The Dr. Hyman Show - Doctors Reveal How They Heal Their Autoimmune Disease

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

View the Show Notes For This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal As a whole, autoimmune disease affects over 80 million Americans and five percent of the population in Western countries. They include type 1 diabetes, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, colitis, Crohn’s disease, and dozens of others. While your body is designed to fight off harmful things like infections, toxins, allergens, or a stress response, with autoimmune issues the body directs a hostile attack on its own joints, brain, skin, and more. In this episode, Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Cynthia Li and Dr. Terry Wahls about their personal stories of working through autoimmunity and how it led them to help others using Functional Medicine. They also dive into the underlying triggers of inflammation such as stress, hidden infections, food allergies or sensitivities, toxic exposure, genetic predisposition, nutrient deficiencies, and leaky gut. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Mitopure, and Fatty15. Streamline your lab orders with Rupa Health. Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests and register for a FREE live demo at RupaHealth.com. Support essential mitochondrial health and save 10% on Mitopure. Visit TimelineNutrition.com/Drhyman and use code DRHYMAN10. Fatty15 contains pure, award-winning C15:0 in a bioavailable form. Get an exclusive 10% off a 90-day starter kit subscription. Visit Fatty15.com and use code DRHYMAN10 today.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. When the dietician analyzed my diet, she goes, you know, I have never analyzed a diet that was this nutrient dense in all of my years of research. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know there are a ton of functional medicine practitioners who listen to this podcast, and I want to ask you a question.

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an exclusive 10% off your first order of MitoPure. Just head to timeline.com forward slash Dr. Hyman and start your journey to peak muscle health. The first thing I did was I went back to basics. And so I did not suddenly just start singing acupuncturist or start trying energy medicine or anything that's really alternative. I was like, okay, no, I'm a doctor.

You didn't start off with crystals? No, I didn't. And oh God, meditation was like, it was like pulling teeth. So no, I went back to basics and I, I took out my pathology 101 textbook, right? Pathologic basis of disease. Robbins and Cotram. Exactly. That's the, we all take it first, second year medical school. Right. And Kumar, Kumar was my pathology teacher. Oh, wow. So I took it out. I still had it. It was highlighted, dog-eared. I mean, and it actually was good for me. Like if I know neuroplasticity, right, it kind of brought me back to this time where I had more of a sense of agency over my life. So in that sense, it was

also healing. I didn't recognize it at the time. But I started reading about how diseases, how chronic disease develops and about cellular repair and cellular injury. And I was like, wait a minute. And they actually talk about it. This was published, I don't even know which edition, but 20 years ago where they say the one cause, one effect paradigm does not work anymore. Yeah. Right? We're in this complex living environment where nutrition matters, where environmental toxins. I mean, this is 20 years ago.

Yeah. And they probably wrote that several years before that was published, right? So I started reading that and I thought, well, wait a minute. And then that diseases are not defined by a set of criteria. Yeah. This continuum, this process. Yeah, that's right. I remember going back and reading chapter one and it said,

any pathologic change is always preceded by a biochemical change yes which means that anything you see like on a microscope there's got to be a lot of years of stuff going wrong with your biochemistry and physiology before that happens yes years and we don't we don't know how to look at that in western medicine we just wait till you have something wrong and then we go oh yeah now i don't know what it is right right because in the way that we've been trained inflammation which is what i had right widespread inflammation in my nerves inflammation in my gut inflammation in your brain in my thyroid exactly um it doesn't qualify as a treatable disease inflammation right no that's what i was joking say functional medicine

doctors are inflammologists you know yes i love that. I remember that from the first functional medicine conference I went to. Yeah. I gave a talk on that, right? Right. Right. So that was a really big aha moment for me was, wait a minute. Okay. I understand this sudden disturbance, what I call it in Beijing. But then I had the thyroiditis before that,

which was sort of the preceding trigger. And then before that, okay, wait a minute. You know what? When I was in residency, post-call, 36-hour shifts, my muscles would feel really crampy. Like I felt like I'd run a marathon and I was dizzy. And I just assumed, well, of course, everyone feels this way because they're exhausted. Not sleeping, right.

Right. And so I started going backwards and realizing, okay, this has been going on for a long time. And for some people that can be really, you know, sort of disheartening. But for me at where I was, it was a little ounce of hope because it meant that I could sort of stepwise, piecemeal, address inflammation in a way that I could tolerate. What I was really afraid of because I was so brittle was having any kind of setback that would push me down further. And so if I could do it in a way that was more controlled and gentle, then it felt like something I could move forward with. So what did you do?

Or the things that helped you recover? So one of the things was, yeah, was identifying- Because by the way, chronic fatigue syndrome is not something most people recover from, right? Right. Fibromyalgia is not something people recover from. Absolutely. Unless you see a functional medicine doctor.

Right, right. Or have some one of those spontaneous remissions, which is one in a million, probably, right? Yeah, so what I ended up doing also was distancing myself from the diagnosis and the prognosis because it was more despairing. My marriage was held together by a single thread. I had two young kids. I had everything to lose. So I was like, if I don't get my act together and start trying differently, then I'm going to lose whatever, you know, what little I have left. So I was really motivated. And, you know, the first thing I did was really, I started reading about, well, I knew I had to get sleep. If I can't get sleep, I'm going to not have enough energy. So really looking,

understanding the circadian clock and you know i learned things that i was surprised i didn't know already you know i knew about the pineal gland and the hypothalamus and we have this master clock and we have jet lag and that's why but i didn't know about um every organ having its own yes clock yeah own. And even a whole field of chronobiology where the different kinds of chemo is better given at different times of the day to work better. Yes, I know. This is in conventional medicine. Right.

And it makes, I mean, it makes like complete rational sense, right? So I started, first of all, being more regimented about just, okay, you know what, I'm going to wake up, you know, and get up out of bed. Um, even if I feel kind of miserable, but I'm going to, my body needs to know that it's awake and that it's alive. So really basic fundamental, um, steps. And, um, and I learned that when we deviate, I mean, particularly when you're brittle like that. I mean, of course, when we are more resilient, like now I have much more flexibility, but when, when I was brittle, you know, any, uh, when you stray away so often from a routine, it causes stress on the body. So I was like, oh, okay, this is maybe an easier way where I can reduce stress on my body.

Yeah. Rhythm. Yeah. We all live different lives. I feed my dog at the same times every day. Why don't I do that for myself? And he gets walks now at the same time. Why don't I do that for myself? So I started syncing myself also with my kids.

Like, okay, I'm going to take care of my kids. I can take care of myself at the same time. So I think that also in that caretaker mentality, you know, as a mother or a partner or a doctor is we, we tend to put ourselves last. And so it was kind of time to put myself first, you know, as my first patient. That's good. And so you did the rhythm and what else changed your diet? And then, um, yeah. And, you know, a lot of it was just asking new questions. Um, the diet piece, I thought I was eating quote healthy, um, you know, which was largely vegetarian. Um, I was cooking meals, but also doing a lot of prepackaged meals, but not a lot of processed stuff. And it wasn't until I saw an acupuncturist. So the acupuncturist that I saw, Robert Levine,

who's in Berkeley, California, he was brilliant, really brilliant. And he's still practicing. And he's a dear friend of mine, mentor of mine. I learned a ton from him about understanding the body in terms of systems. So when my thyroid was out of whack, it wasn't just my thyroid. It was my whole hormone system, which is tied then to the digestive system, which is tied to the immune system. Like it suddenly started making sense. The knee bone connected to the thigh bone, right? Yeah, exactly. And the body is connected to the brain. Which is actually amazing in medicine that our entire training teaches us the opposite. That there's all these organ systems, right?

We take the GI system and the liver and the lungs and the brain and the heart and the hormone. And you go to specialists for every different part of you and nobody connects the dots. Right, right. And traditional Chinese medicine is actually a system of thinking of the body as a system. and you go to specialists for every different part of you and nobody connects the dots. Right. Right. And traditional Chinese medicine is actually a system of thinking of the body as a system. And that's what functional medicine is. It's a systems thinking approach.

Yes, absolutely. And so, you know, and we can extrapolate that to any size system, right? We look at our communities and our world, right? And, you know, one of the things i feel like that drives almost every everything if not everything that we do as individuals and that we do as societies is how do i get more energy yeah right my qigong teacher was talking about that how do we get more energy you know whether it's through you know qi means energy yeah whether it's through solar energy you know fossil fuels whether it's yeah i mean it's food um nature movement um so you know i began to shift my thinking in relationship to health and disease in a much more living sort of embodied way so the but diet thing, he was the first one.

He was like, you know, you're so deficient right now. Like, I think you need more meat, you know, and you need more of these heavier foods. Like you're doing lots of salads and you're doing, which are great, but not for you right now. So I hadn't even thought about a personalized diet. And I was like, more meats, what are you talking about? You know, and this is before paleo days and all that.

Sure, sure. Meat was the enemy. So I began researching ancestral diets and the work of dentist Weston A. Price. Price and Alvin Connors. Right, and it suddenly made sense. Like, oh yeah, okay, I'm gonna eat like my ancestors ate. I'm gonna prepare food the way my ancestors prepared

so I can maximize nutrient density. Nutrient density equals more energy. And then the gluten issue came up. I was really skeptical of it. It's one of the biggest drivers of thyroid disease, Hashimoto's. Yes, yes. And the celiac experts know that, but the endocrinologists don't right so there's

no crosstalk there either and this is in conventional medicine right um so and i do remember asking my endocrinologist like what can i do what can i do and he said nothing you know it's genetic oh gosh no it's not right right it's a genetic predisposition, but not predetermination. But the gluten thing didn't actually arise. I think I was partly in denial about it. There were lots of rabbit holes that I knew about, and I just didn't want to go down. As the time I was taking her to her first dentist visit. And, you know, I felt like as a family, we ate pretty well. She didn't do a lot of sweets and, um, but she had not just one cavity at her visit. She had six cavities. Wow. Yeah. And I was floored. So, uh, you know, and the dentist kept saying, well, don't feel guilty. Don't feel guilty, you know, and I was like, wait a minute, I wasn't feeling guilty until you just said that. But it made me investigate like something else is going on.

Like I know how we eat, I know how she brushes, and I know cavities happen, but like six? It just, it didn't compute. So I started researching and that's when I came across Weston A. Price's work around the condition of teeth tied directly to diet, but then going deeper. you know causing inflammation in the gut which therefore could translate into poor oral hygiene and or just conditioning of the gums and the teeth and um so that was just kind of another step in that process when i realized oh i got to go back and again this is not unconventional this is just traditional socrates said all diseases begin in the gut, right? So, we're just kind of going back. And I realized I have to learn how to heal my gut as another step. Did you still have digestive symptoms after that initial gastroenteritis in China or did it get better?

They were largely quiescent until I removed gluten. And I removed gluten and I had massive withdrawal, diarrhea, irritable bowel. And again, this was kind of before the time that I realized I understood about detox and how healing happens is that often it gets a lot worse before it gets better and that it could be a good sign. So I was really frightened by how severe my reaction was when I stopped gluten. So I was thinking it was a bad thing. But then, you know what, I stuck with it and a week later it calmed down and then my health improved a notch. And not only that, but we changed the way that our whole family ate. And my younger daughter,

so my older daughter's teeth really basically resolved. I mean, they became really strong. Some of her cavities even filled, they recalcified and didn't have to get filled. My younger daughter, who didn't really have anything that was alarming, but she had this perioral eczema, which is this dermatitis, which is very difficult to treat with steroids, which is how we treat most dermatitis. And then you read on the skin, they put steroids on it. Exactly. Why is the skin irritated?

Right, right. Coming from the inside, not the outside. So she had that and she had, she would get asthma when she got colds and both of those are totally, totally resolved. Off of gluten. Well, off of gluten, but also doing the ancestral diet. So off of dairy. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And, um, you know, so it was just one of those things I was like, you know, you can't make this stuff up and this stuff isn't written up and it's very individualized. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Essential fats are, well, essential for our health and our longevity. But we've recently discovered a third essential fat. It's the first to be discovered since omega-3s and omega-6s more than 90 years ago, and it's become an essential part of my longevity routine.

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That's F-A-T-T-Y 1-5.com. But if you look in the literature, you know, doctors say, where's the evidence? Where's the evidence? Well, there's 900,000 papers published every year. Most doctors haven't read that many of them. And the truth is that most of the ones that are on these subjects are completely ignored. And when you put all the dots together, there's a pattern there in the data that suggests that these things are real, that there is something called leaky gut, that there is

inflammation that comes from the microbiome, that foods do cause reactions in the body that lead to all these diseases, that heavy metals and toxins are an issue that cause disease. I mean, there's no lack of data. It's just not data that doctors pay attention to in literature. Right. And it takes, on average, 14 years. I thought this was- 17.

Oh, 17. Oh, God. That's not a good day. For information- That's not a good day. For information. That's not a good day. For information and research to translate over to clinical care. Yeah. I think that's not a good day.

The guy who discovered that we should wash our hands before giving any surgery or childbirth was basically ridiculed for suggesting that doctors could be causing their patients to get sick by not washing their hands. And he was basically exiled and ended up dying in sort of disgrace with no money and, you know, excommunicated from the medical community, Semmelweis. And it took 50 years for them to go, oh yeah, maybe we should wash their hands. Oh my God. Where's the science on that, right? Yeah, right. Well, it was in an athema to doctors that, oh, you could suggest that a doctor would be causing their patients to die from childbirth fever because they didn't wash their hands.

That's nonsense. So it is tough to change medical paradigms. Right, right. But I mean, some of it is common sense. Yeah. We don't need science to show us that, right? Well, I mean, when they didn't know about bacteria, common sense was, you know. Yeah, that's true.

That's true. Yeah. common sense was yeah that's true that's true yeah so yeah i mean i kind of just did this stepwise um progression to get to the point where i was much more able to get out of the house yeah and then um and one of the the things i also explored which i would say maybe is down the unconventional path was um i began to i began to shadow integrative doctors on just different paths in integrative medicine or sort of, you know, I didn't actually know about functional medicine at the time. So I was shadowing an anthroposophical medicine doc, you know, someone doing like sort of anti-aging hormone therapies. And then it was when I was shadowing a integrative pediatrician who said, well, you know, what are

you, this was, I mean, I was still unwell. I was, had taken off work for a couple of years and, but I was starting to think like, oh, how does it, how would it look if I were to return to work? Like, what are the different ways I could practice? And it was the pediatrician who said, well, what are you interested in? I said, well, you know, I really, I love the traditional Chinese medicine paradigm. It makes so much sense to me, the systems thinking, you know, about the gut, you know, sort of being the foundation of healing and I'm really, you know, ancestral health, you know, figures into it. And she said, it sounds like you, you know, you're interested in functional medicine. I was like, what is that?

What is that? So, and she really strongly recommended that I go see the, take this course with Institute for Functional Medicine. So, it was sort of a bone for me, right? Like I was aiming to get healthy enough to be able to travel to go attend a conference. And it came to Santa Monica and I live in the Bay Area. So it felt doable. It wasn't, yeah, cross country. And I went and it was, I think I had that aha moment like you did when you listened to Jeff Bland. I was like, oh my God, oh my God. And this is something that's been developed and developing, and there's a framework. I don't have to make this up. So it was a really important turning point for me. It gave me hope both as a patient, but also as a doctor. How can I give back? What it did also cause was it caused a little bit of anxiety. Yeah, because you had to relearn medicine. I had to relearn medicine, but then suddenly I went from having no or very few options to having infinite options. And how to get better?

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay. Like which diet, when, you know, which supplements, you know, what, what do I, you know, what do I rule myself out for mold and mercury and all these things. And it felt very overwhelming. And so that's when I ended up, I actually didn't choose this. You need a navigator. I did. And I had a very unconventional navigator was we had a visit from some friends of ours who ended up staying with us. And we had known them for years, but they'd never stayed with us. And we've always known them through sort of the sustainability work, right? So, I had been doing environmental health, my husband is in public policy around renewable energy. So, we knew them through work circles. And anyways, we were hosting them for a weekend

and they come. We knew that the wife, Pia, was also clairvoyant. So she was a sustainable architect, and her husband was one of the leading climate physicists. That's a handy skill to have. Exactly. So they're a very dynamic couple. We knew about her clairvoyance through sort of hearsay, but we had never experienced it up front and kind of never really were curious enough to go there.

It was kind of woo-woo. Exactly. That's yeah, exactly. That's how I felt. Yeah. So they ended up staying in our house. And one of the things was that my younger daughter was having night terrors for four months, which did not bode well for my insomnia. And we had tried everything.

And actually gone out kind of on an alternative limb too, right? She was doing like chamomile drops and some homeopathy, but nothing really touched her. And so Pia walks into her house and she starts coughing, coughing, coughing. And she said, there's something going on. The energy in this house is really heavy. You know, do you guys feel it? And we're all looking at each other like, okay, woo-hoo. Right, right. And she said, well, but it's really heavy.

And so she said, do you mind if I just walk around? So she's walking around and she said it's heaviest in the girls' room. And so, you know, nothing opens your mind like desperation, right? Sure, right. So I just said- People only change when they don't have any P syndrome anymore. Any P syndrome is not enough pain. Yes, yes.

When people have enough pain, they're going to do whatever. Right, right. And you hit that dead end, right? So I just said, I said, you know what? Maybe it's heavy because Sonia, my daughter's been crying every single night, right? And she said, wait a minute. She said, no, no, no. It's the other way around.

Sonia's crying because she feels the heaviness too. And I'm like, okay, whatever. So she goes off to Whole Foods of all places, gets a sage wand, right? With a smudge stick, which I had never heard of before. Yeah. It's a Native American way of creating energy from the world. Exactly. So she just goes around and she said, well, it's really important that you come with me. You're the lady of the house and your intention really matters. And I'm like, but my intention is I don't actually believe what you're doing. She said, no, no, just say

whatever doesn't belong here needs to leave. And the thing that really convinced me to do it with her was, well, first of all, it was low risk. I mean, there was, right? I'm always looking for high potential gain, low risk. A little sage around the room. Exactly. I never heard anyone. Bad stuff, get out. She said that she had a vision and she described this vision of this man, tall, slender, reddish brown hair, balding right here, wearing a plaid shirt. And it sent chills down my, just threw out my body because this was the seller of the house who we'd met three times, like to a T. Wow. And he had died.

He had not died. He had moved out, but he had not wanted to move out. And she said, that's just what keeps coming to me when I look at the energy. And I was like, okay, whoa, weird, but okay. Like that's really spot on. So we just walked around and, you know, and I was kind of just being very sympathetic too. I sympathized with the seller, right. That he had to leave his home. Yeah.

So, you know, but, but I was, I wasn't holding my breath. And from that night on, Sonia slept soundly. Amazing.

I mean, you know, to this day, she's an incredible sleeper. So, you know, and then there was still part of me who was like, well,

you know, there's no control. You know, how do we really know? Maybe it was coincidental. But before Pia left, what she did was she said, I actually approached her and I said, well, if you can lift the heaviness in a house, can you lift the heaviness in my body? You know, I mean, I'm much smaller than this house. And she said, oh, you know, it doesn't work quite like that. And she said, but I can do one thing. I can teach you how to develop intuition, which I had never heard of. I did not know that intuition was something like music or art, like you can develop it. Yeah, you can practice it. And she was very pragmatic about it. And she said, no, no, this doesn't mean you're going to be clairvoyant, but it just means that you can learn to open this other side of your brain that has probably been closed off for a long time because of your training and your upbringing.

She taught me how to do that. Well, she taught me what I needed to do to begin to practice to open up to that. A lot of it was so basic. A lot of it was just silencing my analytical mind and being in my body. And that second part was the hard, well, actually they were both really hard. They were both really hard. Silence the analytical mind, being in my body because my body was so uncomfortable. And so she said, you can only heal something that you are connected to. You can't heal something you're detached from. So that was healing on multiple levels, both that I had to inhabit my body, which was probably one of the biggest steps in terms of healing, not being afraid of it, but going into it. And then also, um,

learning how to read sensations for as messages and not just symptoms that, you know, we're making them miserable. Yeah. Yeah. I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. If you listen to it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the intuition piece came in incredibly handy when I was introduced to functional medicine. I wasn't really practicing it because I was doing steadily better. Were you trying some of it on yourself? I was trying some of it on myself, but it was... I mean, you know how it is when you're... It's like someone wants you to play a piano piece, you can't even read the notes yet. And it just, it's laborious.

So I wasn't motivated. But then I go to the intro to functional medicine conference and saw all these tools, but then felt overwhelmed. And then I was motivated to practice intuition. And I really learned to use intuition to guide me. Like, how do I choose what to do next? Is this the right diet for me? Is gluten really, you know, is it something that I can return to, or is it something that I really need to stay off of strictly? So it began to, it made that navigation much easier for me. And, um, and it's something that I encourage my patients to, you know, to develop if they're

interested. It's simple. It just takes a lot of repetition and quiet listening. So you found, you know, one of the causes was gluten, right? And toxins you got from China that you worked on getting rid of. Was there anything else? I did a lot of detoxes. So I learned how to balance my hormones. I think my hormones were really out of whack after that incident. What does that mean? Well, my estrogen and progesterone levels were really low. So for um, I, you know, for a while I actually took bioidentical hormones to just

support my system so I could get strong enough just to help balance out the immune system. Um, and then as my whole system got stronger, I was able to really wean off of those. And, and just last year, even like 14 years later, I actually completely tapered off my thyroid medicine as well. So I didn't know that was possible. Yeah. Amazing what happens when you learn how to take care of your body. Amazing. Yeah. So first we'll talk about the dietary approach. So the way you might think about it when I talk to the public is sort of a pre-Walls diet is a Mediterranean diet, which everyone agrees is a great diet.

More vegetables, legumes, more fish. So nice, healthy diet. And then the first level of my diet, we have people stress. And the goal is nine cups of vegetables, three cups of greens, three cups of sulfur-rich vegetables in the cabbage, onion, mushroom family, and three cups of deeply colored things like beets, carrots, berries. And then I want them to remove gluten, casein, and eggs, because they're the three most common food antigens that can cause an excessive immune response. No more waffles. No more waffles.

Well, you actually know, I make cashew waffles. I make all kinds of great things. You can kind of cheat. There are things you can do. So that's the first level. And you can do that as a vegetarian. And that is fairly close to a gluten-free, dairy-free version of a Mediterranean diet. Then the next level becomes more paleolithic. So we reduce the gluten-free grains and legumes to no more than two servings a week. We add in and stress organ meats, seaweeds.

If you're going to have nuts and seeds, we suggest that you have them soaked and sprouted. Why organ meats? Why organ meats? Because organ meats are something people avoid, right? Liver, kidneys, thymus. Yeah, well, they don't know how to make them. They're actually delicious. It seems like the poor man's food, you know, steak and kidney pie.

Yeah, yeah. What's the rationale for the organ meats? Well, first off, our ancestors would have eaten those. They're a third of the carcass when you harvest an animal. So it would have been an essential part of the diet. And interestingly enough, if there was plenty of meat, they left the muscle meat behind and took the organs. So the liver, great source of vitamin A and the fat soluble vitamins is, so A, K, a moderate source of E, a great source of the B vitamins, a great source of minerals that are very easily absorbed as opposed to the minerals

in plants, which are a little more difficult for us to absorb. And then great source of coenzyme Q, creatine, carnitine. So really, really marvelous nutrition for us. A lot of those are mitochondrial nutrients, right? They are mitochondrial nutrients. And which is important for healthy aging and everything. You know, Terry, it's interesting because if you look at, I've done this before, you Google like liver nutrition facts, right? And then like, and then the nutrition facts for the most amazing vegetable you could possibly imagine or grain or bean. And it just, it's like, it's like Michael Jordan and high school basketball.

It's like, it's that big of a difference. It's shocking. It's like, not just a little bit, it's like three, four, five, 10 orders of magnitude more nutrients in liver than in almost any other food. Correct. Correct. Absolutely. Which is shocking. It's absolutely a super food. The one nutrient it does not have is vitamin C. So that's a good reason to eat your salads and your berries to get the vitamin C. Now, the caveat I'll have is for my carnivore friends who eat only meat, I have to caution them to be careful about how much liver they have, because you don't want to overdose on vitamin A. So liver is really great for you, six to eight ounces a week. So that's, you know,

up to a half pound of liver a week. You know, the first nation people in Alaska and everywhere, they actually would give it to the explorers because they wanted to kill them. So they give them polar bear liver and they literally die from vitamin A poisoning. So liver is really great. Uh, it, it is, um, our family's favorite dish. So, uh, uh, uh, my family makes liver for me on my birthday because they know, uh, it's, it's a special meal for us. We just really love that a lot. For me, for me, it was a poor man's meal meal because we were very poor in New York City when I lived as a kid with my mom. And we lived in this tiny one bedroom apartment and we'd have liver and onions and rice. And I thought that was like a fancy meal, chicken liver.

And you realize it was like because we were poor. Well, you know, and it is actually quite handy because it is relatively inexpensive. You can get organic liver very inexpensively because the market doesn't understand how valuable that nutrition is. Another really great organ meat, of course, is heart. Heart is sort of like filet mignon. That is just so delicious, incredibly delicious. And then, you know, oysters, clams, mussels, those are all organ meats. Oh, really? Quite delicious.

What about the liver toxicity, like liver? Because people go, oh, liver is the wastebasket of the body, where the toxins go, isn't it bad to eat that? So where the toxins go is really the fat of the animal. So people like bacon. So if you're worried about toxicities, be sure that your bacon is organic. If you're concerned about toxicities. The liver is fatty. Liver is fatty.

I would certainly have it be organic. And I think that is prudent. My preference is have liver know, have liver, get it from an organic animal. So, Terry, just to summarize the dietary principles, it's getting rid of gluten, dairy, and eggs. It's getting rid of grains and beans. It's getting rid of, obviously, I'll process food, sugar, alcohol. Processed sugars, more vegetables. More, lots more vegetables. And tell us about your like nine cups of vegetables and the different kinds of vegetable categories.

Because I think it's really important to help you understand. It's not just any vegetable that you need. You need vegetables that contain certain compounds, which are medicines for the body. So we want to have lots of greens. Greens are a great source of carotenoids, luteins, zeaxanthin, myosin, zeaxanthin.

These are essential nutrients for your retina and also for your brain because your eyes are really just extensions of brains. They'll reduce the risk of macular degeneration, of cataracts, and dementia. You're also going to get a great source of vitamin K. And in neuroimmune conditions, MS, in cognitive decline, there's a severe... In epidemiologic studies, the vitamin K levels are extraordinarily low in those population groups. So lots of reasons to get your greens. Now we're going to go on to why I want you to have cabbage, onion, mushrooms. So the sulfur is a really great support for your detox,

great support for making glutathione, intracellular antioxidants, great support for your mitochondria. That's the broccoli family. And the onion family. Yes. Also good for your blood vessel endothelial function. And then mushrooms. There are a wide variety of mushrooms that stimulate your natural killer cells, priming your adaptive and innate immunity.

They also are associated with better nerve growth factor production in animal models and in human studies associated with much lower rates of cognitive decline and depression wow well i feel good about taking my mushroom powders every morning so take your mushrooms i have mushrooms in my tea every day so amazing lots of reasons to have your mushrooms okay so that's the food part now you've taken this you didn't get the colors yet so you then we're also into three cups of colors. And I want to have a wide variety of colors. Okay, wait, wait, before you go on. So the government says five to nine servings.

A serving is half a cup. So you're talking about not five to nine, you're talking about 18 cups, just so people get the idea. Well, no, nine cups. No, no, 18 servings. Nine cups, 18 servings, right. You know, and I'm not trying to have you eat more than what your appetite will allow you. The point I'm trying to have you do is you eat your protein.

And we have strategies for vegetarians or meat eaters. And you eat lots of vegetables. You don't need to be hungry, but you're not eating junk. When you're hungry, you're eating these vegetables and we want to have sufficient protein and lots of vegetables now when you do that you're going to poop people um and of course we have to make modifications for people who have inflammatory bowel disease who can't have as much fiber so So when we talk about this, Mark, this is for the public. This is for what you start.

And then you assess your response. And if you're having loose stools, you're going to have less fiber. If you're still constipation, more fiber, more fermented foods, more sauerkraut and kimchi. Right. So that's the food part. And you've taken this along with the lifestyle aspects and the stress and the exercise and muscle stimulation and hot and cold therapies and all these other modalities. And you, you know, you've studied them. And one of the challenges for traditional medicine is that when we look at research and we'd like to study one thing, let's study this

drug for this disease in this patient. One molecular pathway at a time. Yeah. It's like I was talking to a doctor, a scientist about dementia. I said, look, these patients have dementia as a syndrome. There's many causes for it. It could be the microbiome. It could be gluten. It could be toxins.

It could be Lyme. It could be mold. It could be insulin resistance. And it could be a lot of multiple. Right. And so it's all the market the nutritional deficiencies or hormonal imbalances and all these things and i said you know what's going on is that these patients need to support all these things in order to get better

and she's well let's just study one thing i'm like let's see if diet is right it's important to exercise it's important to sleep right it's important to you know to deal with stress are you saying we just study exercise but not diet and the the rest? It just doesn't make any sense. It's like, let's just see if we can grow a plant by just giving it nitrogen. We won't get phosphorus, potassium, we won't get water, we won't get sunlight, we won't have healthy soil,

but we're just going to give it potassium and see if the plant can grow. Like it just doesn't make any sense. So you've been so pioneering in creating these multimodal interventions somehow, where you look at multiple interventions. And then they pass by the review boards for the research. And they're actually clinically far more effective than anything we've seen for MS and these chronic autoimmune neurologic issues.

I have a really unique reason I'm able to do this, Mark. So I was on the Institutional Review Board for the University of Iowa for years before I became disabled. So they watched me become profoundly disabled and then recover, you know, walk and bike. I'm still on the Institutional Review Board. And so when I came with my first protocol, you know, actually the review board declined. What? Rejected the protocol. But the reason ultimately I got to, this all got to happen.

The dean of the College of Medicine called the head of the institutional review board and said, I really want Terry's study to get approved. So work with her to meet whatever concerns you have so she can do her little study because I want her to do that little single arm safety and feasibility study. So then the head of the IRB called me, arranged for me to meet with the Pharmacy and Therapeutics committee because they were worried about the supplements. And then I, so we addressed the supplements. We had a pretty strict exclusionary criteria. We had to do a bunch of safety labs. So we got that part worked out. Then they were worried about the diet. It's crazy diet because it's goes you know

i have never analyzed a diet that was this nutrient dense in all of my years of research amazing so we got approval and we're able to to do our our little study and now the people we we enrolled i had a progressive MS, secondary progressive, prime progressive. They were using canes and walkers. They had severe fatigue. Nobody with cognitive decline got in because we excluded those folks. We asked them to, and they were having like five servings of gluten dairy and eggs every day one half servings of vegetables a day so really a standard american diet no exercise uh they're exhausted yeah at the end of 12 months they're having on average uh eight cups of vegetables a

day wow so dramatic uh change and they had a social service and they were fully compliant with their diet 90 of the days and then on the exercise doing the exercise and the e-stem every day 75 of the days they had done their exercise in Easton. Wow. The average meditation minutes, I think was 7.6 minutes per day. And the self massage was 3.6 minutes per day. So these exhausted people did remarkably well with this complicated multimodal intervention. It's impressive. It's impressive. Now, the other reason I'm able to do my crazy research, Mark, is I'm not getting funded

by the NIH. You mean they won't fund you? They won't fund you. We write grants. We get scathing reviews. We just got another grant back, scathing reviews, and got another grant back scathing reviews and we'll negative negative yeah negative why what are they saying well you know the the reviewers clearly have a pharmaceutical uh point of view uh they didn't

think people could uh do the diets uh the swank and the walsh diets were too unpalatable. People wouldn't follow the diet. They thought it was unrealistic that we're going to follow people for two years. Why are we doing MRIs? Because you need drugs to have a favorable impact. Oh my God. Crazy. Okay, so we have that challenge. Now, the benefit I have, Mark, is because my work has been actually effective at transforming people's lives, we've transformed the lives of people who are cold calling the university saying, I believe what Dr. Walls is doing. I'd like to support her research. To fund you. They fund our research. And so that's how I funded the first study, the safety and feasibility study. It was a group out of Canada founded by Ashton Embry and his wife, Joan.

They gave us the funds for that first small pilot study in the um and we had a phd student that helped to help me run that study in the university and the va gave me time which of course is hard to get to run the study so what did the study find well you know that was that very first study which we showed that people could radically change their diet. They could do the meditation, the exercise, and the fatigue severity. And our fatigue severity scale score goes from seven to one, seven total fatigue in every aspect of your life, one no fatigue. It dropped 2.38 points, and 0.45 is clinically meaningful. So that's a huge drop.

And the anxiety remarkably went down. Depression remarkably went down. Verbal memory, non-verbal, and performance went remarkably up. And half of our folks had improvements in their 25-foot walking time. For progressive MS, when you anticipate a 20% decline per year, as a group, we held them flat. So as a group, that was remarkably hot. They didn't get worse, which normally they do. That's why it's called progressive, right? Yeah. That's why they call it progressive.

Right. So that's very exciting stuff. So that was the first study that people could tolerate it, they would do it, and then they didn't get worse and they often got better and had a reduction in fatigue. What were the next follow-up studies you did and what did they show? So the next study was a small study, again, funded by our donors. And now we just did the diet. And it was randomized, a relapsing-remitting study. And in 12 weeks, so shorter duration, so it's less costly to run, people, again, could radically change their diet.

Fatigue went down. Quality of life went remarkably up. And the speed at which you could do a 25-foot walk remarkably improved. And the hand function also improved compared to the control group. So you just got a $2 million gift to support your study on the sort of clinically isolated syndrome and relapsing remitting MS. So talk about that.

Yeah, that was a very exciting study. We're about to launch that just before the pandemic. We're going to have newly diagnosed MS clinically isolated syndrome folks, baseline assessments, baseline MRIs, basically give them the WALS protocol and have monthly support calls, bring them back in a year, repeat all the assessments, including the MRI. And then the pandemic happened. And fortunately, we had not started our study. So we had to redesign everything and reimagine the study.

So the study is now a virtual study, and it has three arms. Again, newly diagnosed folks who have been offered drugs and have declined drugs, and we basically put them on the WALS diet, a stress reduction program, and an exercise program. And we do virtual assessments every three months, monthly support calls. Then the control arm are folks who are, again, newly diagnosed and are taking disease-modifying therapy. And they can have whatever diet and lifestyle interventions that they want. And then the third arm, we said that we needed a third arm now because we can't get the MRIs the way we hoped. What we're doing is we're abstracting the medical records here at the University of Iowa of newly diagnosed folks

with MS and clinically isolated syndrome. And we are counting in everyone from their medical records, their number of lesions, the number of relapses, and the progression of symptoms or remission of symptoms during that time period. So we will probably have, it'll probably be another eight months of data collection, and then we will analyze our data. So, you know, with MS, there's often white matter changes in the brain. In other words, there's scarring in the brain that you can see on an MRI. Do you see changes in that as well? We're going to find out. I do know that in our intervention arm, we do have some folks who are having more relapses who have elected to go on drugs. We are also having some folks who have had their follow-up MRIs and lesions have disappeared, and they're not having relapses.

And neurologists are like, wow, this is really amazing. Yeah. And so we'll see what happens at the end. Certainly the vast majority of folks in our intervention arm are reporting symptoms are going down. Their motor problems are reduced. Their sensory problems are reduced. Vision is improving. Impressive. Impressive, impressive. So how is this research being received now? What's different about it?

Because it seems like you hit a lot of resistance at the beginning. MS Society wouldn't even talk to you, like you're a quack. And now they're wanting to talk to you, work with you. What are you seeing? Why all this is happening? I think the TED Talk went viral. I got a book deal. The book was a bestseller.

The MS Society monitors social media. And they saw that when my book came out, all of the attention, which led them to prioritize and create a wellness conference. And they actually tracked me down and got me to the wellness conference. I was one of the scientists there. That's amazing. And then they made a priority to fund dietary and lifestyle research and funded the WAVE study. So that one was funded by the MS Society. So great, Terry.

And the work you're doing is so important and putting the foundation of research behind it and showing the efficacy. And I think, have you seen your neurological colleagues who specialize in MS start to change in all what they're doing? Have a different view? Are they still stuck in diet doesn't matter? Like, where are we at? Well, we're still making a lot more progress. There's more research that the microbiome is altered. There are more people doing dietary intervention studies

you know now we have uh some small studies uh about calorie restriction uh fasting ketogenic diets uh the paleolithic diet mediterranean diet swank diet mcdougall diet so all these small studies uh our wave study is the largest study to date. We have a protocol in front of the IRB for a couple more studies that I'm really excited about. One is a study of the online program that I run. So we're going to evaluate the dietary intake and whether or not that is associated with changes in quality of life and fatigue. So that's going to be very, very exciting because if an online program can do those things, then that makes this available to everyone. And then we have plans for another study, a big study, Walsh diet, ketogenic diet, dietary guidelines that will include MRIs at baseline and at two years. And that will be a study funded by a, again, a very generous donor.

It's amazing, though. You think this should be something funded by the NIH, right? This should be funded by the government. The NIH should be funding this. And now we're having private donors doing it, which is fine. But it's unfortunate that you can get millions and billions of dollars to study drugs, but you can't get five cents to study lifestyle or nutrition. And that's because there's this dedication to thinking we can understand biology, molecular pathway by molecular pathway. But biology is a network of balancing and counterbalancing pathways.

Absolutely. And I think if we're going to create health, we have to study complex systems and you have to support the entire system. That's right. I mean, that's what functional medicine is. It's treating the system, not the individual symptoms or diseases. And then when you do that, it's the only way to create health. I mean, you're not actually treating MS. You're just creating a healthy person by getting them off crappy food, getting a real diet, getting exercise, reducing stress, sleep better, take a few supplements, optimize your pathways, metabolic pathways. I mean, it's, you're not, you're not really treating MS specifically, right? You're, you're, and that's what people don't realize. This is not an MS treatment.

This is a health treatment. And for anybody with an autoimmune disease, it's going to be a very powerful model. You know, when I first had my recovery, my partner started complaining about what I was doing. And I got called in. They had to speak with the chief of staff and the chief of medicine at the university. And then I got sent to the complementary alternative medicine clinic. And my chief of medicine sat me down and said, Terry, you got to talk about it differently because you're, you're making people upset. And what I learned that in the way I shifted my conversation, Mark was that I told my patients that

we're going to monitor your drugs and your disease, but we're going to focus on supporting how your cells run the chemistry of life. And we'll just watch, see if I have to adjust your medicines, if you run the chemistry of life a little bit better. And so we're going to do it through diet and lifestyle. And that's why I documented in the chart that I'm supporting their health, and then we will watch for side effects on their medicines. So I had to learn how to talk about it in a way that was more comfortable for people and to make sure that people did not think I was treating disease, that I was working on creating better health.

That's why we say functional medicine is the science of creating health, and disease goes away as a side effect. That is exactly right. And what we're simply doing is monitoring the drugs to be sure people are not over-medicated. Oh, exactly. Right. You know, I had a huge problem when I wrote my book, Blood Sugar Solution, because people started following the book and it was a number one bestseller and people were following the program and we're getting all these calls. My blood pressure is too low. My blood sugar is too low. I'm like, yeah, you don't need your medication. So I had to put in a big warning. It says, if you're on medication, this program can be dangerous because it will prevent you from needing those medications.

And if you're taking them, your blood sugar and your blood pressure are going to go too low. So you need to taper off them with your doctor. Yeah. Yeah. So we did that as well. We put all these warnings in my, in my reprints in the book to say, you got to, if you're on meds, you have to work closely with your doc because you may need to resettle it. Exactly. So let's switch topics a little bit. I want to talk about the microbiome. You mentioned it briefly, but I remember years ago, even 20 years ago, I had an MS patient and she said to me, Dr. Hyman, well, I have irritable bowel. And whenever my irritable bowel gets bad, my MS gets bad. My irritable bowel is better. My MS is better. And I was like, oh, noted, noted. Like I, when patients say that stuff to me, I pay attention. And that

was before even the word microbiome was in the culture at all. And in functional medicine, we always address the gut. We always address the gut as a way of dealing with inflammation and ms is an inflammatory disease so what what is the story of the microbiome and ms and why is there such a link and how does how does it all connect and what do we do about it yeah how does how does the walsh protocol affect the microbiome well we have a greater appreciation that your microbiome is talking to your T cells, your T regulatory cells. It affects your immune tone of how many pro-inflammation molecules you're going to make and which immune cells are going to be active.

We also know if you have a leaky, you probably also have a leaky brain and these immune cells and these inflammatory molecules are getting into your brain and activating the immune cells in your brain called glia and your microglia are continually sensing the environment and either making it very inflammatory, which is causing a relapse, or very reparative, which is rebuilding the myelin that's been damaged. And that is going to depend on what you're eating and what you're doing. And so it's part of why I talk to my patients, are you pooping rocks, logs, snakes, pudding, or tea? If it's pudding or tea, you need less fiber. If it's rocks or dry logs, you need more fiber and more sauerkraut and kimchi.

If you've got snakes and they're getting into your pants, then you probably still need to have less fiber. Snakes are ideal, but only if they don't get into your pants. Okay. Isn't that way easier than the Bristol chart one to seven? That's the best description of poop I've ever heard. A little graphic and visual, but I think we all get the point. Yeah. Everyone laughs and they all get it.

They all understand it. And they understand snakes in the pants are a problem. So a lot of times in functional medicine, we treat the gut directly. Like we really focus on gut reparative therapies, the five-hour program in functional medicine. Do you need to do that with the WALS protocol or do you just do the general approach and it works?

Or do you need to dive in there and say, oh, this person has extra gut inflammation or they have leucomancy or they have this and that parasite? You know what is interesting, Mark, is when I went through my personal transformation, my only clinic practice was at the VA. At the VA, you really can't do any functional medicine labs, zero. And the supplements I could get were B vitamins and fish oil. And that was it. And what I discovered is by basically doing the Walsh protocol, man, I was reversing disease left and right.

And so what I learned was behavior change, group clinics, group visits, and the power of starting with the WALS protocol, listening closely to how people responded and making adjustments based on their response. But some of them are parasite or really bad, don't need probiotics, don't need other things to help heal. They may, they may. And there's no doubt,

if I could have done functional medicine testing, it would have, I could have recovered people more quickly. And there are people who I couldn't recover as well as I would have liked that had I been able to do functional medicine testing, I could have probably done better. Yeah, incredible. So the microbiome is a huge role in our immune system and across the spectrum of diseases and the spectrum of inflammation.

We've talked about that a lot on the podcast. I do think that the work you're doing is so radical because it does affect everything. It affects your nutrient levels. It affects your microbiome. It reduces inflammation. It helps to optimize the function of all the systems in your body that you were talking about. But Terry, your work is so important.

You've touched so many millions of people and you're bringing hope where there was none, especially in the field of MS. It's one of those horrible conditions that, you know, I've treated so many patients. And it's remarkable when you follow these principles and I followed similar principles over the years, treating these patients with great success. And hopefully this will get more into the mainstream. But what you've done is you've created access points. You've got your books, you've got your cookbook.

And also now you have these online programs. So tell us a little bit about the online programs. People are listening and they want to join. Where would they go? How do they find it? What is the program? Several times a year, we have a free five-day challenge. And that is five days of lessons that people get from me, two lessons a day to help you

on your journey of adapting diet and lifestyle. And then we have the autoimmune intervention mastery course, again, which is online. So we have people from all over the globe. There are five modules, lots of lessons within each module to take you through the emotional aspect, the food aspect, the exercise movement aspect, and the supplements and supplemental, what are the additional things that you can do. And in the online course, you also get access to seven calls, group calls, where I come in, provide more information, answer questions, and provide a lot more clarity. Functional medicine is an incredible roadmap. It's really about thinking differently about disease.

And it's what you said. It's about understanding the body as a system where everything is connected, where there are root causes of things that we can get to, where there's things your body needs like rhythm or the right food to help it restore balance. And when you do that for yourself, it works. And often, it's not something you even have to do in a doctor's office. A lot of things that actually work to create balance are things that everybody can do,

whether it's eating well, moving, sleeping, meditating, connecting, being in a social support system. And then sometimes you do need help to get rid of some of the drivers, things like heavy metals or infections like Lyme, which you said you had, or mold, which I had and almost died from a couple of years ago, allergens, those are the things that actually

you might need a little help with. But if you're suffering out there, if you're listening and you're wondering, you know, what's the road? How do I get better? You know, I've been told that this is just something I have to live with, that I have to manage, that I have to take medications for.

I encourage you to just have hope because if you are suffering, there is a road for most people to recover. And functional medicine is the GPS system to figure out how to navigate that road. And it really is a powerful model. It's not the answer to everything, but it is a far better mousetrap than we were trained with in conventional medicine. And it's what I've done for the last 25 years. It clearly is what helped you recover. It helped me recover. And I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing if I didn't actually understand the body in that way. And every day, you know, I remember first practicing functional medicine.

I wasn't like for you, but I was like, I would tell people to do this stuff that was sort of outside the box of what I learned in medical school. They'd have severe migraines, you know, 25 times a month. Or they'd be having severe irritable bowel, or they'd have, you know, an autoimmune disease. And, and I would tell them to do, you know, change your diet, do this, do that. And they'd call me back six weeks later, whatever. And they're like, I'm better. And I'm like, you are really? I'm like, what? That worked? Okay, fine. I was like, I really took me years and years to expect that people would get better because I was like, well, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just going to try this stuff. And it seems to make sense and

it's not going to hurt them. And people just recovered. And it just was amazing to me. I mean, I had a woman the other day who came in with vestibular migraines, which is a terrible kind of migraine where your head is spinning, you're in vertigo. It's like you were saying you experienced, she had severe migraines 25 times a month. She had severe other quote, other symptoms. So she was seeing the neurologist for that, but they weren't worrying about her gut. And she was having severe bloating, fluid retention, you know, digestive issues. She had anxiety. I mean, she couldn't even come in my office without the door being open. Wow.

And she was a really smart young woman who wanted to go to be a nurse practitioner. She was a nurse and it wasn't in her head. And she was on all these antidepressants and psychiatric medications and anti-anxiety medications and vertigo medications, migraine medications, you know, the drill. And I'm like, well.

And then medications to counter those side effects of those medications. Right. And so, you know, I just followed the basic map of how do you help people restore health and function? And for her, I was like, well, you know, she's got a lot of inflammation going on. I could see her, she was swollen, she had fluid retention, she had gained a bunch of weight. And, you know, I wasn't treating her migraine. I was helping restore her gut function. And I was helping her eat a diet that was anti-inflammatory. And I was helping her with certain nutrients she was low in. And I never really had a patient like this before that was that severe that had stimulant migraines. And in functional medicine, it doesn't matter if you've never seen the disease before, because if you follow the principles of removing

the stuff that's causing a problem and adding in the stuff that creates health, the body knows what to do. It's super smart. Right. The body figures it out. We don't have to. No. And so I just fixed her gut. She had really bad, I gave her stuff to clear out SIBO. She had bacterial overgrowth. She had fungal overgrowth in her gut. So I cleared all that out. I restored her gut with a gut health shake, which contained polyphenols and cranberry and pomegranate and green tea. And I gave her probiotics and prebiotics and just fiber and things to help her gut.

A few basic nutrients. Got her on an anti-inflammatory gluten-dairy-free diet. Came back six weeks later, I didn't recognize her. I mean, all the flu went out of her body. She was bright and alert. She was funny and had not had a migraine and was symptom-free. Her gut was completely better.

And she was off the medication. That's amazing. But I don't want to discount also the fact that you acknowledged her and validated her. I mean, which is a huge piece of healing. I'm like, you're not crazy. You saw her. Yeah, I saw her. Right. I mean, she was in bed and she, I mean, I could tell she wasn't a malingerer or she

wasn't a whiner. Right. But she gets, it's easy to dismiss these patients and go, well, it's just, you know, they're just psychological or whatever. Just give them some meds and kick them on the right. But then they're psychological because they feel miserable. Well, that's very important.

I mean, right, right. I'm like, wait a minute. Like, okay, we call these things. If your body isn't working, your brain isn't gonna work. The difficult patients are the ones who are really suffering, right? That's why they keep coming back. That's why they're irritable.

That's why. And your doctors called you a difficult patient. Yeah, I mean, I call myself a difficult patient. You wanna be a difficult patient. Yeah. I mean, I call myself a difficult patient. You want to be a difficult patient. But it's the difficult relationships that force us to grow. I mean, we have to start asking the question like, wait a minute. And I would say it's like any other relationship, right? Even if one person is the one who's sort of being dismissed and is kind of miserable, I mean, both people in the relationship know it's not, something's not working. So even before I got sick, I knew that the tools that I had in my doctor's bag were really limited. I already knew that, but that's kind of the best I could do.

Yeah, but you didn't know what else was out there. I mean, you and I both have the experience of being knocked to our knees in order to figure out a different way. I don't wish that on all our medical colleagues. But I do wish they would understand that the paradigm that we learned is only part of the story. Yes. And that, yeah, everything I learned in medical school is useful and I use it and I rely on it. But there's another meta layer of understanding how the body is organized

because those are just the piece parts. Like what does the puzzle look like when you put it together? That's what functional medicine is. And those are just the piece parts. Like what does the puzzle look like when you put it together? That's what functional medicine is. And it's such a powerful model. It's what we do at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox. You know, I have three other doctors, two PAs, five nutritionists, and we work with people from all over the world. We've like, you know, probably over 70 years of clinical experience together. And it's just amazing the kinds of things that people can recover from. And now you're doing that in your own practice. You've written this great book, Brave New Medicine,

which is a really fabulous story about how you as a physician understood that there's a different way to heal your illnesses and your autoimmune disease and all this weird nonsense that we don't know how to deal with in medicine. Right. And sort of just what does it look like the lived experience um you know to your point though i mean um i um right at the end of my book about this essay this famous essay called arrogance back in i think it was 1980 in the the um new england journal of medicine editor at that time or he had been retired ing Engelfinger. He was dying from cancer and had written this very provocative essay where, I mean, he was talking about arrogance at the time. And I would say arrogance is probably not the vice of today. I think it's more

just not seeing, right? Not seeing or denial. A little bit of hubris, a little bit of denial. A little bit, right. And he had posed the question, what would medicine look like if one of the prerequisites for all doctors entering medical school was that they had a serious illness? Yeah. What would it look like, right? Yeah. And so, yeah, Would there be more empathy? Would there be more belief?

I mean, like this, this, one of the central questions in my life has always been around belief. Yeah. Right. Like what is true and what is not true? How do we make ourselves believe things if we don't? Yeah. And yeah.

And like, how do, how do we start with that? Like as a doctor, like just believing all patients. And that's really important because, you know, as physicians, we were subliminally trained to have a dismissive attitude to many categories of patients. You know, if you had irritable bowel, well, that was in your head. Or if you had chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia, or if you had even more serious illnesses like Crohn's or colitis, well, that was psychological. Yeah, it manifested physically, but these were troubled patients.

Right, right. I mean, which is so ironic and unfortunate for everyone. I mean, I know for myself and many of my colleagues and friends that I know went into medicine to alleviate suffering and, you know, how much of it are we perpetuating? And, you know, one of the themes also that comes up over and over again with chronic illness, and I know for myself too, is, you know, reaching that point of hopelessness or helplessness. And there becomes a learned helplessness on top of that when you get punted from doctor to doctor to doctor.

So are we perpetuating illness as well through this system? And, you know, I, so yeah, would I want doctors to go through this? I mean, hell no. But, you know, so I sort of turned that question on its head. Like, what would medicine look like if doctors, nurses, healthcare practitioners had an immersion in wellness? Yeah. Like, what if doctors, right, were taught to sleep well? What if doctors were fed well in their training? What if doctors, you know? No, I'm serious. Oh my God, it's so terrible.

What would it look like? What would medicine look like if we could experience- Sleep and lunch are considered weaknesses in residency training. I know that, I know that. And, but would we have that experience then to be able to translate to our patients, right? I mean, we're ultimately teachers. Well, that's what functional medicine is. It's a science of creating health.

Yes. And when you do that, disease goes away as a side effect. Yes. And you're right. I think if you look at most healing traditions, a lot of shamans or healers went through some crisis, some health crisis, some trauma, some initiatory illness that was sort of help, you know, sort of select them to be healers. We don't do that anymore. We just have the hazing of medical school.

But that makes us all kind of unwell in a way. And we sort of then normalize that. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And then we sort of pass it on, right? It's a kind of trauma. It is. It's a kind of trauma. And then we pass of pass it on, right? It's a kind of trauma. It is.

It's a kind of trauma and we pass it on to our patients inadvertently. So how do we break that cycle? And, you know, I would say one thing though, just to bring such little energy that it was easy still for me to have hope. I called it hope fatigue. Yeah. To try another thing. To try something else. To try again.

And what I ended up discovering that was easier was to release. So instead of sort of going, trying to think positively, trying to be optimistic, which were things that, you know- You kind of have to surrender to it. Absolutely. I mean, because those qualities feel like sunlight to someone who's suffering from a migraine, right? Like, I know I need that sunlight, but it is killing me right now. Yeah. You know, my husband was this sort of embodiment of resilience and confidence and optimism. I couldn't stand to be around him.

You know, it was stressful from where I was. And so what I ended up stumbling across was, oh, my God, like I'm carrying around a lot of grief. Okay, yes, I've got, you know, my lost identities and time lost and all the suffering. But like, you know, all this stuff came out, all the suffering but like you know all this stuff came out right i went to a grief ritual i didn't i didn't know these things existed but you know back generations ago in cultures those like soul detoxes yeah right like how do we do that that's right like it's not a body i love that detox. How much are we carrying that is subconsciously programmed into the way our DNA folds, you know, into the way our neurons are wired. And so, you know, and grief is non-discriminant.

So, like, I thought I was going for my health, you know, just the loss of function of my body. Yeah. And all this stuff came out, cobwebs, right? Yeah. of my body. And all this stuff came out, cobwebs, right? From childhood, from residency, relationships in the past. And then the shame, the shame of having this mysterious illness, the shame of being a doctor who cannot figure it out. And that was really, really healing. So then, as you say, as a side effect, what ends up filling up that space is health. Yeah. Right?

It is, oh, I suddenly become more optimistic. I have more hope because there's space for it. Yeah. It's not something that I have to will myself in order to get because I couldn't do that. That's amazing. Yeah. And so you've taken all you've learned. You've been through so many different cycles of struggle and you've recovered and come back on

top and you've written this book. And what's beautiful is it's really your story, but it's an inspiring story. And it's sort of a window into both sort of how in traditional medicine, we kind of miss the boat a lot of times and how you can on your own become empowered to sort of find a brave new medicine. But you also share at the end of the book, you know, 15 steps that are about healing, about how to care for your body and how to heal. So in a way you sort of make it really simple for people in how to actually create health for themselves. Can you take us through those? Yeah. So, I mean, a lot

of the steps were ones that we covered. And so the way that I sort of live through the experience of my healing journey is, you know, it was really through the journal that I kept. And the journal was something that I'd kept since I was a little girl. And so when I began, when I sort of made that shift, like I've got to try differently, go back to pathology 101, review inflammation. Okay. What's my first step? Like, this is going to be my experiment. I'm an N of one. I'm my own doctor. I'm my own patient. Life is experiment. Step number one, ask new questions. And so then, you know, number two, I think was the resetting my inner clock, right? Number three.

So I kind of, yeah, I just build it stepwise as I'm living through my healing journey. So it's a how-to, but it's sort of an organic. But it's really detailed. I mean, it's really beautiful. It's simple. Like, how do you set your rhythm? How do you sleep? How do you give yourself permission to receive and have people help you, right? Right, right. Which was, yeah, was really challenging. Because I stopped driving for quite a while. And yeah, most people were just like, oh my God, that's just horrible. You know, like how do you get, you know, you can't even get around. And you know what? I started thinking

about like, who can I carpool with? Who can get a ride? It ended up being a strange community building experience. Yeah. We can do it ourselves. I can do it myself. Right. And then I realized also, I don't have to live my life so fast, right? I can slow things down. I can wait for a carpool. So there's a lot of things I think that happen with healing. Like for instance, a diet, I might prescribe a diet that's healing for myself or my family or my patients. And maybe it's less about the diet per se than just getting them to connect to their food, right? Getting them to connect to their bodies and they're paying attention and they're treating themselves with love. Like,

so how much is that? Right. Beautiful. Yeah. Get a daily dose of nature, detoxify your house and yourself. And it's really well laid out and very simple. It's almost like you've taken all the concepts of functional medicine and

traditional Chinese medicine and everything you know about healing and integrated medicine and put it into really very practical, simple things. And some of them are kind of strange, like let your intuition tell your thinking mind where to look next, right? Now, that's a quote that I took from Jonas Salk, the inventor of one of the polio vaccines. And that was another thing that was was sort of reassuring to me when I sometimes when I thought, well, I'm getting too woo-woo out there, but really looking at scientists, forefathers of modern medicine who were, they let their intuition sort of guide their discoveries. So I was like, oh, again, it's not woo-woo. Why are we calling it woo-woo?

It's actually very human. Yeah, it's so true. We've just forgotten it in our culture. And there's so many other great things, you know, like heal your gut and the basics of a 30-day diet reset, which is super important because diet drives so much disease, as people know.

Yes. And breaking old habits and just having pleasure and looking for root causes. I mean, surviving love and loss, really, really fantastic. Thank you. Finding your story. These are just real nuggets of wisdom around healing that you've really come to the hard way. Yes. Practicing pleasure is my favorite prescription.

Yeah, that's a good one. It's amazing how many patients won't do that unless a doctor prescribes it to them. Yeah, it's really true. I think we don't prioritize fun and play and joy. It's so great. Well, you just have shared such a wonderful story about how sick you could be, how sick we get, and how much illness there is, and your own road out of it.

I think it's inspiring for so many people. And I think I really feel like that's really why you do what you do. It's why I do what I do. It's why we spend time teaching and sharing because there are so many people who suffer unnecessarily, who suffer needlessly, and there is a way forward. So thank you for sharing that. Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, I would just, you know, this taboo about doctors not disclosing their health problems. Yeah, there are a lot of doctors suffering out there too. It's so true.

Yeah. My advice to doctors listening is to tell your story, share with your patients. Absolutely. Don't have this doctor-patient relationship, which is sort of very distant and estranged. Be a human. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever

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