The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unlocking Health: The Secrets of Nervous System Healing with Mel Hopper Koppelman

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

Unlocking Health: The Secrets of Nervous System Healing with Mel Hopper Koppelman Synthesishealth.co About the Guest(s): Mel Hopper Koppelman is a highly esteemed health professional serving as the Program Director at Synthesis Health Lab. With over 15 years of clinical experience, she has developed a cutting-edge approach that integrates Chinese medicine, functional medicine, and developmental neurology. Mel holds two master's degrees and is known for her ability to address complex chronic health conditions such as chronic fatigue, autoimmune disorders, and fibromyalgia, especially when traditional methods have not yielded results. Episode Summary: In this illuminating episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss dives deep into the intricacies of health with Mel Hopper Koppelman, the program director at Synthesis Health Lab. Known for her transformative work with patients experiencing chronic health issues, Mel shares her innovative approach combining Chinese medicine, functional medicine, and developmental neurology. As the conversation unfolds, listeners gain insight into how development issues can underpin many chronic conditions, and how addressing the nervous system could be the key to sustainable recovery. Mel Hopper Koppelman discusses the concept of first principles in healing, inspired by traditional Chinese medicine, encouraging a reevaluation of modern health narratives. The episode delves into the vagal paradox, highlighting the complexities of the vagus nerve, which plays a crucial role in rest and digestion. Mel also unveils the hidden brain development issues that may lead to chronic fatigue and autoimmune disorders, offering listeners a glimpse into effective methods to address these concerns. Throughout the episode, she emphasizes an informed, methodical approach to health that avoids unnecessary lab tests and supplements, focusing instead on ancient natural healing laws. Key Takeaways: The integration of Chinese medicine, functional medicine, and developmental neurology offers a holistic pathway to addressing chronic health issues. Understanding the vagus nerve's role is crucial in differentiating between rest-and-digest states and states of life threat. Many chronic health problems may have roots in hidden developmental issues that require nuanced evaluation and treatment. Mel's approach emphasizes the importance of using first principles for sustainable health, advocating for an observational method over expensive lab tests. Addressing foundational neurological and gut health issues can lead to substantive improvements in long-term health outcomes. Notable Quotes: "The nervous system is really foundational to all of these systems." "It's getting this next level of nuance where we start to talk more about trauma and early childhood events and how they relate to adult health." "Understanding the order of operations is critical—realizing there's a step-by-step order that the body prefers to heal." "The first principles are not rocket science; they navigate you towards health in ways that become much smoother." "You're only testing what you're testing, and you're assuming what you're finding in the blood is telling you about the entire body."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi folks, it's Voss here from the Chris Voss Show.

Is there anything that makes you feel welcome to the show as always for 16 years, 23 and a half episodes, all the CEOs, the billionaires, the White House president's advisors, the Pulitzer prize winners, all the great authors and minds on the Chris Voss show to share with you their journeys of life, their stories, their lessons to make your life better. Cause that's what we're here for in the Chris Voss show. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or The Chris Voss Show. Some guests to the show may be advertising on the podcast,

but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today we have an amazing young woman. We're going to be talking to her about her insights, her experience, and all the things she's learned over life that can make your life better as well. Mel Hopper Copelman is on the show with us today. We're going to be talking to her about her insights, her experience, and what she knows. She is the program director at Synthesis Health Lab. It's a go-to expert for people who've tried everything, quote unquote, to heal their chronic illnesses but keep hitting dead ends. By addressing the overlooked factors in their nervous system, she helps patients achieve 50% reduction in

symptoms without endless supplements or constant lab testing. She has two master degrees and 15 years of clinical experience. She has pioneered a revolutionary approach that combines Chinese medicine, functional medicine and developed neurology. Her methods have helped thousands of patients recover from conditions like chronic fatigue, autoimmune disorders, fibromyalgia, when conventional and functional medicine failed. Welcome to the show Mel, how are you? I'm doing good, thank you so much for having me. It's fun to have you. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Sure.

So, I share my musings over at essays.synthesishealth.co, and we'll get into it in a little bit, but I also have a group for people who are recovering from complex chronic health issues that you can apply to join as a free guest. And if you are a good fit for the group, then you can come in and look over my shoulder as I work with people. And that's over at SynthesisHealth.co. SynthesisHealth.co. Let me see if I can get the right SynthesisHealth.co. Talk to us about some of these neurological issues that you see your clients struggling with. I think we mentioned a couple like fibromyalgia, autoimmune, et

cetera, et cetera. Yeah, sure. So in terms of neurological issues, there's a couple of things. One is people coming in where they have symptoms or maybe even labels that they know are neurological. I'm actually happy that you said fibromyalgia because that could be considered one as well, although sometimes people aren't aware of it. And other things like brain fog or vestibular issues like dizziness or a lot of people, you know, when they're standing up, they get either a blood pressure drop or their heart is racing, things like that. And also attention issues, which are increasingly common. So these are all issues that are to do with the nervous system. One of the things that I've learned in the last

few years is that when I initially trained, and as you said, I did two master's degrees in health areas, I didn't learn anything about the nervous system. But the nervous system, I actually have come to believe is the foundational system in the body. So even if you have something that you think of as more hormonal or more immune or more digestive, the nervous system is really going to be underneath, sort of like the unifying principle of those. And it's really important to assess it. It's really important to understand a bit about how it works and see if it's happy,

if it's unhappy, see what we can do to make it happier. And usually most things work better. And so you've combined Chinese medicine, functional medicine and developmental neurology. You know, we've talked about this a number of times, we probably should have the author on. There's someone who wrote something called The Body Knows the Score. And so it seems with a lot of discussions we have with experts like yourself, that, you know, the body tends to internalize trauma, it tends to internalize events and hold it in a physical sense in muscles or it's a neural system, things of that nature

and it can lead to diseases. I mean it can lead to death. I've seen people be so depressed over their loss of their child that they just go into a depression, then develop cancer very quickly and within six months after they're gone. So there's kind of ways that our body can, if we use it wrong, can really make us sick, even death. 7 14

Yep, that's right. And on the one hand, I'm happy to see that there is an increasing awareness of that and that, you know, the book that you alluded to, and that's from a Harvard-trained clinician. And so there's a lot of more legitimacy to that perspective that in some ways people have known this for a long time. And so I'm happy to see us talk more about trauma, talk more about early childhood events and how they relate to adult health. At the same time, I feel like we need to get to a new level of maturity and sophistication with it, which is to say, first of all, that can often be the case that let's say an emotional event or a trauma or a

bereavement can affect physically affect the body if it's not processed well enough. But that's not always the case. So if I have, you know, 100 patients, that's not going to be necessarily true for all of them. And the second distinction is that that might be true for someone, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's the most helpful place to start with them. Or that might be true for them, but addressing that might not be sufficient for them to be. So it's like, it's getting this next level of nuance where we start off by having this, what we call the Cartesian model where like the head and the body have nothing to do with each other. They're just completely separate.

And then we evolve a little bit, get a little more common sense and a lot more experience and a lot more research to say, actually, it seems like maybe there's something to it. But now we need to get more sophisticated still. A lot of the people that I work with, which is really fortunate for me, a lot of them have done a lot of therapy or they've done a lot of trauma informed guidance. They've looked at their unconscious beliefs, they've looked at their early childhood events, and that's all helpful. I like when they show up like that, but that's not necessarily sufficient for them to get better. And so it really comes down to order of operations and having, let's say, a more robust model. So when someone

comes in with chronic fatigue or autoimmunity, whatever they have, that we know where to start and how to proceed. Pete Slauson Ah, that can be important. One of the things you talk about in your work there is how to reverse chronic illness using the first principles framework. Tell us a little bit about that and how that works. Dr. Jennifer Steele Yeah, so the first principles, I mean, this is an idea that I'm pulling from my Chinese medicine training because when you look at what the classical texts of Chinese medicine, these

texts are 2,500 years old and they're incredibly detailed. It's almost, what were they smoking? How did they know so much? And they're basically describing first principles of the universe and of nature and of health and of humans. And to give an example, these are all things that people can learn to pay attention to and it's not rocket science. So things like hot versus cold.

And what does that mean? Everyone knows that often if you have an infection, you might get a fever. So there's a relationship there. You might feel different if you're in a different climate. That might have to do with temperature. That might have to do with moisture. Even looking at skin issues. So if someone has a skin issue, is it like a red, itchy, painful thing or is it more of a pale, swollen thing? And by looking at it just that simply, we might use different tools to address it,

which then when we go back to research and hard science, we see exactly why that works so well. But a lot of these ideas are things that people in pre-industrial societies just knew. And then, you know, how we arrived here is we went through a phase where we just thought that we were so clever and that everything was about the newest and the shiniest and the better living through science, that we didn't know anything unless we studied it a certain way. And so we really discounted a lot of very helpful, hard-won human wisdom and said, look, I don't know anything that's wrong with me because I'm not an expert and I just need to run these tests. But with first principles, anyone can really learn them.

They're not esoteric. They don't require any advanced meditation. And when you start using them to navigate towards health, things tend to go a lot smoother. Pete Oh, wow. Yeah, especially anytime you're working towards being healthier and stuff. You talk about the, what is it, how do you pronounce this, the vagal paradox? Kirsten Oh, yeah, the vagal paradox. Sure. People are increasingly aware of something called the vagus nerve. That's getting more and more attention. So this is the longest nerve. It's called a cranial

nerve because it starts off inside of the skull and it's the wandering nerve, the vagrant nerve. And it goes all sorts of places actually. I was just mapping out. It's rude. It is really quite interesting. But it goes to all of our internal organs and it goes to our voice and it goes to different things. And so there's an increasing awareness that with that nerve, it's involved in the rest and digest nervous system. And so when people are more relaxed and when they're breathing well and they're full of gratitude, we have more vagal activity.

And so a lot of the popular advice is that we just need more vagal activity. And so a lot of the popular advice is that we just need more vagal activity. So we just need to either stimulate it or zap it or do whatever gadgets people are selling or breathe a certain way. But it's really a little bit more complicated than that because the vagus nerve has two branches to it, a very ancient one and a newer one. And the ancient one is about slowing us down. So we know, a lot of people know about the stress response, which is about speeding us up. So the heart goes faster, our heart rate, our blood pressure goes up so we can run away from the tiger. The ancient part of the vagus nerve called

the dorsal vagal nerve is like an emergency break. This is not rest and digest and feel gratitude and warm fuzzy feelings with your friends. This is not rest and digest and feel gratitude and warm, fuzzy feelings with your friends. This is life threat. And people can live day to day in some sort of like minor version of life threat. And so in that case, even though they're not thriving, they're not doing well, they might have diagnoses, but they're going to be told that their blood pressure is nice and low and their heart rate is nice and low, which is getting interpreted as being really healthy, even if they're under life threat. Whereas when we're in the ventral vagal response, which is that newer one, then that's when you're really thriving. And so there's an increasingly popular measure that people are

using on their wearables, like their Apple watches and their Fitbit, it's called heart rate variability. And heart rate variability is an indirect measure of gold tone, the vagus nerve. The problem is that that measure is not actually differentiating whether you are slowed down because you're feeling really chill and happy and calm and refreshed, or you're slowed down because your nervous system thinks you're about to die. And so, this is a distinction that's just not talked about enough because it's really, people are being told that the higher the better for that HRV score, and it's kind of missing out a lot of important information for people, again, who are struggling with

their health and trying to get better. Pete Slauson Wow. Where is that nerve located? Dr. Sarah Sears Yeah. So it comes out the bottom of the brainstem. Pete Okay. Anna And then a branch goes to the ear, and then it goes all through the voice box and the pharynx and then down the esophagus, the windpipe, and then it innervates just about all of the internal organs and it's making its way down to the digestive tract. So, it's pretty important.

Pete Is that, I know that, you know, gut health is really important and they call the gut the second brain. And you know, if you, and we've had people on that have, doctors on that have said, you know, if your gut's a mess and leaky or, you know, you're eating like lots of garbage food that are really pissing off your gut and trying to process it. It causes brain swelling and different issues. Does, is that part of the vagus nerve maybe? Uh, yeah, absolutely. And that, that would be a good example of what I started off by saying, whereas I said the nervous system is really foundational to all of these systems.

And so there are a lot of people who, you know, with really good reason, you know, want to give a lot of attention to the gut. And I completely agree. But the, I would say that the nervous system is foundational to it. And an important example of that actually, and this is something I don't hear talked about very much, there's an increasing awareness that if we're chronically inflamed or we're eating the wrong food or we're otherwise a little bit off, we can get a leaky gut. So people talk about that. So things that are inside the gut are getting outside of the gut into our bloodstream and causing problems. And that's a real thing.

But what fewer people realize is that when we are born, our gut is actually supposed to be leaky. And that's normal. And so we can't eat solids, we just breastfeed. And as we get mama's milk, it just perfuses really into our system. And then as the ventral vagus nerve develops and myelinates and becomes faster and more efficient, then the gut starts to seal, and then we can switch to solid foods. And so when people have, let's say little, I'll call them hiccups in neurodevelopment, which is a lot way more common than people realize, they may have always had a leaky gut. And so then why this is important is because these are the people who have already tried to go on a really good diet and is not

doing what it needs to do because the underlying cause isn't being addressed. So if their vagus nerve is immature and it's not developed in the first place and there are things that are keeping it from doing that, then it doesn't matter how perfect their diet is, their gut's still going to be leaky. Oh, wow. It's interesting., a lot of people don't develop that. So, can that leave to chronic problems for your life, I guess? 7 Anna Yes. So, I mean, I would say, and this is something that's really kind of important to me to get out there, is that how we develop and yeah,

how we develop is a really important foundational factor of how healthy we are as adults and how quickly or slowly we decline in older age. Aging and decline and all of those things is the reverse of development. So if you can think of someone who's, I can find it helpful to picture a tree or something like that that you can see with your eyes. If you see a kind of weedy runty tree, it's not even if it reaches adult size or maturity, it's probably not going to last as long as one that develops better. And that makes sense. That's not kind of controversial. But I think it hasn't been until recently that we've had the understanding of how to evaluate it. I think we're used to thinking in very black and white terms. And most people can identify

a child or an adult with a severe developmental disorder. Like you don't need to be an MD to be able to identify that just by looking. But there's more, let's say subtle versions where someone may still have this issue and they may be a very functional adult. They may, you know, I have patients, I know people, you know, that they are married, they have businesses, they travel, it's not a disability. And many of these people will actually have a combination of gifts and deficits, and this is kind of characteristic, but they will have these developmental background issues that if you take an excellent history and do a little bit of an examination, you can find it with not too much difficulty. And as far as I'm aware, until that's addressed, the other issues are not going to resolve.

But this is foundational. So for example, you know, people are really rightfully concerned with say like heart health. Well, your heartbeat and heart, the forcefulness of its contraction, that's all coming from the brainstem. That's, you know, partly coming from the biggest nerve, you know. So if your brainstem is more developed on one side and less developed on the other, that's going to affect every single heartbeat that you have. So of course, that's going to be related to future cardiac risk. And I can say the same thing for just about every

organ. It's, you know, it's interesting how much of our gut health, our body, you know, I've been more aware of it as I've learned to eat better and do better with my health. And it's interesting how much of your gut, how much of some of the interesting things that go on. So you connect this stuff to the hidden brain development issues behind chronic health problems. I've known people that have fibromyalgia,

chronic fatigue, of course that just means you need more coffee. No, I'm just kidding. It's not. It's, talk to us about some of these, the hidden brain development issues behind the chronic health problems and how to fix them, I guess, is actually the question I'm asking, how to finally

fix them or- Yeah, sure. Give us a tease out. I'm knowing your secret sauce. No, absolutely. So that's a two-pronged answer. So we were just talking a little bit about the developmental aspects and to make that a little bit more specific, again, kind of pointing to what I was saying before, let's say you have a group of people with fibromyalgia, some of them might have developmental issues

that have led to that and some might not. So that's the other thing. This is about using discernment and having a clinical model that's robust enough to be simple enough but not simpler than it needs to be to tease these things out. So I want to be clear that I'm not saying that everyone with a chronic health issue has a developmental underpinning at all. I am saying that it's an important and overlooked source that should be evaluated and ruled in or ruled out, right? And the things that I'm looking for in the history, it's often there. If people are aware of their developmental milestones, like how

old they were when they crawled and walked and that sort of thing, or were they really special and they skipped crawling and went straight to walking early and that sort of thing? That can give us clues. Other things like hand dominance. I've had some patients who said, you know, I wasn't really sure whether I was a lefty or righty until I was like five years old. Yeah. So that tells us that there is a maturational issue that we should be really clear on that neurologically by the time we're two or three. And all of that dominance should be on the same side of the brain. So if you are right-handed, then if you're developing in a healthy way, then you should be right-handed, right-footed, right-eyed, and right-eared. That should all be housed in the same place. And if it's not,

a bit like me, actually, then that's telling us that this is not lateralized the way that we'd expect it to. So those are a couple of things. And then also just, again, looking for this combination of gifts and deficits, a person who let's say is like a bit of a math prodigy, but it's like very clumsy, you know, is starting to give us some windows that they really excelled at certain subjects and they couldn't understand why anyone else had any difficulty with them, but they were failing other classes that are really pointing to almost faster than normal maturity in certain parts of the brain and under maturity in other parts of the brain. So we look for that history and then there's an exam that you can do that's looking for

something called retained primitive reflexes. Primitive reflexes are movement patterns that we're born with. So when we're born and we're baby, you know, we don't have the big mature frontal lobe that adults have, but our brainstem has reflexes that allow us to do some movements. So it allows us to feed from mom and it allows us to call for help and it allows us to, you know, do certain basic things. As we mature and develop through movement and through experience and through tactile sensation, our brain grows on top of the brainstem and then it comes down and inhibits those reflexes.

So they should no longer be present on an exam between six months and one year old. So if we examine an adult and they have those reflexes that are present on exam, that's an objective finding of something abnormal. It could be that they never, that their brain developed in such a way that it never inhibited them in the first place.

So that's the developmental explanation. That it can be due to a head injury or concussion. So they have damage in a higher part of the brain, so it's not inhibiting, or it can be due to a head injury or concussion, so they have damage in a higher part of the brain, so it's not inhibiting, or it can be neurodegeneration. But the only interpretation is that the frontal lobe, for whatever reason, is not coming down and inhibiting those reflexes. And for me, because it's a non-invasive exam, it takes less than 10 minutes teaching people all over the world how to have their partners do it on them. It can potentially provide very life-changing information.

And again, to repeat, I'm not saying that everyone with a complex chronic health problem has this issue. I'm saying it's high leverage to just screen for it. And a lot of people are finding that they do have these issues and it's really helpful to be aware of them. Pete This is pretty wild. This is the first time I've heard about this, but I Googled it, retained primitive reflexes. And wow, birth trauma, lack of movement, other factors, and developmental delays, ear infections,

head trauma, vertebral subluxations. Yeah, where the vertebrae maybe aren't properly aligned, and so maybe the disc is moving a little bit. Wow. Developmental issues that you just explained to social media, ex Twitter and Facebook. I'm doing the jokes. Symptoms, motor skills issues, clumsiness, poor balance, sensory processing, learning and behavior. Yeah, this describes social media. Oh, we've solved

that part riddled then. Lauren Ruffin There's a bit of a chicken and egg there though, because the social media is creating more of it. Pete Slauson Yeah, that's true. That's very true. Social media, I remember when it came out, everyone's, this is the thing that will align the world, we'll all come together as one. And it kind of did for a minute and then human nature went, I remember that Pandora's Boxing that we do in human nature. Nah.

And so you can do intervention, integration with therapy, exercises, early intervention. You know, you mentioned earlier, some people just go right from crawling to walking or something like that. I walked right out of the womb. I just went through it. Yeah, that's impressive. Yeah, like it was hotel doors. I just hit them in this, you know. And then did you drop the mic? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I came out, I went, it's damn cold out here. I'm going back inside. Anyway, and I've been trying to do that ever since. Anyway, so tell

us a little bit about yourself. How did you grow up? What were some of your influences? How did you get down this line? I know I kind of teased some of that in the bio, but tell us it from your words, if you would. Anna S. Yeah, sure. So I think part of my relevant background is that my mom is actually a retired physician. And so when I was born, she was a physician and a researcher. I actually attended my first medical conference when I was seven weeks old. She was presenting a paper on the overtreatment of pituitary adenomas in children. I remember it well.

No, I'm just kidding. So, that is what she was presenting. Pete Slauson Maybe this is what got you started down this health road, is it? 7 to 7 months old, you're going and getting those, what do we say they were the primitive reflexes, you're getting those developed early. I was getting those developed, I was getting that, yeah, that interest was peaked. And even I found out more recently that my grandmother actually was accepted to medical school right

after the war, but she felt her physical because she had a heart murmur. She was telling me this in her 80s and she looked at me and said, I couldn't have been that sick. So she ended up going to law school instead. But I think there's a lot of chemists in my family. So there's that kind of strong familial trait. And my dad is a retired lawyer. So I kind of grew up arguing about research, which is something I still do to this day. I kind of decided early on that even though I wanted to be a doctor, I was not interested in going down the industrial medicine path. I watched my mom when a lot of the health insurance reforms came in in the 1990s, making it kind of unsafe and very challenging to practice. She decided to retire early. And I also just had this feeling that the way that that model understood the body was sort

of missing some important pieces. And then after college, I traveled to India for six months where I developed a chronic infection called amoebic dysentery, which I do not recommend. And it was not treated properly. So I ended up having this infection for over two years. And when I came back to the States, industrial medicine was not able to figure out what was wrong with me, was not able to, I would say use common sense to treat me. And one doctor in the ER said that if I'd had this infection for this long, I'd be dead. Which fortunately, he was missing the mark, but I just had to figure out myself. I ended up finding Chinese medicine very helpful. I also had to teach myself the real, the fundamentals of nutrition, because even this is 15, 20 years ago, everyone has such a strong

opinion. But if your digestive system is just shot and broken, then you're just going to find out very quickly what's going to work for you or not. It's not going to be about theory. So I learned a lot of those things and I decided to train in Chinese medicine. I got my master's in Chinese medicine and then I realized I knew just enough nutrition to be dangerous. And I was also interested in labs and in biochemistry and precision and using lab tests to identify really specific things in really certain ways and then using natural things to address them. And so I got my second MSc in nutrition and functional medicine. And I did that things to address them. And so I got my second MSc in nutrition and functional medicine. And I did that, you know, practicing that way for quite a few years and I really enjoyed it. I think I was sensing some shortcomings of those approaches. And then my system, my

health crashed very badly about eight years ago. And I just woke up one morning, I'd moved back, I'd been living in the UK and I moved back to the States and I could not function. I had complete brain fog, my memory didn't work, my whole body was in pain. I was chronic fatigue, like my brain was just constantly telling me to lie down. And, you know, my first thought was like, I'll figure this out. I've got the tools, I've got the frameworks, I can order labs, like this is cool. So I just started using what I knew to help myself. And after a year or two of that, I had to admit that this was not working the way that I've been trained to be working. And I had all the best shiny tools and objects. And so I really, I retrained. And one was studying Chinese herbal medicine, which is so sophisticated. I'm making, just really helping

to understand if you, if you understand how to use them well, they can do things that supplements, most supplements don't even understand that they is possible. I mean, it's really remarkable. And there's a lot of research on them. And then the other thing was learning about the nervous system that for me, the developmental piece was very relevant to my history and that while I had functioned in a reasonably healthy way for the first few decades of my life, I got to my mid to late 30s and my system crashed because the foundation was shaky and there wasn't going to be a supplement or a gadget or a psychological intervention that was going to fix that.

And learning how the nervous system develops, I've studied with a very exceptional human called Dr. Robert Mulwillow. I really recommend anybody interested in this area check out his work. And he also treated me and examined me. And then once I kind of integrated that and graduated from that, I was like doing better, but still wasn't where I needed to be. And so the missing pieces really were further study of the nervous system and understanding the order of operations that there is a step-by-step order that the body really prefers to go in to heal. And if you're not too sick, it doesn't really matter as much. Improving something can often help you feel better. But if you are quite sick and your systems have crashed, I had autoimmunity to my own collagen.

I had off-the-charts inflammation in my blood vessels. I already was on a good diet. I was already doing a lot of the baseline things. So understanding what order you need to go in and understanding how to assess the nervous system, these are skills really just power of observation that really anybody can learn and are very valid. This isn't pop neuro where I kind of tell you something about your brain. This is like objective bedside stuff that

used to be much more common. And then increasingly in medicine, they just really rely on these very expensive invasive tests and they don't have the time often, it's not really their fault. But just to do a really solid bedside examination that can give you tons of information. You're learning how to do this on yourself can really be life-changing. Pete Slauson Definitely. And you talk about how to break free from the supplement and lab test trap using these ancient natural healing laws. Tell us what the supplement to lab test trap is. Dr. Julie Pfeiffer Yeah. I mean, I want to be clear, you know, people are doing excellent work in the field of functional medicine, and I can definitely say that it can be a vast improvement on industrial

medicine for many things. But there are a number of problems. So I really deep dived on the lab testing. So I got my masters and then I did a number of like year-long mentorships. I was going down PubMed. I was convinced I was going to fix myself by finding like the genetic SNP and then like the lab test results. I was convinced that this was going to work. And then eventually I had to admit that it wasn't. But really, as I was studying that or looking at things in that way, I realized that lab testing, which can be useful, is based on so many false assumptions that once you start to become aware of them, you're like, holy crap, I can't believe we are doing this because that doesn't make any sense,

which I'm happy to provide examples. So that's one part of it. Another part of it is that one of the things I always say is you're only testing what you're testing. So one assumption is that we're assuming that what we see in the blood is telling us what's going on in the body. So for example, you can have low mercury levels in the blood, but high levels of mercury in your brain. We know that. So you need to interpret it with caution or people aren't trained to understand metabolism very well. So if you look at a marker that's supposed to tell you about vitamin B6 status, and if you see that that marker is elevated and you say, oh, that means that we need to give B6, that can be true, but that's actually often not true.

Sometimes that marker is elevated just because of changes in metabolism. It doesn't mean that and giving B6 isn't actually going to fix it. Giving B6 incorrectly is often much better than giving medication incorrectly or sometimes correctly. So again, it's all relative, but the trap also, and this is maybe the more important point I think, is that when you are using lab tests as the primary way to guide your recovery or a patient's recovery, then you're very beholden to using labs as the main source of feedback, which is to say that if you run the whole panel and you're doing hormones and you're doing all this, although by the way, it's

really hard to understand what the hormones are really telling you if you don't understand what the brain's doing. But that aside, let's say you do a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars of lab testing and you do hormones and poop and blood and all of this stuff, and then you give the patient a supplement protocol or the stack of recommendations. If they get better quite quickly, then great, everyone's happy. But often that's not the case. So if they're not getting better, then we have to decide, is that just because they haven't been doing this thing long enough? They need a month or two more? Or because

you're going in the wrong direction and you haven't found it. It's very difficult to interpret the feedback. So you end up on a very long and expensive feedback cycle if things don't work well out of the gate. And I've had people come into my group to work who had been working with functional medicine practitioners and bid on bags of supplements for months with no improvements and the practitioner, very well-meaning, sure, I'm sure they're well-trained, saying, oh, you just need to give it longer. In my world now with what I've been able to learn, you get feedback sooner. So I'm not saying that people always get better quickly, but if we're making a long trip, we still need intermediary ways to know if we're on the right path. And so

understanding the difference. If we have no progress, then we need to reevaluate and also using our interventions a little bit more mindfully to make sure that they can give us feedback. So it's just a different way of approaching it. But this idea that if we can get better at using our eyes and our observation to gather information about what's going on with ourself, then we're not quite as reliant on those labs in order to make progress. Now, I noticed you have a community, people can sign up for some free stuff on your website and there's at least one or two communities you have here. As I'm looking over it, there's the

Synthesis Help Lab and you've got a Pro Lab and a Health Lab. Tell us about how these work on your website. Anna Yeah, sure. So, Synthesis Health Lab is where I'm working with folks all over the world. And as I said, you can apply to be a free guest. I read every application. And if you're an excellent fit for what we do in terms of your health presentation and also making sure I just want to curate it to keep it like a nice, really friendly, positive crowd, then you can come in and you can be in that group completely for free for a couple

weeks, get access to a lot of training material. And you're also in the group that I have with the members. So you see how I troubleshoot things in real time, how we share wins. And when people are chronically ill, it can be really isolating. It can be challenging to socialize. It can be challenging to trust about how much energy you have to make plans. So it's nice. It's really important to have a community. And then I have a second group that was colleagues asked me to set up, which I'm happy and that's running and that's really nice too, which is for professionals. And that can be professionals from Chinese medicine who want to learn more pragmatic

ways of practicing. I have a functional medicine people in there. I've got some more neurology based people who are coming in and interested in learning how to add more of the Chinese medicine side to their practice and that's a really great place where you get in the membership, you get access to the whole program I take patients through. My hope is that the practitioners also go through that process as well as some clinician level training. Tell people how they can reach out to you, get to know you better, give us your dot coms and final pitch out as we go out.

Sianne Leary Sure. So, to find out more about those groups, which is really the best place to ask me questions because you can be in there for free and that's where you can pick my brain while you're a guest. That's over at synthesiself.co and then you can just select if you're looking for the patient group or the practitioner group or obviously like the guest member group or the practitioner group. And then I write some ramb you're looking for the patient group or the practitioner group or obviously like the guest member group or the practitioner group. And then I write some ramblings whenever I'm kind of inspired by over at essays.synthesishealth.co and also on Facebook and Instagram.

Pete This has been really insightful and you've given me some thoughts. I'm really going to have to do some more research on these primitive reflexes. I probably have them. I mean… Jai It's possible, you know, and if you do, it's helpful to know about it. Most of the material you'll find on that will be about kids with specific diagnoses. And my aim is really just to kind of widen the context and say, yes, you know, do get tested for that and just

see what it shows. And if they're all normal, then great. That's one less thing to worry about. And if they're there, it can explain a whole lot about your life and also proactive steps that you can take to be healthier and better. Definitely. You got to check, you got to do a dipstick on your systems, just like you do a car. I remember I wasn't experiencing brain fog, but I was experiencing this tiredness and I got on testosterone therapy and I didn't realize I had brain fog and I had severe brain fog. And so you just don't know sometimes. I felt fine. I was a little fatigued and

couldn't retain muscle, but you got to check your systems and make sure they're working because if everything neurologically isn't working right, you're not working right and people can notice. I've been called primitive by a lot of different people on social media. Anyway, thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, Mel. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I'll probably continue being called something primitive on, in probably four letter X-bluffs. Anyway, thanks so much for tuning in.

Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, ChrisFos, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, ChrisFos, ChrisFos1, and the TikTock Tok any and all those crazy place in it be good to each other stay safe we'll see you next time that should have us out great show