Cynthia Fluck and I last spent time together in Europe more than twenty years ago, as two naval aviators. We took very different paths to the same question: what does it mean to reorient?
Cindy graduated from the Naval Academy in 1998 and earned her wings flying helicopters in the Navy. After the military she worked at Lockheed Martin and then in real estate. She now runs a practice that combines functional medicine with energy healing, and she works mostly with women in midlife. Functional medicine looks for the root causes of a condition across the whole body. Her work looks for causes more than symptoms, and she approaches the body the way John Boyd approached any complex system, as something a linear model cannot fix.
A system problem
We talk about healthcare as a system problem. In Cindy’s view it rewards sick care over finding the root cause, the same way many organizations reward outputs over orientation. We get into nervous system regulation and the vagus nerve as one of the body’s feedback loops. The vagus nerve connects the brain with the heart, lungs and gut, and it carries signals both ways. Cindy also covers breathing as a performance tool in high-stakes moments, and the difference between functional lab analysis and the “normal range” standard of conventional medicine.
Probe and adjust
The OODA connection runs through all of it. Cindy works with her clients by probing and adjusting. She forms a hypothesis, tries it, gets feedback and revises. Her description of her intake process comes close to the way Boyd treated decisions as hypotheses and actions as tests. Neither of us planned that connection. It came out of the conversation. In Boyd’s real OODA loop, orientation sits at the center, and every test feeds back into it.
This episode is not medical advice. Talk with a licensed clinician before you change any treatment.
What are you treating as a symptom that might have a cause you have not looked for?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.