosity, intention, and kindness into your health journey this coming year

This episode will leave you smiling, thinking, and maybe even re‑examining the “raisins” in your own life.

Stay curious. Stay open.-minded, and remember—sometimes the scariest problems turn out to be nothing more than a sticky raisin.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Purpose
• 1:02 A Holiday Scare Begins
• 2:04 The Worrisome Lesion
• 3:23 Strange Clues Under The Lamp
• 4:36 The Big Reveal: It’s A Raisin
• 5:42 From Panic To Perspective
• 6:15 Rethinking Medicine’s Default Lens
• 7:28 Root Causes And The Functional Model
• 8:46 An Integrative Win: Headaches And Needles
• 9:45 New Year Invitation And Takeaways
• 10:47 How To Support The Show
• 11:37 Sign Off And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Wellness Connection MD Podcast with Dr. McMinn and Coach Lindsay, where we bring you the latest up-to-date evidence-based information on a wide variety of health and wellness topics, along with practical take-home solutions. Dr. McMinn is an infant and functional entity. And Lindsay Matthews is a registered nurse and IIN certified health coach. Together, our goal is to help you optimize your health and wellness. Mind, body, and spirit. To see a list of all of our podcasts, visit.com. And to stay up to date on the latest topics, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast player so that you'll be notified when future episodes come out. The discussions continue this podcast for educational purposes only. Diagnose or treatment disease. Do not apply any of this information without approval from your personal doctor. And now, on to the show with Dr. McMahon and Coach Lindsay.

SPEAKER_01: 0:54

Hello and welcome to Wellness Connection MD, the evidence-based podcast. We thank you so much for joining us today. I'm your host, Dr. Jim McMahon. Today we're going to wrap up our podcast here by telling you a funny and true personal holiday story that surprised me. And if I'm honest, I gotta admit it even scared me a little bit for a moment. If you get nothing out of this podcast other than a chuckle from an amusing true Christmas story to close out your holiday season, then mission accomplished. But if you want to stick around to the end for the real punchline, you might also enjoy some take-home lessons for life, health, and medicine. I hope you enjoy the story. So here we go. Even though I lived in some far-flung corners of our country, I always try to come home to the family farm for Christmas, the wonderful home of my beloved parents. One particular year, everything was going great, lots of Christmas cheer, a crackling fire, lots of shiny colorful packages under the tree, and way too much food. Then one day I won't say who, since she's not here to defend herself, but let's just say a close family member approached me with a very concerned look on her face. She pulled me aside and stated that she was very concerned about my dad. She had noticed a nasty looking growth on the bottom of his foot, and she wanted me to take a look at it. So I asked him when it started. He said he first noticed it about a week earlier, but that it was getting more irritated every day, and it was starting to become just a bit painful. So I took a look at it, and when I saw it, oh my gosh, my heart just sank. It was indeed a very worrisome looking lesion. For those of you not in the medical field, a lesion is just a fancy medical term for an area of abnormal or damaged tissue in the body. Anyway, it was large, about a quarter inch in diameter, raised, dark, multicolored, and with irregular borders. Everything about it screamed that it might be an advanced melanoma, which is a super bad kind of skin cancer that can spread to other places and even can kill you. In my mind, I was already thinking about all the work up he would need, the extensive surgery, and his impending demise. At that moment, the prognosis seemed very poor. Our Christmas cheer suddenly turned into worry and sadness. So I took a deep breath and paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. I tried my best not to look too concerned in front of my dad, and then I got out a magnifying glass and a bright lamp to get a better look up close. Under magnification, I noticed that there was something very strange about this lesion that puzzled me, something I'd never seen before in my many years of medical practice. It had multiple dark hairs growing right out of it. Whoa, where'd this come from? It was very strange. Now I don't claim to be a dermatologist, but I was pretty good at diagnosing skin stuff. But this time I was stumped. A hairy melanoma? Go figure, where'd that come from? Was there even such a thing? And then I noticed that one edge of the mysterious lesion had a slightly raised lip, and I'm not sure what possessed me to do this, but I got out a Q tip and very gently I started to probe at that edge. Quite frankly, I had no idea what I was doing, but I was hoping and praying that I wasn't doing more harm than good. To my surprise, the edge started to lift off a bit, with no bleeding, which was a huge relief. I was worried that it could bleed profusely. I continued to slowly tease it up millimeter at a time until finally, lo and behold, the entire lesion just popped off into my hand, and there I was, staring down at this tumor sitting in the palm of my hand. We all just stared at each other, completely dumbfounded. What had just happened? So then I began to examine what used to be this deadly lesion just a few minutes earlier, and now it was just a hairy, flattened, dark brown blob in my hand. Upon close inspection, it hit me, and I had what I can only call a eureka moment. What was this strange blob? It was a sun made natural California raisin, to be exact, the kind that you might eat in your raisin bran cereal, which my dad ate every morning. Turns out about a week earlier my dad sat down for his usual breakfast of raisin bran. Evidently, he dropped a raisin on the floor, and then later on, as he was walking through the kitchen barefoot, he stepped on it, and the sticky raisin stuck to his skin and lodged into a crack in the ball of his foot. Over the next week as he walked around it flattened out and adhered even more to his skin. Ultimately, the skin beneath the raisin started to become irritated. Oh, and then I mentioned that he's a dog lover with several chocolate labs, which are known for copious hair shedding. So as he walked across the floor day after day, dog hairs kept sticking to the raisin, which explains the dark hairs I've never seen on any other skin lesion before. So I'm proud to announce that I've discovered a new medical diagnosis. And following the tradition of many great scientists, I've named it after myself. It's called McMahon Raisinoma syndrome. And by the way, for those of you not in the medical field, any word that ends in oma usually describes a mass which is often cancerous. And along with this title, I have also described the appropriate treatment protocol, which tends to be 100% curative. And that is a complete rasonectomy, although it is admittedly a small sample size. Needless to say, we had a good belly laugh about all this, and the relief was palpable. We dodged a bullet, in a blink of an eye, everything changed so drastically. We went from a life-threatening metastatic melanoma to a benign raisinoma, from catastrophe to comedy, from worst case scenario to a piece of cake. So I got to thinking, is there a take-home lesson from this? Many of us, including me, when we get some sort of an ache or pain or lesion, our mind wanders to the worst case scenario and we just lock onto it. We can't get it out of our minds. But when we just take our time to let it play out or we look into it, it often turns out to be something pretty benign, a true nothing burger. That silly little razor reminded me that sometimes in medicine and honestly in life, things are not what they seem to be at first glance. And such a paradigm shift is also at the heart of a functional approach to medicine, both in terms of its fundamental philosophy and its practical application. In medical school and residency, I was always taught sort of a symptom pill or disease pill approach to medicine. The patient has UTI, you start antibiotics. The patient has arthritis, you get them on anti-inflammatory meds, and on and on ad infinitum, symptom pill over and over all day long, all career long. Like many things in life, medicine is a belief system. When we providers go off for our training, we are being indoctrinated into a certain belief system. For instance, the same patient with the exact same problem, for instance, let's talk about low back pain, might see a chiropractor and the patient would be told that they are out of alignment and need an adjustment. The patient might then see an acupuncturist for the same back pain, and she might be told that she needs to have needles placed. She might then consult an internist who starts her own motrin and a muscle relaxer. And then finally she might get a surgical consult and be told that she needs to have an operation. Again, same patient, same complaint. All these doctors are honorable, smart, hardworking physicians who look at the world through their own set of glasses based on their personal indoctrination. But when you think about it, everything really has a cause. None of our illnesses are just caused by bad karma, not at least in the world of evidence-based science. Certainly as providers, we should be humble enough to admit that sometimes we just don't always have the answers, and we just have to call it idiopathic, which means that we don't have a clue what's causing the problem. But we owe it to the patient to at least look. Sometimes that skin rash is really an expression of a gut problem. As I discussed in a recent podcast, sometimes profound depression is really an expression of a nutrient deficiency, and the list goes on and on. It's all connected. In our current medical system, we see an oldist for this and anologist for that, but in fact we are one big matrix mind, body, and spirit organism. And every part affects the other parts. But unfortunately, doctors are never taught to think different and to peel back the layers and connect the dots and to look for the underlying root cause. When you think about it, there are really only four major causes of all diseases the genome, the exposome, the microbiome, and the mind. And where these four factors overlap is where we find disease. I won't go into that in great detail. If you'd like to learn more about that, then check out my podcast called The Root Causes of Disease. And by the way, you can find a beautiful illustration of that at McMinMD.com under the Documus menu entitled Causes of Disease. Embracing functional and integrative medicine allowed me to break free of any indoctrination, belief system, or bias towards any particular treatment modality and open up the options to whatever I felt was the best treatment regimen for a particular patient, bar none. For example, a lady presented to me with severe headaches, which she'd had for years. She had seen an excellent neurologist for quite a while without any significant relief, so I figured there's no reason to just try more drugs or repeat things that had already been done. So I turned to my expanded integrative medicine toolbox and I tried acupuncture. Lo and behold, she had complete relief of her headaches. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I would have said it was too good to be true. And quite frankly, before I opened my mind to integrative and functional medicine, I would never have considered acupuncture. I might even have placed acupuncture in the quackery wastebasket. I'm grateful that the application of functional and integrative medicine has allowed me to help patients that otherwise had fallen through the cracks of modern medicine, like this headache lady. And along the way, I think functional medicine has made me a better physician and has made medicine much more interesting to me. So here's my invitation to patients and to providers as we head into the new year. Bring intention and curiosity to healthcare, and while you're at it, maybe throw in a little bit of loving kindness. If you're dealing with fatigue, brain fog, digestive issues, or whatever else is bothering you, before you fall for the symptom pill trap or accept the explanation that, oh, you're just stressed out or you're just getting old, ask yourself, could this be a racinoma? Is there something underneath that we're missing? A root cause that once addressed could change everything as quickly as pulling off that raisin. In closing, I hope that this story brought a smile to your face, and I hope that it plants a seed of possibility in your health journey as we head into the new year. Remember, paradigm shifts can happen. We just have to stay curious, open-minded, seek truth, and be intentional. Things are not always what they seem to be at first glance. So be a great captain of your ship and look for the raisins in your health and in your life. So to wrap this up, I wish you and yours a wonderful close to your holiday season and a happy, healthy, vibrant new year. If you'd like to reach out to me to comment on the show or to make recommendations for future topics, you may do so at drmcmin at yahoo.com. If you'd like to make a contribution to help us keep this ad-free podcast coming to you, then there are a couple ways you can contribute. First, if you buy nutritional supplements, and I'm not asking you to buy anything you don't already take, then consider purchasing physician grade supplements from our full script dispensary at a 10% discount. You can see the link to Full Script in the show notes, or you can go directly to McMinMD.com and the link will also appear there at the bottom of the homepage under Helpful Links. It's quite simple. Just click on the link and they'll guide you through the process. It's a win-win. You get high quality supplements at a discount, and we get your support for the show, for which we are very grateful. You can also make a contribution directly to the show via credit card or PayPal at the Support the Show link, which is also in the show notes. Well, that should do it. Until next time, stay curious, stay informed, keep it real, and remember small actions can lead to big changes. Take that first step towards better health. This is Dr. McMinn signing out. Take care and be well.