Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #87 Dr. Amy Offutt

Episode Date: May 13, 2019

Dr. Amy Offutt is an extensively trained Integrative Medicine physician who treats patients with complex health issues using a wide array of individualized strategies for healing. We discuss how she got started in medicine and what led to her getting into integrative medicine. We also talk about doctor-patient relationships and doctor burnout, how medication doesn’t treat every medical issue, Lyme disease, Ozone therapy, NAD therapy and much more.   Connect with Amy| Website | https://www.amyoffuttmd.com/ Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/amyoffuttmd/   Show Notes| Dr. Jeffrey Life | https://www.drlife.com/meet-dr-life/ Average time doctors spend with patients | https://bit.ly/2n5QRrJ Kirtan Kriya Meditation | https://bit.ly/2zn2vTz Dr. Frank Shallenberger | https://www.antiagingmedicine.com/ Krebs Cycle | https://bit.ly/2I0KFgZ   Farmers Juice Promo: Get $10 off your first box order by visiting  thefarmersjuice.com/king    Dry Farm Wines Promo: Get a penny bottle of wine on your order by visiting  dryfarmwines.com/kyle     Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on| Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Connect with Onnit on: Twitter | https://twitter.com/Onnit       Instagram | https://bit.ly/2NUE7DW Subscribe to Human Optimization Hour  iTunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY    

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nutrients, each purpose-driven, to provide a tide of benefits to support your body, mind, joint health, immune system, energy, mood, and other aspects of your well-being. It's not a multivitamin, but rather a collection of megavitamins, also containing the clinically studied formulas direct from our most popular supplements. Go to onnit.com slash total dash human to learn more and try it today. We've got an awesome guest. I traveled out to Marble Falls, Texas, which is a little known town about an hour outside of Austin for this one, so I could get an in-house interview with Dr. Amy Offutt. She runs Heart and Soul Integrative Medicine and Yoga and is one of the coolest integrative medicine doctors, functional medicine doctors, alternative medicine doctors,

whatever you want to label it. She really knows quite a bit on how we can dial in our own psyche, how we can get the most out of life, and what are some of the coolest things in the biohacking world today. And if you're not into biohacking, just think of it as what moves the needle on performance and longevity, as well as general health and wellness. She's doing all these practices not far from Austin. And I really learned a lot from her. This is a great one. Let us know what you think. And if you got questions for her, you can find her at amyoffuttmd.com. All right, welcome to the show. We're here at your studio and this is integrative. Can you finish me off there? Heart and soul, integrative health and yoga. There we go. And I was first turned on to you by a friend of mine, Anthony DiClemente,

who told me I have to do 10 pass ozone. So I definitely want to get into that. But first I'd like to get what got. But first, I'd like to get what got you into medicine, some of your background story. So I grew up in rural Northeast Texas. My dad was military. I have three younger sisters. My youngest sister is only five years younger than I am. And when I was about five, my dad sat me down one day and said, I think you should be the president of the United States or you should be a doctor. And I think that was the first time I even ever been heard the word doctor. So I was pretty sure I didn't want to be the president. And then after that, as I progressed through school, I always found it easy to do well in academics.

I was definitely socially challenged, but I was always a teacher pleaser and, you know, get it done and do it well kind of person. And really what sealed my fate, I think, was when I was 15, I was in a car accident and I was driving and there were four other girls in the car with me and I was pretty severely injured, but the girl sitting right behind me died. She's one of my dearest friends from very young age. And I was in the hospital for almost a month. And during that time, I just loved my doctors and my nurses. And after that, I told my parents, like, I definitely want to have something to do with the health care field when I get older. And I think, if anything, all that happened in that tragic event was that it just motivated me. Definitely kind of took away some of my teenager fun focus, but pushed me a little more toward putting my head down and working hard and, you know, trying to do something positive with myself.

So from high school, I went to Abilene Christian for college and got a degree there. I had also met my husband in high school and he went to Abilene Christian. So it was just natural to go there because he was already there. I had also met my husband in high school, and he went to Abilene Christian. So it was just natural to go there because he was already there. And graduated from there. And then he and I moved to Austin and lived and worked in Austin for about three years after college. And I just kept still having that burning thought to go to med school. What did you study in college? Biology. Oh, okay. Yeah, I got a bachelor's degree in biology. I think I just kept getting talked out to med school. What did you study in college? Biology. Oh, okay. Yeah. I got a, I got a bachelor's degree in biology. I think I just kept getting talked out of med school because of, you know, just different acquaintances and friends were like, Oh, you don't want to do

that. That's, you know, it's too long. It's too much. Or our doctors don't have a good lifestyle or, you know, so I put it off and put it off, but it just kept coming up. You know, it was like that deep, slow intuition of like, oh, I don't know why I just want to do that. And so my husband, we were living in Austin, both like, you know, making $8 an hour and just struggling, but really, you know, we were having fun too. But he said, well, if you want to get in, you know, or if you want to go, just get accepted. So I applied and I got accepted and we went. So I went to medical school in San Antonio at UT Health Science Center and met so many interesting, amazing people from all over, all different, you know, backgrounds. Graduated from

medical school in 1997 and did a residency also in San Antonio downtown at Krista Santa Rosa in family medicine. And after residency, I always wanted to be a little like my doctor growing up because he delivered my little sister and, you know, he took care of anything and everyone. And so when I started looking for jobs, I told Brad, my husband, you know, I'd like to live in a smaller town. I grew up in a smaller town and I thought that would be a good place to start a family. And, and he said, well, the only small town I would consider would be, you know, like Abilene, because he grew up in Abilene or a place like Marble Falls. And his dad had brought them down in the summers for, you know, related to his work. And they had had a lot of fun summer memories at Horseshoe Bay on the lake. And so it just all fell into place from there. I made a few phone calls and got a job.

And for the first seven years out of residency, I got to deliver babies and, you know, see clinic patients and do hospital were on a lot of medicines and a lot of them were just not feeling very well. And it just wasn't uncommon to go to work and sit across from someone who was 42. And she would say, I just don't feel good. Your labs are normal. Look down, you just don't feel good. Like, your labs are normal. Look down, you're on six meds, something for heartburn, something for sleep, something for depression, something for birth control, and a little overweight, a little just running on fumes.

And there really wasn't another pill I could give her to make her feel better because that's not what was wrong with her. And I knew it, but I just didn't know how to help her. So I give, I give Brad a lot of credit because he, he just thinks bigger, you know, than I think I grew up being a little bit more rules follower and he grew up being not a rules follower, which I love that we are together because, you know, I think I sort of ground him a little bit. But he is the reason that I learned to snow ski and wakeboard and travel. And I love it. I just never thought that was something that I could do or should do. So anyway, I was telling him one day about how this was just starting to

be more and more obvious to me that giving all these medications wasn't helping my patients, but I didn't know what to do about it. And one weekend, we were going to San Francisco to a conference, and we were on Southwest Airlines, and he opened the magazine, and he's reading, you know, this ad, and it was Dr. Jeff Life from Las Vegas in a Cinegenics ad. And it shows a picture of him when he's like in his 50s, and he's got the pregnant belly and the man boobs and he's all, you know, his hair's all messed up and he looks very unhealthy. And then a picture of him next to that when he's 72, where he's just fit and strong and muscular. And Brad points this out and he said, Amy, you need to find out what they're doing at this place because I work out so hard.

And I'm, you know, I think at that time he was about 40. He said, I work out so hard and I don't look anything like this guy. And this guy's like so much older than me. So I looked at it and we went to the conference. The following Monday, he called them and signed me up to do a training with them, like prepaid, scheduled everything. And then that afternoon, he was like, I scheduled you a training. And so I went for a two-week training in Las Vegas. And that's, I think, where I got my eyes open that there was a different way to

practice medicine. It was just the tip of the iceberg, though. I felt like after that week, or after the first week, I kept asking the doctor I was with, like, what about women? Because their clientele at that particular place is mostly male executives, like 40 to 60, that just want to have mental clarity, strength, energy, stamina, function really, really well. That's probably 80% of their clientele, at least it was back then. And we didn't see any female patients. And I had both. I had the whole family. I have the mom, the dad, the grandmother, and the grandkids. So the doctor there slid me a little piece of paper and he's like, this is what I do for the women. It was mostly hormone optimization. And it just got me interested. Like it was not enough to understand it fully. So that just started the whole journey of going to conferences and reading books and working on a new way to approach any type of health issue. So when someone comes in now and says, I don't feel well,

like my toolbox is just so much bigger. And in order to be able to, to take care of patients that way, I had to get out of like structured, more corporate medicine or group medicine because the last, you know, the last place I interviewed with probably about 12 years ago now. And they were like, we need you to see 35 patients a day. And if you see 35 patients, we'll give you this bonus and we'll give you all the nursing staff you need. But I just, in my conscience, I just cannot practice that way. I think that's why a lot of doctors get burned out maybe after practicing

for a while is they just keep seeing that same patient I was seeing, which is the patient that's looking at you saying, please help me. And we're just giving another prescription or doing another lab and telling them there's nothing wrong when they don't feel well. And so it started to become all about vitality and endurance. And even myself, it was good timing because I was almost 40 when I started learning about a different way to practice. I'm going to be 50 in September, so it's been about 10 years. And what I realized is for really the first 25 years of my adult life, I had tried to fill my brain with as much as I could and totally neglected my physical body. Like hadn't slept enough, hadn't exercised enough, hadn't eaten properly. So I've felt like even the last 10 years I have been playing catch up,

you know, trying to like, how can I incorporate healthier choices? And, you know, and I give Brad a lot of credit for that too. He's always been, he's always been more focused on being fit. And I've always been focused on being more, you know, productive, mentally productive. And so indefinitely there's a happy ground in the middle. So as I shared with you earlier, yoga's been really good for me because it reminds me of dancing. And I did ballet when I was a kid and really liked it and some drill team in high school. But it doesn't feel like, I mean, obviously sometimes yoga class is not easy, but it just still feels like it is something I can do that makes me feel good. I feel great at the end. So I enjoy it. As opposed to like going for like a five mile run, which I just wouldn't, I don't know.

I don't enjoy that. That's how you do it. I have some friends that love that. So anyway. Yeah. My wife's into both. Yeah. Well, I think that's, you know, for some people, that's what feeds them and makes them feel amazing too. I just never have gotten that. I've never gotten the runner's high that people describe. I think it can be meditative. And there's a great book called Chi Running. And it certainly can be that if it's in the right zone.

So if it's a zone to run where you can have a conversation and breathe through or breathe through your nose the whole time, that is really good for aerobic capacity. But it's also, it's less rigorous. You know, if you put yourself through a five mile grind, then that's not likely to make me feel good. There's a certain type of personality type that likes that. But yeah, I would agree with you there. Yoga is... I've been incorporating more yin practices and things that leave me more whole

than when I started and are less energy expending, but more energy building. And yoga has certainly been one of those practices. Well, when I started, it's funny because Brad was doing lots of personal fitness training and working out at the gym. And he said, I think I had just turned 40. And he said, Amy, you have got to exercise more. And I said, well, okay, what do you suggest? And he's like, come to the gym and I'll, I'll train you. So I committed to a month. I said, for a month, I'll go three or four days a week. I'll go with you to the gym. And I did. But at the end of the month, I really just, I just didn't like it. Like, you know, and I know it's, I know that's in my head, but I just was like, it kind of smells bad in there. And people are staring at me or staring at each other.

And I know that's all. I'm over that now, but at the time, I wasn't over that. And so after a month, I said, okay, I don't want to keep going. And I gave you a month. And he was like, well, then what will you do? What will you do? You got to do something. And so I'm one of those people who stopped and started a thousand times, you know. So I said, well, I think I like to do yoga.

And he said, oh, okay, well, that's not real exercise, but okay, I'll go with you to a class. He had never been to a yoga class. I'd been a few times. And so he goes to a yoga class with me. And after class was over, his eyes were huge and he was smiling. He was like, I've never felt this good. You know? And he just, I think for the first time, like breathes while he was exercising.

Yeah. And within a couple of weeks, he like signed up for yoga teacher training and like he just went all in yoga. So now he's like a thousand hour teacher. He teaches yoga teachers to teach and goes and leads teacher yoga class at that time because there's just, you know, with kids and work, like there's all the excuses that I would come up with that I couldn't go at 530. And so that 6 a.m. class got me in a really good habit of just getting up and going. But even that, I realized like attitude was a lot of it. For the first year or so, I kind of

grumbled to myself and thought, oh, it's so early. Why did I say I would do this? And then one time I invited a patient to come and she was super excited about it. And I noticed the next time that I got up to go to 6 a.m., she was going to meet me there. I woke up so quickly and easily. I was excited that she was going to meet me there. I woke up so quickly and easily. I was like excited that she was going to come, got dressed, got ready, was there early. And then she didn't show up. And I thought, okay, like that was my little lesson of like, I, I get to decide if I want to make it, you know, grumpy time in the morning, or I want to get up and just shift my attitude and look forward to it. And I still don't always wake up, like, energized. Sometimes at 6 a.m. yoga here, we have a couple people who are, like,

super morning people, and they come in, and they're all like, oh, good morning, good morning. I'm kind of, you know, that's not me. With your tail between your legs. But I love practicing early because then it's almost like a transition out of sleep. And then I kind of slowly wake up and then I go do yoga. And then I never have any issues with yoga. Sometimes for me, it makes me feel a little bit nauseated if I've eaten in the last couple hours or had very

much water. And so I can do that in the morning easily. And then I always have my coffee in the car. And so like, it's like my reward to myself. It's like my little pattern. And I really enjoy that. So. Yeah, that's really good. We touched on so much there. Yoga really is incredible. And first I want to talk about attitude because as you know, that parallels into anything you do in life, right? It's such an important thing and a tool to have to understand that whatever it is that I'm doing, attitude makes all the difference. That's the last thing that I'm in control of. And it's the thing that I'm always in control of is what I bring when I bring whatever I'm going to do. But I do want to talk a little bit about the Western model where it's almost like patients are on a conveyor belt and it's an assembly line.

And I forget the exact stat, but I think it's on average 7 to 11 minutes that a doctor sees a patient, which is not, it's not working. You know, it's really not. And I think as you know already, but a lot of Western medicine is designed around triage and treating after the fact, and very little of it has to do with preventative medicine and making you healthy to begin with. What are some of the different things that you offer here that are really in line with health promoting activities? So one of them you touched on, which is time. So like new patients, a lot of times I spend an hour and a half or two hours with them. I want to know right now, what's their nutrition like? How are they sleeping or, you know, are they sleeping much? What's their attitude? Like, what's their stress level? What's their support system? Like, are they community connected? Are

they real isolated? That I find makes a lot of people pretty sick. Like the loneliness factor is huge. You know, how much water do they drink? How much do they move? You know, how sedentary are they? I have patients that, you know, live here and they drive an hour into Austin and then they sit at a desk job all day and then they drive an hour home. And of course, they're going to have difficulty fitting in, you know, time to exercise. And then I have some that still do, you know, it's like Brad will say, everyone gets the same 24 hours. It's just a matter of figuring out, like, are there some little mini exercises that they can put into their day when they wash their hands? Can they do a few squats or pushups on the counter? Or can they take a walk at lunch or at a break? Or can they just stand up from their desk and move around a little bit more? And sometimes people haven't, it seems like everyone would

have thought of that, but sometimes I meet patients, they don't even realize that it's not good to eat fast food every other meal, you know? I've had a woman cry in my office because she doesn't know how to cook. She's like, my mom never taught me how to cook. So she can, she doesn't know even where to start. And I'm like, well, that's why we have YouTube. Like you want to make a salad? There's a YouTube video. So, you know, kind of meeting people where they are. I sometimes like to use this one patient as an example. One of the first patients I ever saw after I got a little bit more nutrition training, he was a man who has a lawnmower repair business, 65 years old, weighed 360 pounds the first time I met him and he came in the office in a wheelchair. His ankles were like huge. They were so big he couldn't put shoes or socks on. He had to have his pants cut up to his knees. And he started crying within a couple minutes of our visit. And he said, I just want to walk. I

just want to be able to get in my shop and do what I like to do, but I can't. And he said, please help me. I've been to like all these specialists but I can't. And he said, please help me. I've been to like all these specialists and all these doctors. And he goes, nobody, everybody just says, you know, we've done everything we can. Well, I look at his intake forms and he's on 21 prescription medicines, including a lot of insulin. So he's diabetic. And as far as like meeting him where he is, he, you know, he didn't, doesn't know what organic is. He doesn't know grass fed. He doesn't, I mean, that was like not even something that we could have a conversation about. So I literally took a piece of typing paper and I drew a line down the middle and I wrote on the left, eat this.

And I wrote on the right, don't eat this. Very simple. And I said, tell me what you eat. He started. And it was all the things I ate growing up, you know, cereal and Little Debbie's and Mountain Dew. Kraft back and cheese. Yeah, just junk, you know. And if there was anything that had sugar in it or starch in it, because his biggest issue was the inflammation from his diabetes, I put it in the don't eat this column, but

I let him keep hot dogs. I let him keep my inner sausages. I let him keep cheese. You know, I just thought I'm just going to separate out a few things and see how he does. He came back in 30 days. He lost 35 pounds. Wow. And he could walk. He was still using a walker, but he could walk and he had shoes on. So I think most of what he lost that first month was just inflammatory fluid retention weight. And then his cute little

wife was like, I lost 18 pounds. She was doing it with him. And I followed him for a year and a half and he lost 150 pounds. Wow. Really, I mean, I did encourage, as time went along, I encouraged more vegetables, you know, like as best I could with what the tools, you know, the tools that he had for what he knew. And I got him down to two meds. So we went from 21 medicines to two medicines and he just felt so much better. And then when I stopped taking Medicare, he didn't, he didn't keep coming. But I even told him like our last visit, I remember I was like, you're doing great if you just stick with this. And when you go to the doctor, ask him what else you can do besides take a pill, you know, so that you can stay as healthy as you possibly can. Because I could just see him going back and starting again, you know.

The typical approach, and I did this for seven or eight years, which I think the reason that God put me in that spot at that time was so I could learn about medicines and how they work and what they do. And really what I'm looking at when someone else comes in and that's already what they've had from another doctor is, you know, how do we work around this? Anyway, I just enjoy that. Like I really enjoy helping people minimize their medicine. It doesn't mean everyone can get off of everything, you know, but if we can improve nutrition, improve movement, improve sleep, um, help with stress, like sometimes I'll just recommend reading a book or, um, sometimes just watching a TED talk or like,

you know, something really simple. It can't be too expensive. I actually also like, it seems to some people a little strange, but in yoga, I learned about it. And I'd also been taught about it at a medical conference about kartan, carton kriya meditation. And there's, there's actually more than, I think last time I checked about 350 papers written on transcendental meditation and all the health benefits of it. Um, to do that for some people, it's a little bit of an effort because you have to go to someone who's a trained teacher and learn from them. TM's not cheap either. Yeah.

For the most part. But the, the Kirtan Kriya meditation, you know, there again, you can go to YouTube. It's 12 minutes. You can do it by yourself. You don't need any tools. You don't need, you don't need to spend a penny. You just need to like decide to do it. And some of the published data on it, Dr. Singh, he's like an Alzheimer's specialist. He's been studying it for a while for the prevention of Alzheimer's. And in all of his early published data, the patients have all kinds of interesting health benefits from, you know, better blood pressure, better blood sugar,

better sleep, all the things that we're treating with pills and medicines. If, you know, 12 minutes a day, lots of benefits. Yeah. Not a huge ask either. No, no. And it's really, I'll, I'll confess that the first time I was taught about meditation was about 10 years ago. And I came home and I tried it. And at that time, my kids were, I had, you know, like a six-year-old, a four-year-old, and a one-year-old. And I, you know, I shut my closet door and I sat on the floor. Okay, I'm going to do this. And within a couple minutes, there was the knock on the door. Mom, I'm hungry. You know, and I tried and tried and finally

just gave up and thought, I'm just not going to, I can't do it. And then learned through really going through yoga teacher training that I can do. I can do it because I can do what I can do. And so now my kids are older and I have more freedom and flexibility to do things. But I think really it's sad that even when I was a mom and my kids were little, that I didn't just, I didn't even think to go in the other room and say, hey, Brad, would you mind just watching the kids for 12 minutes? Like, you know, looking back, it seems so silly and simple

that I didn't do that. But I just- I have very, a lot of memories of my mom saying, all right, when this door shuts, mommy's going to have alone time. And she'd meditate for a good hour, you know? And then we'd come right when the door opened and it was like, hey, how'd it go, mom?

And like, we knew all about it. Like probably starting, I think when I was 10 or 11, you know, but like that just became a part of the routine. And I think that's all kids need is just that understanding like, oh, this, this, everyone needs their own space, their own time that we can have family time. And, and, and in that, like whatever is the routine, that's the norm. So it's not weird that mom needs 12 minutes or an hour to herself because that's just the norm. That's what mama does each day. Well, it's interesting.

My parents got married very young. I was born when my mom was 19 and my dad was 21. And then my mom, by the time she's 25, has four girls. And I look back and think she could have used meditation so much, but had no idea at all, even what that was. And then even thinking a generation ahead of that, my grandmother, my dad's mother, I spent lots of time with her growing up in the summers. I'm not sure she thought of it as meditation, but she had a huge garden. She worked out in the garden all the time. And we all shelled peas and shut corn and helped her, you know, pick, pull weeds and things like that.

But every afternoon, about 30 minutes before my granddad would pull into the driveway from his job, she would look over at me and she'd be like, Amy, are you ready? And I'd be like, sure. We would go sit on this little yellow glider on her back porch. And we literally just sat there for 20 or 30 minutes. We didn't talk. Sometimes we rocked a little. Sometimes she might hum a little bit. But that was her meditation.

She just didn't call it that. So she even knew then, I mean, she had plenty more to do. That's where I feel like I was sort of misdirecting my energy was like, I have to do this. I have to do this. You know, got to, got to, got to, got to do. And never really thought like maybe how much more productive I would be or how much more calm I could be or if I actually did take a little time, you know, for myself. But anyway, we learn as we go and I've learned a lot and, and I'm not the perfect meditator. I don't always do it every single day, but I have learned to make little moments for myself even where I just

turn inward and recenter and start over or calm down or whatever I tell myself. Yeah. There's a great book from Dr. Ronald Siegel. It's one of the great courses on Audible. It's the science of mindfulness. And he talks about all the different ways you can meditate, what's been studied in Western medicine, where the traditions began and a lot of Eastern mysticism. And then from there, kind of bridging the gap for people, but really getting into that, like you can meditate anywhere. You can meditate while you're driving. You can meditate in a park with traffic behind you. You can meditate while you're walking. You can meditate while you're doing the dishes. You know, it really is that just that conscious effort to be mindful and quiet the mind, follow the breath, whatever the focal point

becomes, but it can be done anywhere and it can be trickled in, you know, and that doesn't have to be a one hour block that's devoted each day. And I think that helps when I see patients, because at least for me, when I started learning about it, I did think it had to be a certain way and a certain amount of time and a certain method. And some people love music and some people love gardening and some people love running. So they find a place in a space and get that in, you know, and it doesn't have to be something that someone else defined, which is good. Yeah. Yeah. That's really good because then you're kind of leading into your own prescriptive medicine for what works best for you. Let's dive into some of the practices that you have here.

You have everything from NAD and vitamin therapy to ozone therapy to different hormone optimization protocols. Can you touch on some of those and who they benefit, who they're for, what they do? Sure. So when I started practicing integrative medicine, I would say the first wave of training was very directed at hormone optimization. It's a really good starting place and it helps people feel better faster. So when we see someone that maybe someone even that's fairly healthy, but is struggling with a little bit of energy issue or a little weight gain or a little sleeplessness, especially when they're past 35, we usually do look at their hormones and see what's going on. I will say what's changed about hormones for me in the last four or five years, I used to just treat the hormone imbalance with hormones, whether it's

thyroid, cortisol, female or male hormones. And I still do that, but I also go ahead and look for what's the deeper root cause of the hormonal imbalance to begin with, with the hopes of maybe not needing that hormonal supplementation or augmentation forever. And so we definitely look at that. And that's a good way to get someone feeling better quickly, as long as we don't ignore the rest. So add to that, like actually what ended up happening to our practice is in my integrated medicine training, one of my professors focuses quite a bit on chronic inflammatory diseases and especially tick-borne disease. And I was at a conference and I remember it was in Washington, D.C. and he started talking about Lyme disease. And in Texas, the training is that we don't have Lyme disease.

And so I kind of, even that Sunday morning in Washington, D.C., thought, oh, I'm just going to waste today. I'm going to sit here and listen to him talk about something that we don't have. And then his next couple sentences, he said, well, how many of you have patients with fibromyalgia? Well, you know, we have more than we can count. How many of you have patients with chronic fatigue issues or rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or other autoimmune diseases? So he got me back, you know, to paying attention with those questions. And he basically walked us through his protocol for how he assesses patients with chronic inflammation, whether it's arthritis, migraine headaches, chronic digestive issues. So many people walk around with chronic diarrhea,

chronic heartburn, chronic bloating, and they just think that's their norm. And sometimes it is just a food issue, but a lot of times, especially if they have other systemic inflammatory issues, they do have some sort of chronic infection or chronic inflammatory trigger. And this is so foreign to what I was taught in the conventional approach to a patient. And it is why it takes longer. It takes a lot more training to you to learn, you know, what labs do you order? What labs do you not need to order? How do you approach that patient?

Because we have patients that come in that are in a wheelchair that have been, you know, to 40 doctors and they're still in the wheelchair. And a lot of them are really depressed because they just, they haven't felt well for a long time. Yeah. And just starting with that patient And a lot of them are really depressed because they haven't felt well for a long time.

And just starting with that patient and working from a very low place to try to help them, first off, just get rid of the inflammation as much as possible and then find the root cause reason for that inflammation. And sometimes it is tick-borne disease. And we do have Lyme disease in Texas. It's really controversial, but even a few years back, the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife studied the deer and they collected blood samples from 1,100 plus deer all around Texas and tested their blood for five markers that are indicative of Lyme disease and about 5% of the deer tested positive, highly reactive positive. And it's just kind of silly to think that it would stop at the Red River, you know, like it would stop on the Texas border or, you know, that it doesn't spread

because birds migrate and, you know, even deer migrate around in forage and, and some of the carriers are the unseen, like the, the white footed mouse. Like I can't remember the last time I saw, um, a mouse, a live mouse, my cat once in a while brings me a dead one, but, um, but they're, you know, it's the unseen. Same thing with mosquitoes. I mean, mosquitoes carry, I think the last thing I read was about 60% of the world's transmissible diseases are mosquito carried. And, and no one ever says that mosquitoes carry Borrelia burgdorferi, which is the pathogen for Lyme disease. Although in Europe, they have tested mosquitoes and found that mosquitoes can contain it,

but they've never shown it to be humanly transmissible to humans. I always want somebody to do that study. Yeah. There was a veterinarian at A&M that took her grad students or veterinary grad students out and did some tick dragging where they basically picked some areas around Austin, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth area and put on these pants that look kind of like chaps and just walk through tall grass and kind of the areas around the forest. And they tested the ticks for Lyme and they found it to be positive too. So there's some kind of undeniable evidence that it does exist here. We've just been, this has been ingrained for so long that we don't have it, that a lot of doctors, you know, it's a little bit intimidating to all of a sudden have to learn everything about a new disease. But I honestly think people in the South are more affected by the chronic long-term issues

with Lyme because people in the Northeast recognize the acute form and treat it more quickly. And, you know, they're not, you know, here it's a, oh, that's a fungus rash on your leg or, or that's a ringworm and it's not, or you have the flu, the flu test is negative, oh, that's a fungus rash on your leg or, or that's a ringworm and it's not, or you have the flu, the flu test is negative, but you know, so we just don't, we're not looking for it acutely. So we don't treat it acutely. So patients get sick and they sometimes stay sick for a long time. And the testing's not very good, which is also the reason that it's controversial. A lot of doctors, they want that test. That's the other thing about Western medicine.

We've gotten a little bit away from clinically assessing people and asking them questions and getting a good history. And it takes time to do that. And we've gotten more toward, well, if you don't have a positive blood test, there's nothing wrong. And the patient's still sitting in front of me saying, I have headaches and I don't feel well. And look at these rashes, you know, but your lab's normal. And that's sort of, I don't know, to me, that's just not good enough.

So we treat a lot of patients who are, they're not in the gym. They're not in the yoga studio. They're at home on the couch, like hurting and suffering. And their family is at a loss. And it's really sad. Brad one day, he's like, where do you find these patients? Well, you just don't see them if you're out. You know, they're not out. Like, I want them to get out.

I want them to get their health back and get a life back. And some of them do and some of them don't. It's hard. The regimen that you have to follow is pretty detailed. And if you don't have someone who's going to help you get organized and stay on track and do some of these things that we offer, we just, you know, we don't always see that much improvement. But one of the reasons I added ozone to my practice was because it helps those patients. So ozone has been around for 150 years. It's not something new. Even Tesla had the Tesla ozone company in the early 1900s and they used it to treat all different kinds of infections and, and health conditions. And it just went by the wayside when pharmaceuticals got so big and so available. Um, so I learned ozone. I learned about ozone really the first time was from a biologic dentist.

And he was like, oh, you should explore this for your patients. And I was at a conference in Florida a few years ago, and a doctor from the Northeast presented a patient case. So he had an 11-year-old boy with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, who was in a wheelchair and he used ozone, systemic ozone and intraarticular ozone. He did some knee injections with ozone and helped this kid walk again and get well. And after that lecture, I went to him at the break and I was like, I want to learn how to do that. You know, those are some of the patients that I see that I just like before that, I, I don't, I didn't know how to help them. So I went and did some training at his practice. I went and visited another practice in Wisconsin. And then I went to California and trained with Dr. Rowan. Um, I've gone to a couple of ozone

conferences, um, where I've heard Dr. Schallenberger speak. I'm actually not a member of the big ozone community organization because I also learned how to do direct IV ozone, which is controversial in the ozone community. I went to New York City and trained to learn how to do that particular technique, which then the place for that technique is in someone who doesn't have good veins. Or someone who's on, say someone's on a blood thinner. You have to put a little heparin in most ozone treatments, especially if you're pulling some blood out and then ozonating it and giving it back to the patient. If you don't have the added heparin, you lose the ability to give that treatment. So some patients are not a candidate for giving those kinds of medicines.

So that's just where it started from that release, that patient case, and then an interest in it and then training. And, you know, the more that I have learned about ozone, it's been used, it's used even in the United States, like in operating rooms to purify the air. It's used all over Europe as a water purification. If I ozonated a bottle of water and clean the countertop surface with it, it, it kills all, you know, it kills bacteria, virus, fungi, protozoa. It's like a, it's like bleach. Like there's not anything that really survives in its presence. Obviously we have to be really careful how much we give and how we give it to patients. But if we knock down, say someone does have

chronic Epstein-Barr or Lyme disease, if we can kill some of that population in a session, and as long as they have some other immune support, what they end up feeling after, sometimes they actually feel a little flu-like or maybe whatever symptoms they were having that were inflammatory get a little flare. But then as soon as their body's able to kind of clear that, they start to feel better. So that was the initial reason that I added the ozone to my practice was really to treat those patients who are sick, really sick. But it has definitely branched out to be something that healthy people want to stay healthy or people who are a little overtired, over-traveled, overtaxed, can use to help them recover and get well faster.

I like to do one on myself every so often, not because I feel bad, but just because I know it's good for me. So, and then not only are you getting the benefits of the ozone being an antimicrobial, ozone also stimulates like some of the more beneficial interleukins. It turns on some of the enzymes that stimulate immune resilience. And then you're also giving them a flood of oxygen. So there's really not anything negative except that I'll say my first 10 pass

that I got that right then, like immediately following it, I felt kind of fuzzy. My brain felt a little fuzzy thinking, like a little slow and tired. And then within a few hours, I thought, I should write a book or I should write something down or talk to someone. I had that stirring brain energy. And I wanted to go for a walk, and I was in California, and it was pouring rain. So I kind of walked around the lobby and then went back to my room. But I think the sicker that someone is, probably the more benefit they feel. We have to give them less of a dose because we don't want to provoke too much of a problem. So it's not uncommon that we start very low and then just gradually increase the exposure as they tolerate it. And then sometimes in between, we give other

things that are supportive like IV vitamins or IV NAD or sometimes just fluids. I mean, some people just need a little help. So that's one of the main services that we offer at the office that's not necessarily like conventional Western medical approach. First time I've heard about this was less than six months ago. And I'd like to think that I have my ear

to what the cool trending things are in medicine as well as performance. You mentioned Dr. Schallenberger. Is that Frank Schallenberger from up in Carson City, Nevada? Yeah. I've also been recommended to talk to him and he's based a lot of his work around the health of mitochondria. And so much now we see that one of these root causes in a lot of disease, not only is inflammation, but it's the health of the mitochondria. What are some of the ways that ozone and NAD and these other therapies help influence the mitochondria positively? So, believe it or not, so I mentioned my kids earlier, even in my 15-year-old freshman son's science class this past fall, they went through the Krebs cycle.

You know, you go back to the Krebs cycle. It's from high school science class. And even it's even mentioned in fifth grade science class. So it's not beyond people's comprehension to understand the Krebs cycle, which takes place in the mitochondria, the majority of it. And so what happens is when we're, hopefully when we're born, we're born healthy. Some babies start off like their moms weren't healthy and strong during their pregnancy. Some babies start off challenged, but if we're just imagine that I'm born healthy and then the minute that I'm born, I start being exposed, you know, to environmental chemicals, to infections, to some good things, too. You know, I hopefully get a good, strong gut flora.

Hopefully I eat the right things and I don't take too many antibiotics or steroids or it's sad because kids nowadays are so unhealthy and they start getting exposed at such a young age to things that that set them on a path of just inflammatory disease but it all goes back to like what's interfering with nature's design. And the mitochondria is where we produce ATP for energy. So if you even go back to that basic high school science diagram of the Krebs cycle, things like NAD are important. Oxygen's important. Certain B vitamins are important.

Several of the enzymes that are cofactors in the production of ATP are important. Certain B vitamins are important. Several of the enzymes that are cofactors in the production of ATP are important. And if you look at just even the food supply now with trying to get food to market quickly, and we don't grow our own food very much. And if our grandmother ate an orange, she supposedly got about eight times the vitamin A that we get from an orange now. So just even if we're making good health choices with what we eat, we may not be getting all those substrates that drive that Krebs cycle forward. And then throw in there some DNA interferences, just like everybody talks about Roundup and glyphosate. And one of the things that glyphosate does is it basically is a nuclear DNA interference. So I love the analogy that DNA is like a file cabinet where we keep all of our data and we pull out what we need when we need it. But the file cabinet is just the very basic

data bank. What we pull out and what we do with it is what determines which proteins get made, which ones don't get made, the balances of those. And so, you know, some of the things in integrated medicine that are newer, more exciting therapies are things like peptide therapy. And it's because if you can't make your own peptides because your DNA has been disrupted by things that you've been exposed to, then it might help you to have bypass a few of those steps and give you the peptides. They're just expensive and a little hard to get. the, like the mitochondrial question, when we give ozone and oxygen, those just support that ATP production pathway and help drive it forward. So there's more of a possibility to make more ATP with, you know, if you're given the right substrate to build that ATP,

same thing with NAD, which NAD is several steps of your Krebs cycle. So if you don't have enough on your own, we give you a little extra. Hopefully it results in an increased production of ATP, which ultimately results in whatever system is lacking, getting more energy and doing its job in a better, more efficient way. Yeah. So there's, and that's certainly something that I felt is almost like a systemic balancing and energy, you know, like, and really it's hard to kind of think of things in those terms because we've been taught to put it into a tiny little file and compartmentalize every part of the body.

Like, no, that's the circulatory system and the respiratory system and everything's interconnected, as you know. So when we can have this systemic health influence, there's a cascade of positive that happens from them. Absolutely. And with patients, I find myself talking even more as time goes on about other toxicities too that have to do with, you know, we mentioned stress earlier. I think that's the least appreciated factor. A lot of patients go on the internet and they research nutrition and they come in, they've already tried 50 diets, you know, or five diets. They've already tried working out or they are working out. They're taking things to make them sleep. They know it's important.

But they rarely appreciate the stress factor, you know, the sympathetic-parasympathetic balance. And, you know, they're all gas and no breaks and all and sometimes people even say i'm not stressed you know like um so i i do have like a heart rate variability you know strap you up measure that i've used to sometimes show people usually i can just have them do something really simple like i'm'm a simple minded person. Like I don't want it to be too complex because mentioning like the guy earlier, like meeting people where they are, most people want simple. They like want me to give them something that they can actually do. That's not, you know, 17 supplements in the morning and 22 supplements in the afternoon and then this workout and that diet and you know like it's just overwhelming for for most people that i see um and sometimes i feel

like that's a source of stress too trying to be so perfect you know trying to like follow every rule and implement everything we've learned and i've been through that like thinking oh you know at my house with my kids, like, we like, we're really strict with our nutrition for a few years. And, and we still don't bring bad food in the house, but if they go to a friend's house and they eat something over there, and I don't really know what's in it. We, we just, you know, it's nice. They've gotten older and they've learned, like when they eat certain things that makes they've started to associate how they feel with what they've eaten or how much sleep they've had or, you know, they're just learning. Yeah, that can be taught for sure.

And sometimes with me, I think my where I was telling Brad this other day, sometimes I just want to be content and just like know what I already know and not feel like I have to do something extra or more. You know, like just finding like a time to like laugh and have fun and play and do something with my kids or with my husband that's just fun, you know? Because if I had to confess like anything that I need to work on, you know, in all of the introspective work I've done, it's how can I enjoy? How can I find joy? How can I... I was talking to a patient the other day. He's about 75.

And he said, oh, Amy, it just sucks to get old. And I said, really? I said, what's going on? He's like, well, you have to get up and brush said really I said what's going on he's like well you have to get up and brush your teeth and put your shoes on and pick your clothes and make your breakfast and I was like what you know he's the guy that when he's driving here he doesn't see the blue bonnets or like the sunrise or the the lake he sees like the traffic and, you know, I don't know. It's the attitude thing again.

It's just full circle, like coming back around to how, how I look, you know, how I look at things

and what I choose to see and, you know, working, working on that or just being like the way that I am right now and being okay with it, you know? Yeah. Contentment for sure is a big one. We were, um, Brian and I were on a yoga

retreat a couple of years ago and I had had a talk with myself that morning about just enjoying, we were in Costa Rica, just enjoying the day because I was, you know, he leads the yoga and I'm usually kind of the organizer, like, what are we going to do on Tuesday? What time is it going to be? And, you know, who's going to go and just getting organized, you know, like, what are we going to eat? Where are we going to, how are we going to get there? And, um, I just told myself that morning, just have fun today. Like just enjoy the day. Everything's planned, you know? So I was on, we were ziplining and I was on like the longest zipline at the place. And they told me like, don't break because you won't, you may not make it and you don't want to have to monkey crawl, you know, to get there. And I was

ziplined a lot. So I was like, okay, well I'll tuck in and I'll just, I'll get over there. And I was literally looking out at the ocean, having fun. And, and I looked forward and the guy at the platform who's supposed to catch me is not there. And I thought, and I saw the block on the, on the line and thought, well, maybe is that going to stop? It just happened so fast, but I just slammed into the tree and I broke my left leg pretty badly. And that, you know, so humbling. Like, and I do think things like that happen. You know, there's a lesson that I've learned from the last two years of I had three surgeries on my leg and nine screws and a plate in my leg and a whole different level of empathy for patients who have hardware, you know, and can't walk. And I definitely had my own little pity party and quit going to yoga and didn't sleep and,

you know, gained some weight, but then coming back around to like, why did that happen? And what can I take away from it? And how can I get back on a good routine without beating myself up? And it's what is going on out there with a lot of other people. And I just don't think that maybe even the people around them understand how that, you know, can affect someone. But, um, I think if anything, it's helped me just be more of an encouragement to people who are going through things like that. Um, so, and then like having metal in our bodies is some people it's fine and other people it's, it actually is an inflammatory issue. So starting to recognize that too, you know,

patients have artificial joints or plates, you know, so many people who like ride dirt bikes is the same fracture that I had, you know? And I, now I'm, I kind of know like how that's got to feel. And they don't walk around complaining about it or whining about it, but I know there's like sometimes just some silent suffering in there or, or getting off track. So like you're eating your movement, your sleep, all that gets influenced by surgeries, pain medicines, other medicines, not being able to function at full capacity. So anyway. Yeah, there's a lot there.

Well, thank you so much. It's been an hour. It's been amazing having you on as a guest. And I'm so appreciative of you. Where can people find you online? You have a website obviously for your practice here. And then also are you on social media at all? We have a Facebook page. It's Amy Offit MD and our website is amyoffitmd.com. And we are building and growing and happy to answer questions. And I really appreciate you for having me on.

Yeah. Thank you so much for what you're doing. It's important. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you guys for listening to the podcast with Dr. Amy Offutt. She has an amazing practice just a little bit outside of town, Austin. So if you're coming through Austin,

it's about an hour drive. Well worth it, in my opinion. She's doing all sorts of cool stuff out there, but you can visit her at amyoffuttmd.com. That's A-M-Y-O-F-F-U-T-T-M-D.com and learn more about a lot of the cool shit that she's doing. She's on the cutting edge and an absolute sweetheart.

Thanks for tuning into the show.