Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - “The Key To Managing Autoimmunity & Thyroid Issues.” - With Dr. Josh Redd

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Everyone knows the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but did you know that the thyroid is the powerhouse of the body? It plays a critical role in the metabolism and development of the human body by regulating hormones. Brain fog, blood sugar dysregulation, and leaky gut are all signs of an autoimmune disorder that might be linked to your thyroid. Dr. Josh Redd, owner of the US’s largest functional medicine clinic, RedRiver Health and Wellness, reveals how to identify autoimmune triggers, how to slow and even reverse symptoms, and how you can be the expert in your own health. Connect with Dr. Josh Redd on social media, and purchase your copy of "The Inflammatory Reset" when it drops in early June. Instagram |   / drjoshredd   YouTube |    / @dr.joshredd2761   TikTok |   / drjoshredd   Facebook |   / drjoshredd   X | https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redi... RedRiver Health and Wellness Center | https://www.redriverhealthandwellness... Website | https://drjoshredd.com/ . Get ticket details for Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit at https://ywls2024.com and use code ALEX for 25% off admission! Interested in making a tax deductible donation to support The Spillover? ☕️ Visit https://donate.tpusa.com/donate to contribute to guest travel, set needs and more! . Try infrared roasted coffee with Patriot Red and use code ALEX for 10% OFF! https://patriotred.com/tpusa Get 100% Organic tampons & now PADS! Try GARNUU today at https://garnuu.com/ and use code ALEX for 15% off. Ditch artificial fragrances for your family by switching to ALEAVIA organic prebiotic body wash and use code: ALEX15 for 15% off. https://www.aleavia.com/ Support American farms and shop GOOD RANCHERS at https://www.goodranchers.com/ and use code CLARK for 10% OFF. Elevate your skincare routine with NIMI SKINCARE! Go to https://www.nimiskincare.com/ and use promo code ALEXCLARK to get 10% off your order. . Looking for like-minded friends? Join the Cuteservative Facebook group: ⁠  / 1234544066933796  ⁠  Interested in making a tax deductible donation to support The Spillover? ☕️✨ Visit ⁠https://donate.tpusa.com/donate⁠ to contribute to guest travel, set needs and more! Listen at 6 PM PST/ 9 PM EST every Thursday by subscribing to ‘The Spillover’ on Apple Podcasts and Spotify ☕️✨ AlexClark Instagram | ⁠  / realalexclark  ⁠ Instagram | ⁠  / poplitics  ⁠  X | ⁠https://x.com/yoalexrapz⁠  Spotify |⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/7M0C7cl...⁠  Shop Real Alex Clark Merch! https://tpusamerch.com/collections/real-alex-clark

There's a lot of information out there that they want to suppress. A lot of health information, food information, pharmaceutical information, also parenting, advice on marriage, relationships, family, career, how to balance that with motherhood. That's all information that's going to be shared at the Young Women's Leadership Summit this year. This is the biggest conservative women's conference in the United States happening in San Antonio, June 7th through 9th, and really the biggest gathering of women who listen to this podcast. So if you are a woman high school through any age, grandmother, you belong at this conference and you're going to be hearing from not only some of the biggest guests that I've ever had

on this show, like Erica Komazar, Ali Beth Stucky, we'll have Candice Owens there, Taylor Dukes, Riley Gaines, holistic Hilda from the Weston A Price Foundation, we'll be speaking on the main stage. and many, many more that are yet to be announced. Secure your ticket with 25% off by going to YWLS24.com and use code Alex. YWLS24.com, use code Alex and find everything in the show notes. If your labs are saying everything is normal, but your body is telling you otherwise, you're going to want to hear what my guest has to say today. Almost 90% of people today with low thyroid have an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto's.

It's the most common autoimmune disease, America and most doctors don't really know how to deal with it besides putting you on meds. Shocker. Well, at the beginning of this year, I found out that I'm one of these people with an autoimmune disease. Luckily, I'm in a position to manage it really well and hopefully reverse a lot of my symptoms with help from experts like my guest this week. He's a doctor and one of the leading autoimmune experts in the country. He owns one of the largest functional medicine clinics in the U.S. called Red River Health and Wellness with clinics across the Western United States that focus on autoimmunity and chronic conditions. He became a doctor of

chiropractic back in 2010, opened his first functional medicine clinic right out of school, then went on to get his master's of human nutrition and functional medicine, master's in public health biology from Johns Hopkins, and graduated from naturopathic medical school in 2022. Now he's currently doing his regenerative medicine and stem cell residency where he's actively seeing patients who suffer with chronic pain and musculoskeletal issues. If you are someone you love, struggles with an autoimmune disease or thyroid issues. This is a fantastic episode to send to them, and you can watch on the real Alex Clark YouTube.

There's also going to be something fun and extra at the end, but only on the YouTube channel. So if you want to see some extra stuff from this episode, go there. This show is made possible by donations from cute servatives like you. You can make a tax-deductible donation with the link in the description to help fun set and equipment needs, as well as being able to have guests like mine today out to film in person, which really ups the quality of the production. If that's not possible right now, a five-star review sharing why you love this show and how you found us really helps. Please welcome autoimmune and Hashimoto's expert, Dr. Josh Red, to the spillover.

There's so many juicy questions for you, from Botox with Hashimoto's to dietary household triggers for autoimmunity. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, I think we have to start with defining what autoimmune diseases are and how many people currently have them. percent of America has some type of autoimmune reaction, not necessarily a disease, but what this is when your immune system is attacking some form of your body's tissue. Rather than attacking like a virus or bacteria, sometimes it can be a little bit more stimulated and start to attack your own tissue. Hashimoto is the most common autoimmune disease, but there's other autoimmune conditions based off of what tissue is being destroyed. Oftentimes this leads to so many different problems and

issues, but this is something that is very serious in our country. A lot more people have autoimmune conditions than we realize. And a lot of them are being neglected and feel like they're crazy or lazy. And in reality, they're not. They're just being totally mismanaged, right? So this is something that I think is really important. And I think is going to be getting worse as the days go on. I predict in 20 years from now, I bet 40 to 50% of the country will have some type of autoimmune disease. Why is that? Well, we live really crappy lifestyles. We're eating this ultra-process foods that are really problematic for our immune system. We're exposed to way more things from an environmental standpoint that causes our immune system to freak out. One research

paper said that if we have a gluten intolerance and we don't do anything about that, we continue to eat gluten for up to five years, we're almost 100% likely to develop another autoimmune condition just from having a gluten intolerance. However, if we lose what's called chemical tolerance or oral tolerance, and we don't correct those, it's likely for it to turn into an autoimmune condition. So for example, when we lose oral tolerance, our immune system is attacking food proteins that it shouldn't. Most people, we can eat whatever we want and our immune system doesn't attack it. Or we can be exposed to a chemical and our immune system doesn't freak out and attack that. We're fine. Our immune system is able to adapt. If our immune system freaks out and starts to attack the

chemical that we're exposed to on a consistent basis, that chemical can bind to a protein or that food protein that we eat can mimic self-tissue and then eventually our immune system can turn on itself and then start to attack that as well. And that causes a ton of symptoms. So with autoimmune conditions, you could have an autoimmune condition that attacks the thyroid. You could have an autoimmune condition that attacks the joints. You could have an autoimmune condition that attacks the brain. A lot of patients that we see don't just have one autoimmune condition. They have multiple autoimmune conditions because they have this overreactive immune system that's attacking and going crazy because it's being exposed to so many different environmental things and chemicals and problems and it's creating this massive epidemic of

issues. So what are the different autoimmune diseases, the top ones? Well, the top one is Hashimoto's. I bet close to 10% of our females specifically have Hashimoto's. It's about a 8 to 1.1. female the male ratio. But then you have rheumatoid arthritis, you have lupus, you have MS, you have Shrogrins, you have celiac, which is really common, Crohn's disease, ultraoclitis, those are probably the most common ones. But again, we see some crazy autoimmune conditions that you don't really hear of. We have a panel that we can check for the top 25 autoimmune conditions in the country. And that's pretty thorough, but there's even more than that. You have lots of tissues in your body that can be destroyed, and the likelihood, like I said before, of just having one autoimmune condition is

probably slimmer than not. That's why it's so important that if you have an autoimmune condition to get it under control as fast as you can and do whatever you can to improve your immune resilience. And so if somebody has an autoimmune disease is another way to say that just they have severe inflammation within the body? Not necessarily, because lots of people have inflammation. We live these like highly inflammatory lifestyles, but that's not causing the immune system to actually attack itself. So an autoimmune disease is when your immune system is now attacking your own self, your own body. It's destroying it at a rapid pace and eventually becomes like a permanent low thyroid or for a type 1 diabetic, their immune system attack the pancreas, right? And then they

can't produce insulin like they should. That's different than just inflammation. However, a lot of autoimmune conditions are inflammatory, meaning that as you calm down inflammation, the autoimmune response will calm down as well, and those two kind of go hand in hand. When somebody has an autoimmune disease, you'll have what's called TH17 cells, which will increase. And when those cells, those immune cells increase, they're going to have more tissue damage wherever they have antibodies to. For us, personally, we'll check inflammatory markers and we'll assess those in detail pretty frequently. And then our goal, as we calm down inflammation, you'll typically see the autoimmune response calm down as well. Those two kind of go hand in hand, but they are separate.

So are all of these reversible or are some autoimmune conditions, things that you just have to live with? You can improve them. You can manage them significantly. If it gets too severe, like, for example, if somebody has an autoimmune disease to the thyroid and that person live for 10 years with the immune system destroying the thyroid tissue at a rapid pace, eventually that thyroid is going to be permanently destroyed. It's not going to be able to produce proper thyroid hormones like it should. So if you can catch it in the window of time before it causes too much tissue damage, then you can minimize a lot of problems down the road. However, if we catch it too late, they might have to be on a thyroid hormone for the rest of their life. But you can still calm down the

autoimmune response so that they can manage their condition a lot better. So there's symptoms improve long term, but you're not like curing it. You're not. You're not. not correcting, you're not going to improve like thyroid tissue or whatever that may be. You're just managing it a lot better than what it was. When somebody has an autoimmune disease, they have this high inflammatory response, they have brain inflammation, they have liver dysfunction, they have blood sugar imbalances, it causes like a systemic issue and creates so many different problems in their life. And so it's a lot more complicated than just like it's attacking the tissue. It causes so many different issues on top of that. And so if you can calm that down, the patient's

quality of life, it's going to be markedly better for sure. What are some of the signs that somebody could have an autoimmune disease and they don't know? Some of the most common ones will be brain fog, inflammation. They might have joint pain. They might be depressed. They might have intestinal issues. Those are really common symptoms if you just have a standard out of immune disease. On top of that, though, wherever you have antibodies that are destroying tissue, you're going to have those symptoms too.

So if you have antibodies attacking joint tissue, you're going to obviously have joint pain, joint inflammation. You're going to know that on top of fatigue, depression, sleep issues, headaches, whatever. If somebody has intestinal autoimmunity, they're going to have intestinal issues. If someone's going to have thyroid autoimmunity, they're going to have metabolic type issues as well. See, I'm always cold. I'm the type of person. It could be summer and I'm putting on the heat at 80 degrees, which is psycho because I live in Phoenix. I mean, that really is demonic. But so that's something I deal with, definitely the joint pain, serious brain fog. And I'm curious, how would you describe, like, what is brain fog?

What does that like for somebody? Well, brain fog can be a few things. So we'll have patients where they just can't, like, remember certain things. They forget their keys. They are forgetful all the time. They can't grasp their words, right? The mechanism driving that's kind of scary. We tested our patient population.

And we found out the most common autoimmune disease linked with Hashimoto's was actually brain out of immunity. They had their immune system attacking some part of the brain. I think I have that. And that's a problem. And brain fog, forgetfulness, if nothing's being done to calm down that, then your immune system is attacking neurological tissue and that can lead to lifelong problems, right? On top of that, though, even if you don't have neurological antibodies, you can also just have brain inflammation. That's really, really common. So the brain inflammation is causing like the headaches, the fatigue, the brain fog, forgetfulness, those types of things as well. Regardless, even just chronic brain inflammation, that's a problem because it can lead to dementia,

Alzheimer's, and other issues down the road. So you don't want to just like let this wildfire continue to burn. You want to figure out all the different mechanisms that are driving it and then calm it down as fast as possible. And then there's things that you can do to improve what's called neuroplasticity, which will help your brain fire more effectively and help minimize chances of having severe complications. What would those things be? If I become too scientific, you just like shake me and be like, stop.

No, I think go for it. People can Google. But this is really, really important because even like if you have an autoimmune disease, how are you treated typically in the conventional model? Well, I have no idea because I, no one ever once even suggested I had any of this done until I left the conventional model, went into more functional medicine and started doing hormone testing and everything. For sure.

So you have all these symptoms and problems. You go to the conventional doctor. They look at you. They probably say, oh, you just need an antidepressant or something. Probably. And they think you're crazy. They think you're lazy. You think you're crazy.

And really, you're not crazy. You're just mismanaged. If you go to a conventional doctor, they might prescribe some type of like a thyroid hormone. They might prescribe steroid. And that's their autoimmune treatment. That's it. They don't look at any of this stuff. So me just diving into like neurological function is different.

It's way more complex. If you have brain inflammation, it can ruin your life. If you have neurological antibodies, it can ruin your life. And so when somebody has this, you have this brain inflammation. It can't, your brain can't fire to what's called the parasympathetic response or the parasympathetic nuclei. And you probably heard it as like the vagal nuclei. Have you ever heard of like someone stimulating the vagal nuclei or vagus nerve or any of that stuff? I've learned about that from you.

Yeah. Their brain now can't fire to the vaguest nerve. And so the sympathetic response, their fight or flight response, like, is constantly going full steam ahead. It doesn't shut down. And the parasympathetic response, which is the part of the midbrain that helps us calm down, helps us relax, helps us heal, it helps our immune system. That part begins to be atrophied and it doesn't get the proper stimulation that it needs. So in an autoimmune patient, this issue is going on consistently and it's creating a lot of problems.

So for us, it's pretty simple. We can stimulate and do things. things to simulate that paracynthetic response or that vagal nuclei, and it will help with inflammation. It helps with the immune response. It helps fire to the gut. It helps with so many different things that most people don't realize. So a lot of our autoimmune patients, there's a neurological component that you can work on, and you can even do at home that can make a big impact outside of any other form of treatment. And is that like little exercises or like supplements? Yeah, exercises. The first and most easiest one is you can gargle water aggressively.

for two to three minutes. Two to three minutes. Yeah. And you have to gargle psychotically enough that if we were to film you, we would laugh hysterically. Okay.

So we say like, gargle enough to where you start to produce tears. And the reason why is because the vagus nuclei is on the same part of the midbrain as the salivatory nuclei. And so when you stimulate one,

you stimulate the other. So gargle aggressively, if you produce tears, you notice that you gargled well enough to stimulate that vagal nuclei response, which is great. But think about this.

Your brain fires to the midbrain, which is the vagal nuclei, and then that fires to the gut. And that helps stimulate like HCL, digestive enzymes, blood flow to the gut. It does so many different things. You know that a lot of autoimmune patients have intestinal issues on top of that, almost all of them. So if we can get this to fire really frequently, it's great. I had a patient. She had severe constipation, and she just started seeing this. Obviously, I have no idea who she is, but tell me what extreme constipation.

means for her because I want to compare it to me. Okay. So like she couldn't, she couldn't like go to the bathroom for like five days. Oh my gosh. Yeah. My entire life I pooped maybe once a week, maybe once every week and a half. It's terrible. Horrible. But I didn't know that wasn't normal until about a year ago. Then I started working on it more, but I still really struggled.

Now I'm at a place. I'm usually every day or like every two days is kind of where I'm at. So to me I'm like, this is amazing, but it's my dream. Most people are like, I have a dream car. I have a dream place to live a dream vacation. My dream is to poop every day at the same time. Like I can count on it. That's my dream is to get there.

That's a fantastic dream to have. I love it. I love that. Like she had this constipation. She's trying to figure out like Dr. Red can't take a laxative because I'm on now of this restrictive diet. What should I do? And I said, look, rather than taking a laxative, let's just have you gargle water aggressively

for two to three minutes every hour for the next five hours. If you haven't gone to the bathroom yet, then you can take it laxative. So she does this. She gargles really aggressively and I get this text. Dr. Red, I pooed. And I was like, ooh, awesome. So that's great, right? What?

But all she did was she stimulated the parasite that response. It fires down to the intestinal track. It gets blood flow and gut multility to increase. And here we go. Another test that you can do is just stimulate the gag reflex. So you get like a tongue blade from Amazon and you just stimulate that. Obviously don't do it with food. But you can simulate the gag reflex.

So I always joke around with my patience like, hey, look, when you're watching like a movie with your husband, just grab your tongue blade and just gag yourself 10 times. I don't know. That doesn't sound like fun. I don't know. It works, though. Okay. And then I was like, okay, if you're driving and you're at a stoplight, just grab your tongue blade and gag yourself 10 times. That simulates the per cent of the response. Another one that you can do, which I love, is an ice bath first in the morning. And the reason why I like this is because, and if you don't want to do an ice bath, you can do a cold shower. But in Phoenix or in like hot climates, it doesn't really get that cold. You want it to be at least below 60 degrees. For an autoimmune patient, they oftentimes have a cortisol awake and response issue.

So their circadian rhythm is off, which is probably one of the reasons why you can't sleep as well as on top of that. But what happens is if you can do an ice bath, first in the morning, it stimulates the cortisol awake and response, but it also stimulates the pericentic response as well. So you get both positive things. So I love an ice bath in the morning. You wake up, you do the ice bath. For how long? At least 60 seconds. Okay.

Super easy. If you can't do that, do a cold shower. Does your full body have to be emerged or like can it just be like legs in half your tummy? I like your full body to be emerged. Okay. Yeah. 60 degrees or less, full body emerged. And I think that's fantastic.

But you're stimulating both pathways that are fantastic and both issues that are really common for autoimmune patients. The next one is not as fun, but it's probably the best one that you can do. And it's a coffee enema. Okay. Actually, actually, I have been dying to try this. Well, that's weird. And that's cool at the same time. I had a guest about a year ago.

She is the biggest coffee anime fan. And now that's something that I've been dying to do. So why do you like it for autoimmune? Okay. So when you do a coffee enema, the best part is you can go to Starbucks and choose your own flavor. All jokes aside, you definitely want to use organic coffee. There's tons of garbage in coffee. So use your organic coffee.

But coffee enemas will stimulate what's called the nicotinic receptors of the colon. And then that gets the brain to fire. That goes back up to the brain and fires the frontal cortex to the vagal nuclei back down to the intestinal tract. They are fantastic. It also helps with detoxification. It helps with so many different things. So if you can do and you feel like you're up to it or maybe it's a dream of yours, like yours, which I've never heard before, then do a coffee enema. It's fantastic once or twice a week.

Okay. Speaking of enemas, are you a chai tea or coffee girly? If you're a coffee girly, I'm excited to share with you something new and different I've actually never heard of before. Infrared roasted coffee. I actually didn't know this, but every coffee out there, no matter what brand you drink, is what they call conventionally roasted. This basically means that the beans are subject to the flames and fumes, which is why almost all coffees are bitter tasting and actually acidic. Infrared roasting keeps the flames away from the beans in this proprietary process, which makes for not only an incredible taste, but low to no acid. The spillover's newest sponsor is the Patriot Red Coffee Company. Not only do they use this infrared roasting process, but they're a conservative Patriot-driven company that is giving a full 10% of their sales back to conservative causes and initiatives. I'm being told that their red special version also blends in the coffee fruit itself.

Now, did you know the coffee beans come from a coffee fruit? Well, it turns out this fruit has a very high antioxidant value and is really healthy for you. And they actually put it back into the ground coffee. Sounds interesting, right? If you'd like to try this coffee, Patriot Red is offering to send you a couple of samples and their cool little single-serve pourovers. All you have to do is pick up the shipping. Go to Patriotred.com slash TPUSA in the code Alex,

where you can also get $10 off your first order if you want to just go ahead and buy a bag. They even have K-Cups. Go to patriotred.com slash TPSA and the code Alex, where you can also get $10 off your first order or try some samples for free. Find the link in the code in the description. You can also do what's called, you can buy an alpha stem

and you clip it to your ears, and it stimulates the vagal nuclei from that. So you just put these like electrodes on your earlobes and then you turn it on for 20 minutes and then that simulates the vagal nuclei as well. There's like lasers that you can use and other stuff, but those are the most common ones. What is the difference between hypo and hyperthyroidism? Because I always get these words confused and I don't know which one I am. Yeah.

So hypo is low thyroid. That's when your TSA is high. That's why it's probably confusing because if you have hypo, your thyroid isn't producing the proper thyroid hormones that it needs. If you have hyperthyroid, that's typically due to what's called Graves disease. And that's hyperactive thyroid. So your metabolic system's going like crazy. And is that what Wendy Williams has? Her eyeballs are popping out. Yeah. So when you have Graves disease, you'll often see like they have the thyroid eye disease as well. Yeah, that's what she has. Okay. And which one am I? I'm hypo. You're neither. You're not taking any medication, right? No. So you have what's called Hashimoto's autoimmune reaction, which means your immune system is attacking the thyroid at a rapid pay. it just hasn't destroyed it enough to where it hasn't become a permanent low thyroid yet.

Okay. So we caught it at like a window of time where if you can calm down the autoimmune response now, you may minimize your chances of ever having to be on thyroid medication and you're catching it kind of early on in the ballgame. There's a ton of people with Hashimoto's autoimmune reaction as well. And most conventional doctors don't know how to treat it,

so they like see that your TSA is normal, but you have these antibodies that are attacking the thyroid. and you have all the symptoms of Hashimoto's and thyroid issues. But since it's normal, they just stand there, confused, and worried. You still have brain inflammation. You can still have systemic inflammation. You still have tons of issues that are going on. And most doctors will be like, well, we'll just wait until it becomes a low thyroid.

And that's terrible. There's tons of stuff that you can do to get it to calm down. And I want to get into what those things are that we can do. But first, this is probably a dumb question. And I should know, but what even is a thyroid? What does it do? Why is it important? Well, your thyroid is the main metabolic gland.

It helps with your metabolism. It helps with weight. It helps with energy. It helps with so many different things. If you don't have proper thyroid function, it can impact every cell in your body. Every cell in your body has a thyroid hormone receptor. So think about that. Like it will help with your intestinal track.

It will help with your brain. It helps with every cell, every form of tissue. Now, I sent you all of the tests that I've had done, all of the labs. I did a blood test, Dutch test, gut microbiome test, food allergy test. What did you think of my results? I think you have a ton of different imbalances going on. I think you're really sick. Unfortunately. I don't look sick. No, you don't look sick. And so I think that's confusing to people understanding, like, is autoimmunity really a big deal? It just doesn't seem like much of anything. Yeah, when we look at those labs, you have a ton of different imbalances, and that leads to a ton of different symptoms. And I think this is what makes autoimmunity frustrating is because you look normal. But you have individuals that have a severe autoimmune disease that look normal.

They can't get up out of bed in the morning. Oh, it's extremely hard. I'm awake and I can do things, but to get going, like get up, get dressed, leave. It is, I am so slow in the morning. Like, I can't even explain to you. I feel like I'm frozen in time. Like my body is led. For sure.

And the fact that you look normal makes it even worse. Because then you might have friends and family members that think, oh, she's just a hypochondriac. Oh, she's just this or, oh, she's that. In reality, you're none of those. You're just being mismanaged by your doctor. Like, there's serious concerns and problems that you're dealing with that need to be addressed right away.

And if you don't address those in five years from now, you'll get way worse. And it's frustrating. But there's a lot of people out there in the country and in the world, we see the worst of them and it's heartbreaking sitting down and just listening to those patients

one of my first patients I've ever met I walk into the office and she just starts crying right away she's with her husband and she just says look I'm at the end of my rope if you can't fix me

I don't know how I can live anymore and she says her son was asked to draw a picture of her at school and he drew a picture of her in bed and he brought it home and she pulls out of the backpack and she's like

what's that honey She's like, that's you, mom, because you're always in bed. Oh, that's so heartbreaking. That's the reality, though. I can't tell you how many patients we see where they've just been, like, told that they're normal, that they're aging, that it's all in their head, that they're depressed, and they have this raging out immune condition that's being totally neglected and missed. And that impacts their family life, that impacts their quality of life, that impacts

or social life, and here they are just walking around like nobody's seeing them. And you're right here where you have lots of different symptoms, a lot of different problems, and things that you just might not even think are due to your autoimmune response, like brain fog or confusion or just your memory is not as good as it used to be. That's a severe issue that needs to be addressed. And I wouldn't let anyone tell you otherwise, especially for us, and I try to train my doctors like this,

where we want to be psychotically OCD about all these imbalances. I want to be able to correct all these imbalances to where we can redo your lab work and see that it's just pristine and perfect. And if we can do that, you're going to feel way better. And then in 20 years from now, you're going to be the expert in your own health. You're going to know what to do, what not to do, and your quality of life is going to be markedly better as well. Yeah, so speaking of the future, I'm 31. Most of my audience is between 25 and 35 on average, females 25 to 35.

And if the amount of people that have Hashimoto's and don't even know is true, that high of number, how much did you say? Almost 10%. So if that many women in my audience likely have an autoimmune disease, if it's going untreated, what does life look like for us in 2025 years? It's terrible. You can end up having dementia, Alzheimer's. You can end up having problems getting pregnant. You can end up having a ton of different issues from a physiological standpoint that drastically declined your last. You might not be able to exercise.

You might not be able to do just simple tasks because you don't have the energy to do it and you don't feel like you can do it. And then if it turns into another autoimmune disease like rheumatoid arthritis or MS or whatever it may be, that significantly impacts your quality of life down the road and you could have done something about it right now. So like, look, if you're 25 to 35 and you're listening to this

and you have symptoms and you don't know what to do about it, there's tons of stuff that you can do. You just have to find the right doctor. Mm-hmm. Once you find the right doctor that understands what's going on, you have the ability to take control of your life and to improve it tremendously. And our whole goal is obviously to help our patients like we do.

But another big goal is to just teach them and educate them so that they become the experts. So they didn't know what to do and what not to do down the road. So in 20 years from now, they know more about their autoimmune condition than most doctors do. And so somebody who is an autoimmune disease, if their regular primary doctor, their solution was just, we're going to put you on this thyroid medication, and that's all that they've done.

Why is that problematic? Why is that not enough? It would be like you have a fire in your house and the fire alarm's going off and all you want to do is just go in there and turn off the fire alarm and do nothing with the actual fire. If you have an autoimmune disease attacking your thyroid, for example, and you're on a thyroid hormone, all that's doing is addressing your thyroid hormone issue. But this is what I want to make clear. that's not the mechanism driving your disease. The mechanism driving it is your immune system. Your immune system is the culprit that's destroying the thyroid. So if I just give you thyroid hormones,

and I'm not doing anything to actually decrease or dampen the autoimmune response or to work on the immune system component, we're literally missing the whole thing. We want to think critically. We want to dig deep. We want to find that underlying mechanism. in this case, it's your immune system that's the issue. So, for example, you're not even on a thyroid hormone.

Your immune system is destroying your thyroid, creating all these symptoms. If I just put you on a thyroid hormone, that's not going to do anything for you. You have to address the immune component in order to feel great. This is why it's so frustrating for patients that go to a rheumatologist and get put on steroids for their RA or lupus. That's great, but what's being done to all the different mechanisms causing the immune system to freak out? nothing. You have to get to that mechanism and those underlying issues and treat at that level in order for these patients to truly improve long term. How much does our genetic makeup play into an autoimmune disease versus environmental factors or diet? There is a genetic component,

but our lifestyle is a thing that either dampens or makes it worse. And so our lifestyle, environmental factors, the food we eat can really turn on those genes and make them express themselves differently, and then all of a sudden we have full-blown autoimmune disease. But there's so much that we can do from a dietary lifestyle and environmental component that make a huge difference whether we get an autoimmune disease or we don't. But there is a genetic component. If your mom has a history of thyroid issues or autoimmune issues, then it's likely that you're going to have issues on top of that as well.

Post-2020, after the COVID vaccine, how much did that impact the amount of autoimmune diseases that we've seen shoot up? you can get an autoimmune disease from any virus. And sometimes we'll have patients where they had the severe viral infection, and then it caused the autoimmune disease to freak out and start. And then from that point on, they were sick. So just COVID in general can cause autoimmunity. There's no questions about that.

However, because the spike protein can mimic self-tissue as well, we saw a ton of people that also got vaccinated, that instantaneously they got vaccinated, and all of a sudden, boom, cardiomyopathy. autoimmunity MS symptoms started from that point forward. I was in a clinic in Chicago and people knew that I was there. So I had all these like tons of autoimmune patients. And I had some pretty liberal doctors.

I'm not like pro or anti. I'm just like science. So I'm in the clinic. But I had these staff doctors there as I was finishing my medical program who were like hardcore intense. Like you have to wear a mask. all times and everyone has to get vaccinated. I was there, which was like, I'm like this oddball where now I have

hundreds of autoimmune patients in the Chicago area that are coming to me. And there was one week where I'm seeing a patient and I have students behind me that want to know what I'm doing with autoimmunity. And then I have staff doctors behind me as I'm seeing the patient right then and there. So it's just kind of like a spectacle. So are they arguing with you while you're with the patient like, hey, And you need to be telling her to get the vaccine? No, everyone's just kind, respectful, listening to how I treat autoimmunity because they're all trying to learn how they can help autoimmune patients moving forward, right?

Okay. So I'm here in this clinic. I have students behind me. I have staff doctors behind me. And I'm interviewing these patients. There was one week where a patient would come in and share their symptoms and share all their problems. And then I would ask, when did your problems first start? And they would say, as soon as I got vaccinated, or the day after.

after I got vaccinated or 12 hours after I got vaccinated, this happened. Wow. And all those hardcore vaccine pushers as far as a staff doctor, I remember one of them, which was fantastic, I walk out and she's like, holy shiz. Like we were forcing all these students to get vaccinated. We were forcing all these people to get vaccinated. And you could see on her face, she was like, oh crap. we didn't really give them the proper informed consent.

And that's the thing that I was frustrated about too. Look, here's a vaccine. Here's pros. Here's cons. Here's what you have to look out for. Let's just give people informed consent. But we were told it was a one-size-fits-all. But nobody was considering, hey, you have employees who might be dealing with this, this, this, or this, breastfeeding.

You know, pregnant. All these different things. It was like none of it was considered. It was just everyone has to take this. It's maddening. And I was in a situation where, As soon as they come, I'm like, okay, well, we're doing a research study anyway, so I can test for the 25 different autoimmune diseases on top of this.

The most common one was autoimmunity to the heart tissue. Yeah. Which was crazy. I've never seen that before. But we have people that had cardiomyopathy type symptoms where their hearts literally inflamed. And then I check antibodies and they come back with cardiac peptide antibodies, which means their immune system is now attacking heart tissue. that was like alarming for me.

Well, when I found out about the Hashimoto's, I was so thankful to God that I never got the COVID vaccine. I did have COVID, but I had no symptoms. I was one of those people that had to like stay home for two weeks and not leave my apartment, but I had zero symptoms. It was very bizarre. So I don't know if that affected anything or not, but I didn't get the vaccine, which is good.

Now, one thing that I think is really interesting about you is that you tell people not to accept their diagnosis of fibromyalgia? Why? When somebody has fibromyalgia type symptoms, I feel like those symptoms are really broad. So I'm not going to say don't accept your fibromyalgia types diagnosis. I'm just saying like, make sure you dig as deep as possible. So for example, 20% of Hashmeld's patients will have fibromyalgia type symptoms. And what are those symptoms? So symptoms of pain, fatigue, depression, random aches and pains throughout your body. But if they go to a standard of doctor and they share that and the doctor just doesn't do any form of testing and just tells you that you have fibromyalgia, then you're left with no diagnosis, no form of help. And it's just like, yep, you got fibromyalgia, there you go.

But in reality, if we were to check your Hashimoto's antibodies and they came back positive, and then we corrected that and improved, and all of a sudden your fibromyalgia type symptoms, 40% of those with rheumatoid arthritis have fibromyalgia type symptoms. And so my biggest thing is I love the fibromyalgia community. Like, there are so many of my patients that have fibromyalgia. I just don't want them to stop there just in case there's a bigger autoimmune issue on top of that. However, there are fibromyalgia patients out there with fibromyalgia. They have issues and problems and it's really frustrating. There is an inflammatory component to their condition, though, and there's lots of things that we can do to get them to improve.

But I don't want them to have rheumatolythritis, Hashimoto's that are actually driving that, and then that be totally missed. So my biggest, this is like a sensitive topic, because they're the patients that aren't getting help anywhere. their life is terrible. Their quality life is so bad. And the last thing that they need is a doctor to say, your fibromyalgia diagnosis is completely trash.

And for the most part, it probably is. But they need, like, someone to help them know that, hey, there's someone here for you. My thing is just make sure you have a doctor that's really looking for the underlying causes to make sure that you have fibromyalgia. And if you do, great. There's tons of stuff that we can do for it.

But for the most part, every time I see a fibromyalgia patient, if we dig deeper, there's a likelihood of him having another condition that's actually driving fibromyalgia type symptoms. And they have been misdiagnosed for 20 years. And then by the time that I see them, we can get them to improve in two, three, and four months and get them to feel better than they have in 20 years. And if we would have caught that sooner, their quality of life would have been much better. clear back then as well. So where I'm coming from is that. Something you may or may not know about me is in my free time, I do some volunteer work in the foster care system as a child advocate. I've worked on three different cases throughout the last few years and just started my fourth. For the first time, my child is a teen. She's a 16-year-old teen girl, which is exciting and scary for me because that means a lot of life advice conversations, which I'm not really used to. Every teen girl, though, should know how important it is to use 100% organic cotton feminine products for your health and to never use anything with fragrance down there.

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and use code Alex for 15% off. That's GARNUU.com with code Alex for 15% off. Find everything you need in the description. What are the tests that you recommend somebody get if they suspect that they have an autoimmune disease? A simple one is just checking forward what's called TPO antibodies and an antithereoglobin antibody.

Those are the ones that you'll check for your thyroid. However, there's a test called the Syrex Array 5 that test for the top 25 autoimmune conditions. You're better off just testing for that. And what is that? A blood test? It's a blood test. It's a blood test. Super easy.

One blood test. Any doctor can do it. They can send that off and you can see if you have an autoimmune disease from that. Great. From a conventional standpoint, though, in order to get truly diagnosed with the autoimmune disease, they like to see some form of tissue damage that's occurred. For example, doing an ultrasound on the thyroid and seeing, yeah, your thyroid is definitely being attacked or doing an endoscopy or a colonoscopy and seeing that we have tight junction

breakdown and that your intestinal linings being destroyed or whatever that may be. Now, see, I haven't done that and I haven't done an ultrasound on my thyroid. So are those two things that I should be doing? Yes, especially because you have both antibodies to the thyroid. So most people when they have Hashimoto's or a thyroid issue, they only have one antibody. You actually have both. You have positive TPO antibodies and you have positive antithyroglobin antibodies. When you have both, it's more likely for you to have another autoimmune condition on top of that. Oh no.

But then also, it's more likely for you to develop thyroid cancer. So you want to constantly check to see if you have thyroid nodules and how your thyroid's functioning just to rule that out. And so when you say constantly check, how often do you have to get those tests done that? I would say check once every year, once every two years. And just look at the nodules. Like when your thyroid is being destroyed, your body will try to repair it with kind of fibrous, gunky tissue. And then that builds up nodules and different things like that. And sometimes that can transition into cancer.

And so I always like to be a little bit more conservative and have my patients check their thyroid yearly. And it's an easy test. It's really inexpensive. But that minimizes problems on the road. And I know every patient is different, but if you were to give a guesstimate on cost of average price of doctors, visits, supplements, tests, et cetera, for getting an autoimmune disease under control, what is a good or fair ballpark range? Like $500 to $1,000 to $2,000, $5,000. What would you say your average autoimmune patient looking to improve is spending? Our average autoimmune patient that sees us will spend anywhere from like $4,000.

4,500 to 6 grand. Okay. But that's way more complex. That's way more detailed. And it's over time. That's like over a course of nine months to a year, basically. Sometimes it can be more based off of who they see. But this is a lot more complicated of a process than just like, okay, here's a pill and I'll see in six months.

I'm putting him in the hot seat on that question because you guys always ask me and I'm like, I don't know, it's different to every person. I think it's super valid too to basically go over that. So that's going to, we're going to do all the medical tests to figure out what the heck's going on. And then once we get those tests, we're going to analyze the test to see what's the best treatment plan for you as an individual. And then a lot of these patients are so severe. Like, we're not seeing easy, out of immune patients. Our patients are really, really sick and they're really, really severe. So a lot of times we have to like hold their hand throughout this process and teach them and educate them and show them what to do and what not to do.

And a lot of them will end up having like 15 different imbalances too. And you can't be on supplements to correct every single imbalance. You have to figure out which imbalance should we correct first. And then we have to read test. And then once that's improved, then we can move on to the next imbalance. And then once that's improved, then we can move into the next imbalance. But we want to make sure that we're really specific and really targeted to that individual since you as a hospitalist patient or autoimmune patient is different from the next.

And we want to make sure that eventually we improve all this stuff and then that you're the expert in your own health. If you don't do the dietary things that we ask you to do, we could correct all the different imbalances. And let's say there's two foods that could flare it up. And then two years down the road, you decide to eat those two foods again. Guess what's going to happen? And be back? You feel as bad you did before you start.

And this whole process would be a complete waste of time. So it's a ton of hard work for us and our doctors. We spend countless hours just on one patient. And for the patient, it's a ton of hard work for them too. If they don't do what we ask them to do, it's a waste of their time. This is so much different than like, here's a person. feeling all scene six months. However, guess how much these patients pay on medications? Right. Guess how much these patients pay by not being able to function? We haven't changed our fees

in probably 14 years. We haven't. We love what we do. It's a ton of hard work. And we feel like our fees are actually minimal compared to most. And we're betchen dang good at it too. What are the top triggers that could turn on an autoimmune disease in somebody? Cortisol defects. Cortisol is your stress hormone. And as we see cortisol either increase or decrease, we see an autoimmune response increase. Blood trigger imbalances. Obviously, if somebody isn't managing stress well, that's a really common trigger.

Hormonal imbalances will trigger it. Poor liver function. There's a test that you can do. If you have an autoimmune disease, you want to do this. There's a test that you can do. It's called homocysteine. We call it the cheap man's version of an MTHFR gene mutation test. When homocysteine is above seven, that will unequivocally cause your autoimmune disease to increase.

So there's a simple thing that you can do. You just take methylated B vitamins to get that lower, and that's one trigger down if you have a homocysteine issue or methylation problem. About 30% of Americans have a methylation problem, so you definitely want to check it. It's so easy. But that's one thing that you can do to improve it. I'm taking some vitamin, methyl something, and it's B vitamin. Yeah, yeah. If it's methylated, then fantastic.

And then again, we want to be very scientific about it. So we'll check homocysteine. We'll give the treatment and then recheck and make sure that it's improving. If it is fantastic, then we move on to the next one from there. But there's intestinal problems. There's neurological issues. There's a ton of things that can cause an autoimmune disease to get worse and make the patient feel worse. But it's different between each patient.

so we could give generalized things that might help. But when it comes to severe patients, you have to be really specific in order to help them. What exactly is leaky gut, and how does it play into autoimmunity? A lot of people will have intestinal permeability. And a lot of people think that intestinal permeability or leaky gut is what leads to autoimmunity.

So the intestinal lining will break down, and then the integrity of it is not functioning well. And so when you eat food proteins, they'll actually get through the intestinal membrane into the bloodstream. And then your immune system will freak out and start to attack those food proteins. So that's a big trigger for the autoimmune response. You can also have what's called overactive dendritic cells where they grab onto food proteins in your intestinal tract. They take it through the portal vein into the liver and then into systemic circulation. And then that causes a systemic response.

but just intestinal permeability can lead to autoimmune disease and create it and make it worse. And then once you have it, it makes a lot worse. Now, you have to avoid foods that are making it worse. So highly inflammatory foods like gluten, dairy, ultra-processed foods, those are really common to cause intestinal permeability in general. And then there's something called butyrate, which is a short-chain fatty acid, which the cells that line the intestinal track, use it as fuel. You get it from fiber. So people with low fiber diets. I have low fiber. Yeah. So one of the best ways that we can do to improve intestinal, the intestal membrane is beta rate, which is fantastic. Another thing is vitamin D and vitamin A, help with regulatory

T cells, but they also help with those cells that line the gut too. And then managing stress helps with the gut. There's a thing called BPC 157. Have you heard of that peptide? No. So we can prescribe peptides now that and the best one for the integrity of the gut is BPC 157 and that's fantastic for intestinal permeability a lot of research is showing a lot of good promise for that but those that are doing peptides you just want to make sure that you're getting a prescription and you're not doing a gray or black market version of BPC 157 because BPC 157 if you're getting it from a gray or black market it will have what's called LPS lipopolysaccharides which which is actually really, really inflammatory for autoimmune patient.

So you just want to make sure that you're getting it prescribed to you and it doesn't contain LPS. See, the only peptides I'm familiar with is like in skin care. I know about having peptides in anti-aging skin care, but what you're talking about is different. For sure, you can have lots of different peptides. You've probably heard of O-Zempic, semaglutide, or surzeptide for the weight loss and all that stuff as well.

Yeah. But this one is a peptide specifically for the intestinal tract. It helps improve what's called angiogenesis, which helps increase blood flow and basically repair and regenerate gut tissue, which is fantastic. Okay, I have to ask you, you brought up Ozzympic and semi-glutides. What are you seeing with patients struggling with autoimmune diseases taking those drugs? Are they making it worse or are they good for them? Because, I mean, Hashimoto's typically you struggle, you have an inability to lose weight.

So I'd imagine Ozzympic is really tempting for them. Yeah, I'm not anti-Ozempic. I'm not anti-any of that stuff. But again, just like OZempic, we want to make sure that people have the proper informed consent and understand their risks with the benefits, right? Blood sugar imbalances are one of the biggest triggers that will cause the autoimmune response to flare up. And so they have this blood sugar and stabilization and it creates tons of problems. So we've found that if somebody really has severe insulin resistance or blood sugar stabilization issues and they get put on semi-glutide or terseptide, which is OZempic. or Mangaro.

But as someone gets put on those, we've seen that sometimes, for the right patient, it actually decreases antibodies. And I think the main reason why is because they go from having these volatile blood sugar levels to more stable.

Insulin is a huge, huge trigger for an autoimmune disease. And so with terseptide or synaglutide, Ozempic, Manjaro, those are helping blood sugar levels stay stable. And I think that's why in turn

with some of these patients we're seeing their antibodies drop, inflammatory markers drop as well. So I'm not anti those, but, you know, it's based off of the specific patient and their history. And we definitely want to make sure that they're being monitored closely. So are you guys prescribing those end big? These are patients just come to you and they already have it. Yeah, these are patients that just come to us and already have it. In my clinic, I have a bunch of different clinics.

One of them is for autoimmune patients. And then I have another clinic where we focus on hormones, peptide, stem cells, and all those things. And so for some of our patients with severe insulin resistance or PCOS or blood sugar stabilization problems, we'll prescribe ozempic or terseptide if it's indicated and if the patients properly understand, you know, the risk, because in anything, whenever you prescribe a peptide, there is definitely going to be a risk to it. I'm thinking of the stomach paralysis lawsuits that we're seeing. I mean, the thing is, when you have autoimmune, it's like, man, I have all of these symptoms that I'm dealing with. This will help with that. But then I have

the chance of getting this. Like how do you decide what's worth it, I guess? For us, when we have a patient that's exercising until they drop dead and they eat a 500 calorie diet and they still weigh 260 pounds, that's a problem, right? And when they can do all the adjustments and we can create all the adjustments and we're still having problems, then that's when we'll jump into that. We would opt for right now terseptide versus semi-glutide, which is Manjaro, not Ozone. Zempe and we're finding that there's less side effects at this point. But again, this is just like the COVID vaccine, right, where we don't really know the long-term risk with this. That's what I'm scared of is people being on this drug for decades. We don't know the long-term risk. There's some

research that shows that if you do a small amount consistently, that it actually helped with longevity, but then there's other research that shows that might cause thyroid tumors, brain tumors, and other issue, stomach paralysis, right? So I think for us it's about giving the patient the options and saying, look, here's the risk, here's the benefits, here's why it might be beneficial for you. But in the end, it's got to be your decision. And we don't know the risks in 20 years from now what happened. Yeah. And so this also might be a dumb question. But every time I hear people talk about leaky gut, I'm like, okay, what does that mean? Does it mean just like tiny microscopic holes in your stomach where your food is seeping out, or is that totally not what it is?

Well, so you can have these tight junctions, and they're kind of like, let's say they're fences, right, where if you eat a mill, those tight junctions gate what proteins enter the bloodstream, what gets into the bloodstream from the intestinal tract. Okay. When your tight junctions are healthy, you're not going to have anything that's adverse or anything that could cause your immune system to freak out. you're not going to have any of that pass into the bloodstream because those tight junctions are strong. When those tight junctions break down, that's when all of some like whole food proteins get into the

bloodstream that shouldn't be in there. And then that exacerbates this autoimmune response or an inflammatory response and it causes lots of problems. Then we have food intolerances. Then we have a risk of autoimmunity down the road, all based off this intestinal permeability or leaky gut. Harvard is one of the top colleges for this research, which is pretty fantastic. But if there's a way that we can improve those tight junctions, then it will minimize, you know, problems down the road. And did my gut microbiome tests say that I have leaky gut? And if so, how bad is it? It didn't say neither.

It tested for parasites, yeast, fungus, buterate, you know, those types of things. And so how is everything looking? You have intestinal inflammation. You have quite a bit of problems when it comes to short chain fatty acids, which help fuel those cells that line the gut. So you have a ton of different stuff going on from an intestinal standpoint. It just didn't show if you have intestinal permeability. When somebody has an autoimmune disease, the likelihood of them having intestinal permeability is quite higher than if they didn't. And what are the signs that you have that?

Food reactions are really common intestinal. bloating, discomfort, bowel issues, you could end up having heartburn, digestion problems. There's something as simple as fatigue and depression is a common sign of intestinal permeability. Struggling with sleep? Personally, I love a little L-thianine, Ashwaganda, camomile, tart cherry juice, half a bar of dark chocolate. I like a magnesium-epson salt bath. And then my green tea, honeycuckle organic prebiotic body wash from Alevia. I love this non-toxic body wash because there's less than 10 pure organic ingredients from land and sea in every bottle. There's a pump you can get if you like a little pump and the smell is to die for with cold pressed essential oils and never

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this good. Go to Alevia.com and use code Alex 15 for 15% off your order. That's Alevia, a L-E-A-V-I-A dot com with code Alex 15 for 15% off. Find the link in the show notes. What are the first things that somebody with Hashimoto's needs to start doing immediately and stop doing immediately? When somebody has an autoimmune disease, there's specific foods that will trigger the out of immune response. This can range and be so different from one patient to another. One thing that will do is we like our patients to be on an anti-inflammatory diet, where they're avoiding inflammatory foods, and then we'll add in foods as we go down the road. But avoiding inflammatory foods could be one huge trigger down, and then you move on to the different imbalances that are causing issues. So that's,

that's one. If a patient doesn't have the motivation to do an anti-inflammatory diet, then they can avoid gluten, dairy, and sugar. Remember I said blood sugar imbalances are a big driver. So just avoiding dairy, gluten, and sugar, those three things can play a big role in your autoimmune response as well, which some people are like, oh, because everyone eats gluten and dairy, but those are three simple things that you can do from a dietary standpoint

that can play a big role. On top of that, this is where I guess it's going to really show how much more we want to do than just like a standard doctor, because this is kind of a lot, right? I thought about homocysteine. If you have a homocysteine issue, you want to take methylated B vitamins. There's a supplement that's called the liver complex from just ingredients who I love because you can make sure that like just ingredient supplements don't have any extra fillers or any extra things that can flare up an autoimmune patient. Some of our worst patients that we have are the ones that have like a bag of supplements and they come to your office and just like drop them down. Like that gives me anxiety. Why? Why is that bad? Because there's a lot of supplements that aren't immune neutral

that actually stimulate the immune system and can make an autoimmune disease worse. And then on top of that, they can have fillers and additives and different things in there that flare up an immune disease as well. So based off of whether it's a capsule or whatnot, and is there something in that capsule that can flare up an autoimmune disease or has it been made in a factory with gluten, dairy, soar, or whatever that may be? Supplements, and a lot of them give me anxiety because of that one issue there. So there's a supplement from just ingredients where it's called liver complex that helps with this methylation issue and all you do is you just take it once a day and you recheck your homocysteine and you'll likely see that improve and that's one trigger that

you can do if you have an autoimmune disease um from an exercise standpoint and you talked about this exercise can be either really good for you or it can be like rat poisoning for you if you have autoimmune disease you could actually have what's called exercise induced cytokines when you exercise and it can make your autoimmune disease worse so if you have you you have an immune disease worse so if you you have, you know, you have to make sure that you are getting some type of movement, but you don't want to overexercise and exacerbate the autoimmune disease. I struggle so much with working out because I have this muscle weakness, which is also a symptom of Hashimoto's, isn't it? And then just fatigue. So what do you suggest for people

that have autoimmune issues that need to start working out because it's beneficial, but it's also really hard? Yeah, you'll get to a point to where if you work out too much, you're going to have increased symptoms. So I tell my patients to work out to the point to where you don't have any symptoms afterwards. Working out should help you feel better. It should like wake up your mind. You should be able to think clearer. If you feel worse after exercise, though, then you're flaring up the autoimmune response. But you think about even with you, a lot of people have blood sugar levels like you do. So you have what's called a reactive hypolycemia. Your blood sugar levels are dropping too low. And so when you exercise, what that's doing is it's actually burning the very minute sugar levels.

that you have in your system and it drops it too low. We're going to have like intense fatigue and exhaustion and muscle weakness just by working out at all. In order to get you to where you're functioning better, you have to improve your blood sugar levels, but you also have to make sure that the adrenalins are functioning better. And then you'll be able to work out and you'll be able to feel better and be a little bit more resilient when it comes to exercise. How do you fix the blood sugar levels like what I have? Is it a diet thing? Is it a supplement thing?

It depends on the mechanism driving it. Most of the time it's due to cortisol, which is your stress hormone that we talked about before. So if you can get your cortisol patterns to be up and regular, then you'll be able to maintain blood sugar levels more effectively and you'll be able to function well. There's also a neurological component to that. But as you calm down the autoimmune response, you improve the cortisol, you improve the blood sugar levels. Your exercise should be better. So the other thing, too, is you can test for your fair time.

levels and ferritin and iron is really important. So just to see if you have iron deficiency and ferretin, a lot of our female patients end up having issues with iron deficiency. And improving those to where ferritin levels are optimal, that instantaneously will allow you to function well. So there's like a few things if a patient comes in. If they have blood profusion problems, that's a huge issue. I could give you supplements, make dietary changes. You're not going to improve. if we don't fix the actual blood profusion problems. The other thing is iron deficiency type issues. Same thing, whereas iron is really important to help distribute oxygen and nutrients to your brain and distal tissues.

If we don't improve those right from the get-go, you're not going to improve as much. So those are like easy, key things that we can focus on to make a big impact. Outside of that, there's supplements that are really helpful for you. Vitamin D, like you mentioned, is fantastic. vitamin D increases regulatory T cells, which calms down the autoimmune response. What kind of vitamin D do you like? Do you like the K2, D3, whatever that all is? Yeah, I like vitamin D3 with K2. Okay.

And then oftentimes magnesium activates the D3, and so those three go fantastic. Which magnesium? Well, there's a handful. So you always want to be cautious. So one awesome thing that I've loved to do recently is I help, uh, formulate a therapeutic line for just ingredients. And we use organic ingredients. You'll, like another thing that's really bad is you'll be taking different nutrition and botanicals and they're all sprayed with pesticides and it jacks you up and causes problems. So when you have a list full of supplements,

you're like, okay, well, what else is triggering it? And are there tons of pesticides in there that you're drinking and, you know, whatever? Like green drinks, for example, they're filled with lead. And that can cause a ton of problems. So I like organic D3. I like K2 where it helps the D3 absorb, and I like a variety of different magnesiums that show that they have a bioavailability to actually absorb and utilize. The supplement market is pretty strange

in a sense that a lot of people are creating supplements, and they'll use the cheaper version that doesn't absorb and that is filled with pesticides. Because if we use the organic version or the version that's going to be more bioavailable and absorb more effectively, it costs $5 more per bottle, and they could sell it for a lot cheaper. So even like making sure that you're taking the right supplements

and supplements that actually work for your body and make the therapeutic change, that's really important too. But vitamin D levels, you can just check your vitamin D levels consistently and make sure that they're actually improving. And if they are, then fantastic. I feel like everyone in America has a vitamin D deficiency. So, I mean, is it like a supplement is really the best way? Or is it like you need to be getting outside for this amount of time?

a day? Like what really helps vitamin D deficiency? Getting outside is really important. I like just the natural vitamin D, but a lot of people have to supplement too, especially in the winter. Hashimoto's, which you have, will stimulate and cause receptor issues for vitamin D. It will also increase inflammation. And as inflammation increases, vitamin D decreases. So if you live this inflammatory lifestyle or if you have an inflammatory condition, you're likely going to have vitamin D issues no matter what you do until you calm down the inflammatory process. But vitamin D is really good. A low dose, vitamin A is fantastic. We use glutathione, which you've heard of. Glutothion helps with the autoimmune response. It helps decrease inflammation. It helps with liver detoxification.

It helps with brain inflammation. It helps with blood sugar stabilization. It helps with those tight junctions that we talked about in the intestinal tract. Glutothion is one of those things that's really, really important. And as we age, glutathine becomes depleted and our demands for glutathine increase as well. I just don't believe that these food allergy tests are totally accurate. I want to set the record straight. So please tell me how much should we trust those. Where is this question coming from? Just for fun. I have asked every doctor this. I asked the dentist that came on. I asked Dr. Patrick Flynn. I'm asking you. I'm like, okay, why are the only foods that are coming up on this, the ones that I happen to have every day. And they're all healthy foods. I mean, cinnamon,

garlic, milk, eggs, like things that I always eat are what's coming up. It wasn't like the foods that, well, I never eat that. You know, it's all the things that I love and eat consistently. So I'm thinking, okay, it's just saying that it's an allergy because it's just getting through like leaky gut or something. And like, if we just fix that, then I'm going to be fine. I can eat this stuff again is what I think. Yeah. So if somebody has a ton of food and Like a huge list after one of those tests. And I didn't have a huge. It was only 15.

Okay. Only 15 food intolerances. That's a lot, though. If someone has more food intolerances and it's what they're eating consistently, it's likely that they have intestinal permeability. Okay. So that's step one. So you kind of already got that.

If you have intestinal permeability and all those food proteins are going into the bloodstream, then those will come up positive. If you're not eating foods, they won't come up positive because your body hasn't been exposed to those food protein. So if someone has avoided gluten for two years and we test for gluten intolerance, it might not even come up positive even though they have a gluten intolerance just because they've avoided that food for a long time. Does that make sense?

Yeah. On top of that, though, there's a lot of inaccuracies when we're doing food intolerance testing. If you're just doing an IG test, which a lot of people do, which is what you did, there's actually other immune cells to see if you have a food intolerance. So it's better to do what's called an IGG and IGA test because it does a combined of those immune cells when we're looking for immune tolerance. You might have super low IGA cells to a certain food protein, but then higher to the IGG, and then that makes it appear like you have a food intolerance when in reality you don't. Or vice versa, you might have a food intolerance and it doesn't come back positive.

So there's that component too. There's also IGE, which is for allergies, and those are for looking for like an allergic reaction. When you eat a food and almost instantaneously you have an allergic reaction. Yeah, like the anaphylactic shock. I had zero on that. Yeah. No things on that, just the things that are causing inflammation. Yeah, yeah.

And so I like the IgG test to help guide us, but it's not 100% accurate. So typically we'll do the anti-inflammatory diet with our patients and have them avoid a lot. of foods, and then we'll allow that IGG test to guide us as far as what foods we introduce down the road. There'll be a lot of foods that will add in that a patient might have a flare-up with, or there might be something that came back positive that will add in and the patients function great. However, I will say this. If we can improve immune resilience, when we first see a really sick patient, they'll have a massive list of food intolerances and chemical intolerances that trigger their autoimmune response. Once we start to improve the intestinalysis,

membrane, blood sugar imbalances, liver dysfunction, how they're detoxifying, brain inflammation, inflammation in general. Once we do that, their list of foods and chemical intolerances will decrease tremendously. So when they're kicking butt and taking names, they might only have two or three foods they have to avoid like rat poisoning. When they have a flare-up, they might have to avoid 15 foods or chemicals or whatnot too. So coaching a patient through that process can be really really, really valuable. How much does somebody's average sugar intake play into autoimmunity? Huge, huge. Because blood sugar levels are one of the biggest triggers that we see throughout our clinic, blood sugar issues and blood sugar dysregulation is a huge, huge problem. So just avoiding

processed sugar and ultra-processed foods that turn into sugar really fast, that's one change that you can make that would be a game changer for you. Do people with autoimmune problems ever get to a spot where They can reintroduce gluten and have gluten or for the rest of their life, no flour. Because gluten in and of itself is highly inflammatory, I personally, and because of the research when it comes to autoimmune patients, and if you type in your autoimmune disease and then say gluten afterwards in like PubMed or any research article or any research journals, you're going to have a list of research articles that come up to say gluten is not good for that autoimmune disease. What about sourdough?

It depends. If you're actually intolerant to the gluten protein or you're intolerant to the things that make gluten inflammatory like pesticides and all that stuff. So what you're talking about is, is it the gluten itself or is it the glyphosate? Yeah, but there's glyphosate, there's folic acid. It's how we break down our wheat. It's how we basically use only one gene of gluten that makes it inflammatory. Sometimes we store gluten for up to two years and it causes a mold that produces what's

called aflatoxins. You could be intolerant to those. There's a ton of things that make gluten inflammatory right now that didn't 40 years ago. So how do you find out if it's, you know, one of those things? It's really complicated, but you can always check for transglutaminase enzyme or antibodies, which is for celiac disease. You can check for alpha gliadden antibodies as well, but that's only checking for two components of a nine protein molecule. So, but then on top of that, there's all the stuff that you could be sensitive to from like glyphosate and aphletoxins. If my patients come and see me and they have an autoimmune disease, I will tell them to avoid gluten like rat poisoning always.

What are the best foods for autoimmune? Ironically, I'm pretty sure it's garlic and cinnamon, which are two of the things I'm not allowed to have. Cruel. Garlic and cinnamon are the two best things. Yeah. Yeah. See? Vegetables, healthy fruits, healthy meats.

like real food, not processed stuff, is fantastic. When you start getting into grains and like soy, dairy, gluten, those things become highly, highly inflammatory for our patients. We did a test to see, okay, what are the most common food intolerances for our patient population? Gluten was number one. Dairy was number two. And then it was followed by like soy, corn, rice. egg. But again, lots of our patients can eat those and not have any problems. It's just sometimes

a patient or individual doesn't do well with one of those things. But gluten and dairy were one of the top and continue to remain at the top. How does somebody know if they are experiencing a Hashimoto's flare-up? This is one of the things that is really, really beneficial for anyone with the autoimmune condition to find out. Because if you can know what your flare-up feels like specifically, you can start to target the variables that you do or that cause and trigger the autoimmune response, right? So every patient will have different symptoms pertaining to their flare-up. Most of the time, it's like a headache, fatigue, depression, intestinal issues. If you have intestinal problems right after, like, during your flare-up, that's like a

dead giveaway. But sometimes you might have fatigue the next day for 24 hours. Brain fog, decreased clarity, headaches. those are pretty common triggers. And then if you have joint pain or whatever that may be, you know, based off of what autoimmune disease you have, that's really important for you to figure out. But probably the most common symptoms will be headache, fatigue, intestinal problems, joint pain. Those are common symptoms for flareps, but it ranges so drastically from one patient to another. How do I stay so positive? Delusion, mostly. And chicken, I can trust. Chick-fil-A, as you know,

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Find everything in the show notes. Good Ranchers. American Meat delivered. What are some good tips for helping the body recover after a flare up? When somebody has a flare-up, we have them go into recovery mode, and it might only last for two days, and then they go back to their normal life. But what this will allow them to do is recover in a few days instead of, like, a month, right? We'll have them go back onto the anti-inflammatory diet, and then we'll have them do things to, like, increase their dose of vitamin D. We'll have them increase resveratrol or turmeric, doing things to help dampen these inflammatory statokines.

So to give you an idea, like ibuprofen helps with one inflammatory mediator. A lot of drugs only target one inflammatory meteor. Tumoric and resveratrol touch on 30 different inflammatory mediators. So it's fantastic. Love this for the people that are obsessed with ibuprofen. You have been got. This is what we need to be doing. Iberophan only touches on one inflammatory media.

There's lots of things that will cause inflammation and lots of things that you can target to calm down inflammation. turmeric and resveratrol touch on 30. So there's a supplement called turmeric complex that just ingredients makes as well. And what that does is it has turmeric that's highly bioavailable. It has resveratrol and it has basalia, which is incredible for inflammation and autoimmunity. So that one supplement, we have a patient take high doses of that and it will calm it down rapidly as well. You see patients with autoimmune problems from all over the world. What are the most common household products that could be causing more issues?

Mold is obviously one of those that is just, it wrecks an immune system, right? So if there's any chance that your house has mold, that's one of the things that you've got to get under control right away. If a patient, like, goes on vacation and feels better and then comes back to their house and feels way worse, you've got to check for mold. What cleaning brands do you like? We use branch basics. Okay. Those are great. Does it actually matter like the type of body wash that you use?

It could. Here's the thing. For our autoimmune patients, we aren't as OCD about products they're using like that. That's obviously important and it can be helpful. And when you have the motivation to change your household products, do it. But we have almost all of our patients change their diet, lifestyle, improve the physiological imbalances. they don't change hardly any products and they kill it and feel fantastic

and their quality life is back. However, if you get to that point where like, you know what, I'm going to go to a next level and I'm going to change these things within my house, then yeah, changing up your cleaning products, what you wash your clothes with. You can use glass instead of plastic. Those types of things are great.

Talk about the effects of alcohol on somebody with autoimmune issues. Yeah. Alcohol is an unpopular topic for a lot of people, but alcohol is one of those things. Whether you have an autoimmune condition or not, alcohol is really inflammatory and causes brain inflammation. So to give you an idea, remember how I said your brain fires to the vagal nuclei and then back down to the intestinal track. And that pathway is really important. When that pathway doesn't function properly, we end up having tons of issues when it comes to our immune response. You have a ton of neurons in the intestinal track. It's called the interic

nervous system. When alcohol is exposed to those neurons, it kills them instantaneous. And so it just creates this problem and makes it worse and worse and worse. On top of that, it feeds the brain inflammation. So for my patients specifically, I will tell them to avoid alcohol like the plague. So I'm not a big drinker. So this is another thing that I'm like, okay, a win for me. If I drink, it's like a couple cocktails, you know, a birthday dinner or something like that. It's literally once or twice a month. I'm not a nightly wine drink or nothing. So I'm really happy about that. Plus, mocktails are like having a moment. Everybody's doing mocktails. anyway. So I think if you are somebody who does more frequently go out and have drinks, but you have an autoimmune disease, there's never been a better time to like completely cut it out almost entirely. Like it's so socially acceptable to not drink right now. For sure. And to be honest, there's a lot of people that do drink that are alcoholics. They don't even realize that they're alcoholics because they go out and drink all the time with all their friends and that's just what it is. I think even just limiting your alcohol intake is fantastic. You know what is

interesting though, on top of alcohol, since we're on this topic, is like THC or marijuana or gummies. Do you have friends that like smoke or vape or do the gummies? Yeah. I mean, it's legal here in Arizona. I don't know in Utah. No, it's definitely not legal there. No. Yeah. I'm sure so. I know the alcohol laws are like wild, so I figured that no weed. But yeah, everybody's smoking weed. Everybody feels like there's so many health benefits. So for an autoimmune person, what's the truth about marijuana? This is a funny. thing. We started to have these patients, uh, and they started to do like the gummies and marijuana and all that. And it was lighting them up, like it was jacking them up like crazy, flurring up the autoimmune

disease. So we dove into the literature. And what we found is that, uh, marijuana isn't immune neutral. So when somebody smokes marijuana or does the gummies, there, if you have the wrong strain, which you can't really predict what strain you're going to actually use, it can flare up the autoimmune disease and it can heighten the actual immune system to attack whatever tissue it's attacking. On top of that, it also causes brain inflammation. There's tons of research that shows that. And then the THC is, there's some research that's showing that THC actually causes intestinal imprimidity and will increase your food intolerances, which will in turn exacerbate the autoimmune response too. Whoa. So beforehand, I was like, yeah, like CBD and, you know,

potentially marijuana for the right people can be fantastic. And there was a lot of rave about all these things that it could do. But then we started to see patient after patient after patient that was doing marijuana or gummies or smoking it. And it was making it 10 times worse for their autoimmune disease. It was increasing their intestinal issues. It was causing more food intolerances. And then we dove into the research.

And it's not as healthy and safe as you think it is. Can it have the therapeutic benefits on specific people if given the, you know, to the right people? Yeah, absolutely. There's no questions about it. But if I had an autoimmune disease, I would not drink alcohol and I would not do any form of marijuana. I can't find anybody talking about this. So I'm asking you. Can people with autoimmune issues get Botox?

Sure. I'm sure a lot of people could do Botox without any problems. This is one of those things, though, is it trigger your immune response versus another person's immune response, right? We'll have a small percentage of people where Botox actually flers up the autoimmune disease. But then we have others where their immune system handles it just fine. It doesn't freak out. It doesn't cause any problems. So can I tell you what happens to me when I get it?

And you tell me that's a flare up or normal. Yeah, yeah, I want to hear. So every time I get Botox for the first cup, at first for several years, it was just two days. Now it has gone to five to seven days of cold flu symptoms, severe congestion, body aches, chills, and fever. Well, you already know the answer. I mean, that's a specific immune reaction. I love that. You're even asking that question. So someone like you, that's an immune response. I mean, every time you're getting Botox, you're having those immune reactions, which is obviously a significant problem. I'm going to cry because I can't give it up. What about Zeoman?

Have you ever heard of this? X-E-O-M-I-N? People are telling me that it's the purest neurotoxin because it lacks accessory proteins that cause issues with antibodies. Sure. That would make sense. So I'm wondering, I haven't tried it yet, but I'm wondering if instead of getting my Botox touched up,

if I try this, see what my reactions are. Way better, especially if it doesn't have the proteins that Botox has. Botox is one of those things. that's not crunchy living, I totally get it. Because people are like, Alex, how can you be so crunchy and anal about all this other stuff? But like, you do Botox. I'm like, I think Botox is phenomenal. The only thing is now I worry that it is irritating me specifically for autoimmune.

So I'm like, great. Well, maybe I can't do that. But I mean, for the job that I have everything, I care more about this than the average person because I'm on camera all the time and photograph and everything. So it's like I am doing everything I can to find what the alternative is going to be for me. The way that you're going about it is great. Okay, is there a healthier alternative that doesn't flare up my autoimmune disease and it is safer for me? Yeah, try it out and see.

Okay, we're going to guinea pig. And then I'm going to tell you so you can tell your patient. Yeah, let me know. Because you're in Utah. Those women with their Hashimoto's want Botox, I'm sure. I mean, we're in the capital of Botox and aesthetics and all that stuff for sure. Look, there's a lot of patients that have autoimmune disease that don't have any immune reaction to Botox. But there are some.

And that's the same thing with dairy, soy. corn, environment, you name it. There's now way better things to do with aesthetics that even will trump Botox, even will trump anything that you do like fillers or whatever that may be. Okay, tell me. Right now, I'm in my regenerative medicine

and stem cell residency, and we can take a little bit of fat out of a patient, and we can cycle down the stem cells, and then you can inject that into the face to regenerate the tissue of the face. So even from a stem cell perspective, there's tons of stuff that you can do where we're using your own body's tissue or your own body's stem cells to really heighten and help with longevity and all that stuff as well. What sorts of connections have you seen in women with breast implants and autoimmunity? Any type of implant, whether it's Botox, whether it's fillers, whether it's tooth implants, whether it's breast implants, you name it.

You have the potential for it to trigger the autoimmune response. We have what's called toll-like receptors and pattern recognition cells. cells. These cells are hardwired to basically detect any type of foreign substance or anything that could potentially be hazardous for us. If you trigger those cells, boom, you can have an inflammatory response just like that. Like my wife, for example, she had, gosh, she was 22 years old or 21 when she had a breast implants. And I didn't know anything from a health standpoint at that time. Probably about five years ago, she started to have crazy symptoms and we did everything from a functional medicine standpoint that we could.

And she got about 50 to 60% better. And then I took a deep dive into implants, breast implants specifically, and we saw all the negative things that came up. I mean, it can cause cancer, it can cause autoimmune conditions, it can cause inflammatory responses. If you have those pattern recognition cells or those total like receptors that sense that foreign substance and those trigger an autoimmune response or an inflammatory response, that's going to cause a problem for sure.

So did your wife get hers removed? Yep. And so what happened with her symptoms? Significantly improved. Really? Yeah. And so you think that was it? We don't even think.

You know. You remove it. And then all of a sudden, all of her symptoms significantly dissipated and went away. So she had breast implant illness. Yeah. It's like we've lived it. I had an office manager, same thing. Horrible symptoms.

Removed them 100% better. How long had her implants been in? 10 years. That's an episode I really do want to do at some point this year. hopefully is get somebody on to just do breast implant illness and talk about that. That's a terrible thing too because these individuals are just like autoimmunity are going to all these different doctors. Everyone's pretty much saying they're crazy and they're not. They're literally being poisoned by their breast implants and nobody knows it. After like 24 or 25 years old,

you absolutely have to incorporate a retinal into your skincare routine, okay? Especially if you don't want to do Botox. I cannot stress how important this is for combating brinkles. If using a full-blown retinoles scares you, I recommend starting out with a good retinol-infused moisturizer that has a lot of vitamin A. I love the hydrating cream one from NeNe-Skinkare. If I ever run out and I have to use something else, I always notice a huge difference in my skin and not a good one. This moisture-rich cream offers intense, long-lasting hydration, perfect for dry dehydrated skin. It softens and soothes while providing protection against free radical damage, ensuring a nourished radiant complexion. It's paraben-free, and it does say PM

because there's retinol in it, but since I wear so much makeup, I have a very much makeup, I have no problems wearing it in the day, although I wouldn't put that on like before going to lay out or something, okay? Nimi skincare has amazing luxury skincare for every budget and skin type with modern ingredients, but timeless values. Yep, they are a conservative own company. This is absolutely crucial all the time, but especially during an election year when so many leftist owned brands are using your money to fund candidates in causes that you do not align with. Go to NemiSkinkare.com. Use code Alex Clark for 10% off. That's N-I-M-I-Skinkare.com with code Alex Clark for 10% off. The link in the code are in the description if you forget. What is the deal with

hot tubs in Hashimoto's? Similar to like fillers or Botox or any type of chemical intolerance. You have bromine, you have iodine and you have chlorine in hot tubs that are pretty much to help keep it clean. So if you're reacting to any type of chemical and specifically those chemicals that can flare up the autoimmune response if you have that chemical intolerance. What makes it different for a Hashimoto's patient is iodine can be like rat poison for Hashimoto's. And this sounds strange because a lot of people will link iodine to be really healthy for the thyroid. But if you have TPO antibodies, which you do, that is basically a huge problem for iodine because what happens is iodine is a co-factor and stimulator for TPO enzymes, which are the very things that your

autoimmune disease is attacking. So if you take iodine on its own, it could flare things up like you're pouring gas on a wildfire. Is that a normal thing like how chlorine is in every hot tub? Like is iodine in every hot tub? No, no, no. So I should ask my apartment complex, what's in our hot tub. Yeah, but you could be reacting to the chlorine. You could be reacting to the bromine, whatever they're using,

and you can still have that chemical intolerance. And once you have that chemical intolerance and you're exposed to it, it will flare up the out ofamine response. But when it comes to iodine specifically for you, like if you're doing iodized salt, I would have you avoid that. Pretty much all of our patients, we have our patients avoid iodine like the plague. But here's some key rules that we follow.

One, we have them check for iodine deficiency. If they have an iodine deficiency, then we might supplement iodine. But we only supplement iodine with selenium. Selenium is really good, but it helps basically buffer any type of toxic effect the iodine will have. So it kind of keeps the positivity with iodine. Okay, I'm taking one teaspoon of selenium a day. No, two teaspoons. Okay, so if you take that with your iodine, that's better.

So check to see if you have a low iodine. If you do, then you can supplement with iodine, but always take it with selenium. And what's the aftercare? Let's say I do get in a hot tub. Then what should I be doing that night or next day to, like, help with anything that could be bad about it? Some people will get into the hot tub and not have any symptoms and it doesn't cause any problems. You don't have to do anything, right? Do you have symptoms after you do the hot tub?

I just, well, severe dry skin, but I think that's the chlorine. And then I would say extremely tired, but I'm like, well, but am I supposed to feel relaxed? How long is the fatigue last? I guess I've never paid attention. These things are really important to pay attention to, right? Yeah. Where it's like, huh, is this causing my autoimmune disease that flare up? And if it is, that's definitely a trigger that's making it worse.

Okay. And if you can minimize your triggers, you're going to be better off. But again, there'll be a lot of people that are listening to this podcast that are freaking out, like, holy crap, I got to avoid gluten, I've got to avoid dairy, you got to do all these things, I got to avoid these chemicals, I got to do all this stuff. And in reality, that's not really the case. If you do things to improve your immune resilience and adaptability, you're going to be able to go into an environment that would have flared you up before and it won't do anything to you because your immune system is now functioning a lot better.

So I don't really want to get people scared to do stuff because we're constantly surrounded and bombarded by ultra-processed food, crazy chemicals and environment. and sometimes it's like we can't even live. And then if we live in a bubble, the bubble's made up plastic, and that flares up our hormones and issues and problems too, right? Right. So what I want to do, though, is preface and really emphasize, if you can get to the mechanism of the issue, improve inflammation,

improve your immune resilience, you're going to be able to weather pretty much any storm and feel fantastic. If you understand what your flare feels like and recover faster, do those types of things, now you're the expert in your own health and you can live a good quality of life without being in fear and concerned and worried. Yeah, there might be a few foods

you know you just can't eat but those few foods might be different for you than they are a different individual. I don't want my patients to like avoid everything and avoid every chemical and avoid every food and do all that stuff that's not healthy. What I would rather do is improve their immune resilience,

correct the different imbalances that are causing issues and then teach them how to recover. recover fast and teach them how to go day to day and live a healthy, good, quality, fun life where they can do a hot tub without symptoms and Botox if they really want to. How can I possibly pinpoint what my trigger is? Having someone like myself being able to look at your labs and assess exactly those different triggers and mechanisms and then start correcting those one by one. A lot of that we can use with nutraceuticals. But again, I don't want my patients

to be on 15 different supplements. I'd rather my patients be on like three or four or five specific to that one imbalance that's making the biggest impact. And then once that's improved, remove those supplements completely and start working on a whole new imbalance. And then once that's improved,

remove those and start working on a whole new imbalance. Then once that's improved, remove those and do another one. All the while, we're trying to teach them and educate them. But by the time they're done seeing us, a goal would be to where they're only taking one or two supplements just to help for maintenance. Yeah, like vitamin D, I'm probably always going to have to take. Sure, sure.

And maybe a methylation supplement. But that's it. And then maybe what you can do is have some supplements in the cupboard or whatever, where if you have a flare up, you can start to take those to help recover faster. And you think I am at a place that I could possibly avoid having to take thyroid medication. We do the right things. Yeah, for sure, if you do. If you calm it down immensely, you bet. However, I'll preface this. There's a ton of people where they've had Hashimoto's for 15 years, and they have a permanent low thyroid. So if they were to stop their medication, they have no thyroid hormones at all, and it would significantly impact their health. Like, you can't cure that part. If you've destroyed your thyroid enough, you have to take some type of thyroid hormone. The difference between you is you're not taking any medication and your TSA is perfectly fine.

you just have the antibodies that are attacking and assaulting the thyroid rapidly. So we calm that down and you're going to minimize your chance of it causing a permanent low thyroid down the road. What happens if somebody can't find a doctor like you to help reverse or manage their autoimmune properly? So we have a book coming out in end of May, 1st of June. It's called The Inflammatory Reset and I did it with Carlin Call, who owns Just Ingredients. and it talks about all things inflammation. If you can't find a doctor, buy that book. At least do that.

Buy that book and follow that to a T. We implement what foods to eat, what foods not to eat. We spell it out so easy for you, what supplements can be beneficial, what supplements to avoid, we go over physiology, we go over lots of stuff. Just that one book could make a significant impact in your life. So if you did nothing at all and you can't find a doctor to help you do this, that. If for some reason you can't find a doctor, then you can call us for a consultation and we see people remotely. We see patients from 30 different countries and all over the world and every state

in the nation. And your clinic is Red River Health? Yep. Red River Health and Wellness is our autoimmune clinic. And then I have a regenerative medicine and stem cell clinic called Palmavita Clinic. And the book that you're talking about, is that available for pre-order right now? Not yet, but soon. It's so close. Okay. So close. It's so close. Yeah. So exciting. I definitely want to get that. It's called the inflammatory reset.

Okay, so you told us a little bit about the stem cell work that you're doing right now. Is there anything else that you want to add to that? Stem cell's crazy. It's awesome. So when I was at Johns Hopkins, I was in my stem cell courses, and one of my professors has a lab where they could sever a mouse's spine. It was quadriplegic, and then they can inject stem cells and it could fully walk again. So, like, the advancements every year, obviously we're not there yet in humans. But the advancements of stem cells is getting better and better every year.

There's so much that we could do. I mean, that's a whole other podcast. Yeah. But when I was in those classes, I realized, like, this is going to change the world. It's going to change all of health care. So then I went and did a whole other medical program after that. And then now I'm in a regenerative medicine and stem cell residency right now, where we basically will take people's bone marrow out, fat out, cycle down the stem cells,

and then inject it to wherever they're injured from a musculoskeletal standpoint. So we'll have like women, like for example, my mom, she couldn't even walk up a stair. And we did stem cell injections in her knees. And now she can walk two or three miles. She goes to Pilates. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, she's absolutely killing it.

So the results that we see, it's pretty stinking incredible. It's amazing. So if you struggle with chronic pain or things like that, then you would be great to see you for that. Yeah. You wanted to do a blood pressure test on me. Yeah. Because what are we looking for? So I want to just make sure that your perfusion isn't garbage.

There's a lot of people that will have really low blood pressure, like blood pressure of a dead person like I talked about, where it's so low that oxygen and glucose can't get to the brain, and that's one of the first mechanisms you have to improve when working with an autoimmune patient. If you don't, you're going to continue to feel like garbage. All those supplements you're taking, they're not going to be able to be distributed throughout the body, right?

Right. Your glucose and oxygen won't be able to be distributed throughout the body. So there's key things that if you don't correct at the very first, you're going to fail that patient. Okay, so we're going to do that test right now, but you can only watch it on the real Alex Clark YouTube channel. So if you're on YouTube, then keep watching. We're going to do these tests. If you're just listening right now, thank you so much, Dr. Red for coming on the spillover. Where can people find you on social media?

They can find me at Dr. Josh Red. And then you can go to Dr. Joshred.com, Red River Health and Wellness.com or Palmavita Clinic.com. Fabulous. And it's red with two D's. My last name is Red with two D's. Yes. But Red River only has one. Okay. Got it.

Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me. Send this episode to anyone that you know struggling with autoimmune issues. I think this episode could really help provide some clarity and encouragement. Before you move on, please leave a five-star review for this episode. Text this episode to one person that you know who has an autoimmune disorder. I'm Alex Clark and this is the spillover. Love you mean it.

Bye. Sometimes I will have. a can of beans for dinner. Well, we need to fix that. We need to fix that. When I'm lazy and I'm just like, I can't cook anything. I'm too tired. I just have a can of big beans, a whole can.

Yeah. We need to fix that for sure. Well, I'm glad that that's your source of fiber. But I don't even know what to say after that. A can of beans? Sad, isn't it? A can of beans? That is crazy sad.

Bless your soul.