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

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Athletic Greens. 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.  Dr. Cynthia Li received her medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She’s practiced as an internist in many settings, including Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, San Francisco General Hospital, and St. Anthony Medical Clinic serving the homeless. She currently has a private practice in Berkeley, CA and is the author of, Brave New Medicine: A Doctor’s Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness. Dr. Terry Wahls is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner and a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa where she conducts clinical trials. In 2018, she was awarded the Institute for Functional Medicine’s Linus Pauling Award for her contributions in research, clinical care, and patient advocacy. Dr. Wahls was confined to a tilt-recline wheelchair for four years. She restored her health using a diet and lifestyle program she designed specifically for her brain and now pedals her bike to work each day. She is the author of The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles, and the cookbook The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Athletic Greens.   Rupa Health is a place for Functional Medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. You can check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.    Right now, Athletic Greens is offering my listeners 10 free travel packs of AG1 when you make your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman to take advantage of this great offer.

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 a lot of you out there are practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual person and

body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health. Looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables can help us find the most effective path to optimize health and reverse disease. But up till now, that meant you were usually ordering tests for one patient from multiple labs. And I'm sure many of you can relate how time-consuming this process was, and then it could all feel like a lot of work to keep track of. Now there's Rupa Health, a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty labs from over 20 labs like Dutch, Fibrin America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. Rupa Health helps

provide a significantly better patient experience, and it's 90% faster, letting you simplify the entire process of getting the functional medicine lab tests you need and giving you more time to focus on patients. This is really a much-ne in functional medicine space and I'm so excited about it. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out and look at a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's r-u-p-a-health.com. Now so many of my patients wait until they're sick to finally take care of their health. I've even had doctors, many doctors as patients, who just wait for their problems to get worse and worse and receive a diagnosis of a disease before they take any action. Well, that's not the path to health. We can live longer,

healthier, happier lives if we just prevent the imbalances in our bodies in the first place. And nutrition is a key part of this. And many of us don't get the optimal amounts of nutrients through our diet alone, even a whole foods diet. And then when you add in all the stressors we're up against, like work demands, toxins, lack of sleep, we're even more likely to have nutrient deficiencies. So one of the things I use every day to optimize my intake of vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients and pre and probiotics is AG1 from Athletic Greens. It's a comprehensive superfood powder with a special blend of high-quality whole food ingredients that work together to fill the nutritional caps in your

diet. It's specifically designed to support energy and focus, aid with gut health and digestion, and support a healthy immune system. I've made AG1 part of my daily ritual because I feel better knowing I have a little extra nutritional insurance to complement my healthy diet. It also gives me a nice boost without feeling overstimulated. I like to think of it as a huge leafy green salad shrunk down to a simple glass of water that I can take anywhere. Right now you can get a free one-year supply of Athletic Greens Liquid Vitamin D and five free travel packs of AG1 when you make your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com slash hymen. That's A-T-H-L-E-T-I-C greens, G-R-E-E-N-S dot com slash hymen. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the

producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Millions of individuals worldwide are affected by autoimmune disease, and rates continue to rise in record numbers. These conditions can rob you of your quality of life and leave you isolated and unable to do the things you enjoy most. On today's compilation episode, Dr. Hyman talks to two doctors, Dr. Terry Walls and Dr. Cynthia Lee. Both have successfully healed from autoimmune disease and are sharing what they learned from their own experiences. Let's dive in. So the first thing I did was I went back to basics. And so I did, you know, I did not suddenly just start seeing an acupuncturist or start you know trying energy

medicine or anything that's really alternative i was like okay no i'm a doctor off with crystals no i didn't i didn't uh and oh god meditation was like it was like pulling teeth so um no i went back to basics and i i took out my um pathology 101 textbook. Yeah. Right? Pathologic Basis of Disease, right? Robbins and Cotran. Exactly. That's what we all take in 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. 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, you know, about cellular repair and cellular injury. And I was like, wait a minute. And they actually talk about it. This was, you know about cellular repair and cellular injury and i was like wait a minute and and they actually talk about this was you know this was published i don't even know which edition but 20 years ago yeah where they say the one cause one effect paradigm does not work anymore yeah right we're in this this complex living environment where nutrition matters, where environmental toxins.

I mean, this is 20 years ago. 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. This continuum, this process and that yes i remember 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 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 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. Yeah. Inflammation in my gut.

Inflammation. In your brain. In my thyroid. Exactly. In your muscles. It doesn't qualify as a treatable disease inflammation right 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 like really crampy. Pagromyalgia. 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. After 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 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? What were 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 kind

of some one of those, you know, spontaneous remissions, which is one in a million. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, so what I ended up doing also was distancing myself from the diagnosis and the prognosis because it was more despairing. Yeah. My marriage was held together by a single thread. You know, 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, we have jet lag and that's why but i didn't know about um every organ having its own yes clock yeah own rhythm and even a whole field of chronobiology where the different kinds of chemo is better given at different times the day to work better i know this is in. 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, I'm going to wake up, you know, and get up out of bed, 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 steps. 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 I was brittle, 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 my dog i feed my dog at the same times every day right why don't i do that for myself you know you know and he gets walks now um at the same. 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, as a mother or a partner or a doctor, is 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, yeah, and, you know, a lot of it was just asking new questions. The diet piece, I thought I was eating, quote, healthy, you know, which was largely vegetarian. I was cooking meals, but also doing a lot of prepackaged meals, but, you know, 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, 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 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. 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 everything, if not everything, that we do as individuals and that we do as societies is how do I get more energy, right? My Qigong teacher was talking about that.

How do we get more energy? You know, whetherigong 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, nature, movement. 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 the 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. Yeah. And you need more of these heavier foods that 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 yeah and i was like more meats what are you talking about you know and this is before paleo days and all that um 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 going to eat like my ancestors ate. I'm going to prepare food the way my ancestors prepared so I can maximize nutrient density. Nutrient density equals more energy. Yeah. And then the gluten issue came up.

I was really skeptical of it. Well, 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. So there's no crosstalk there either, and this is in conventional medicine, right? 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 yeah and um so the but the gluten thing didn't actually arise i think i was partly in denial about it um i just you, there were lots of rabbit holes that I knew about and I just didn't want to go down as long as I was steadily getting better. It was my older daughter who she was five at 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, 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 on. Like I know how we eat. I know how she brushes. And I know cavities happen.

But like six? It just 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 and then in my research, I came across gluten and gluten causing enamel defects, gluten, 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 so we're just kind of going back and I realized I have to learn 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. I removed gluten, and I had massive withdrawal. Diarrhea, irritable bowel.

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 what i stuck with it and a week later it calmed down and then my health improved a notch so and not only that but you know we changed the way that

our whole family ate and um my younger daughter so my my older daughter's teeth like you know really basically resolved i mean they became really. Some of her cavities even filled, like they recalcified and didn't have to get filled. My younger daughter, who didn't really have any thing that, you know, was alarming, but she had like this perioral eczema, which is this dermatitis, which is very difficult to treat with steroids, I mean, which is how we treat most dermatitis. Anything red on the skin, they put steroids on it. Exactly. Why is the skin irritated?

Coming from the inside, not the outside. So she had that, and she would get asthma when she got colds. And both of those are totally resolved. Off of gluten. Well, off of gluten gluten but also doing the ancestral diet so often 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 um this stuff isn't written up um and it's very individualized so 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, you know, 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. 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 a good day the guy the guy who discovered that we should wash our hands before giving you know 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 semi-wise and it took 50 years for them to go oh yeah maybe

we should wash their hands oh my god no where's the science on that right yeah right well it was just it was it was an anathema 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. So yeah, I mean, I kind of just did this stepwise progression to get to the point where I was much more able to get out of the house. Yeah. was 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 yeah and um it was the pediatrician who said what are you interested and i said well you know i really i love the traditional chinese medicine paradigm 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 uh figures into it and she said um it sounds like you you know you're interested in functional medicine i was like what is that what's that what is that so um and she really strongly recommended that i go see the uh take this course with institute for functional medicine so i it was sort of a a bone for me right like i i could i was aiming to get healthy enough to be able to travel to go attend a conference and so um and it came to santa monica and i live in

in the bay area so it was it felt doable it wasn't yeah cross country and um and i went and it was i think i had that aha moment like you did when you, you know, listened to Jeff Bland. I was like, oh my God, oh my God, and like, this is something that's been developed and developing, and there's a framework. I don't have to make this up. No. 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 did you get better? Yeah. Yeah. Right? Okay, like which diet when?

Which supplements? What do I rule myself out for? What tests do I do? 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. I did. And you know, 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 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 um was also clairvoyant so she So she was a sustainable architect and her husband was one of the leading climate physicists. So there was this very- 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'd never experienced it up front and kind of never really were curious enough to go there. It was kind of woo to woo woo. Oh yeah, exactly. That's how I felt. 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, you know, some homeopathy. But nothing really touched her. And so Pia walks into her house and she starts coughing, coughing, coughing. And she said, you know, there's something going on. The energy in this house is really heavy. You know, do you guys feel it? And we were all looking at each other like, okay.

And she said, well, but it's really heavy. And so she, she said, do you mind if I just walk around? So she's walking around and she said, it's heaviest in the girl's 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 NEP syndrome anymore. NEP 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, you know what, maybe it's heavy because Sonia, my daughter, has 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 smudgeudge stick which i had never heard of before yeah it's a native american way of great energy exactly so she just goes around she said well you 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 just say whatever doesn't belong here needs to leave. And the thing that really convinced me to do it with her, 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. Never hurt 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 yeah so we just walked around and uh you know and i was kind of just being very um sympathetic too i've i sympathized with the seller, right?

That he had to leave his home. Yeah. So, you know, but 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 um 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 right but it just means that you can learn to 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. So 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. And a lot of it was, 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 know, 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 learning how to read sensations as messages and not just symptoms that were making me miserable. 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 it's something that I encourage my patients to develop if they're interested. It's simple. It just takes a lot of repetition and quiet listening.

So you found one of the causes was gluten, right? Mm-hmm. And toxins you got from China that you worked on getting rid of. Was there anything else? Yeah, so I did a lot of detoxes. So, you know, 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 I, you know 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.

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. And why organ meats? Why organ meats? Because, you know, organ meats are something people avoid, right? Liver, kidneys, thymus. Well, they don't know how to make them. They're actually delicious. It seems like the poor man's food, you know, kidney steak and kidney pie. Yeah. Yeah. And what, what, what, 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 that 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 and plants which are a little more difficult for us to absorb uh 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. Absolutely. 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 up in Alaska, 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. It is our family's favorite dish. So my family makes liver for me on my birthday because they know it's, it's a special meal for us. We just really love that a lot. For me, it was a poor man's meal because we were very poor in New York City when I lived as a kid with my mom. And we lived in a 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're 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 uh clams uh mussels uh those are all organ meats uh really quite quite uh quite delicious and what about the liver toxicity like of liver because people know why liver is number the wastebasket of the body where the toxins go isn't about to eat that so where the toxins go is really the fat of the animal. People like bacon. 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, liver get it from organic animal so um so terry just to summarize the dietary principles it's 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 sugars right more vegetables more 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. Correct. So we want to have lots

of greens. Greens are a great source of carotenoids, luteins, zeaxanthin, myozeaxanthin. 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, and 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.

And 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 a 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 lots of reasons to have your mushrooms. Okay. So that's the food part. Now you've taken this approach.

No, no, no. You didn't get the colors yet. So then we're also know three cups of colors uh and i want to have a wide okay wait before you go 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 no nine no no 18 18 servings nine cups 18 servings right you know and i'm not trying to have you you eat more than what your appetite will allow you. The point I'm trying to have you do is you eat some of 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 when 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. 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've studied them.

And one of the challenges for traditional medicine is that when we look at research, we 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 and say, 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 them. 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 important. 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 rest, it just doesn't make any sense. It's like, let's just, 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, it doesn't make any sense. So you, 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. And 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 uh declined what rejected the the protocol but the in 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 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, crazy diet, because it was, you know, excluding food groups and nobody could about the diet. It's a crazy diet because it's excluding food groups. And nobody could follow this diet. So then I had to do a pre-study. And fortunately, we had someone following the diet. That was me. So they analyzed my diet. And when the dietician analyzed my diet, she said, and she had done dietary analyses research for about 30 years.

She 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 do our little study. And now the people we enrolled had had a progressive ms secondary progressive prime progressive uh they were using canes and walkers they had severe fatigue uh nobody with cognitive decline got in because we excluded those folks we asked them to abandon 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 so seven 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 e-stem. 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. I 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 in 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. And we had a PhD student that helped me run that study. And 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, 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 7 to 1, 7 total fatigue in every aspect of your life, 1 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-ribble memory 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 MRIs.

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 their neurologists are like, wow, this is really amazing. 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. 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 some small studies about calorie restriction, fasting, ketogenic diets, the Paleolithic diet, Mediterranean diet, Swank diet, McDougall diet. So all these small studies. 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, Wall's diet, ketogenic diet, dietary guidelines that will include MRIs at baseline and at two years. And that will be a study funded by, again, a very generous donor. It's amazing though. You think this should be something funded by the NIH, right? This is, should be funding by the government. And, and, and now, you know, we're having private donors doing it, which is fine,

but it's unfortunate that, you know, 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 that's because there's this'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. 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,

you're not really treating MS specifically, right? 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, this can 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, said, Terry, you got to talk about it differently because you're making people upset. And what I learned 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 better. 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 is the story of the microbiome

and MS, and why is there such a link, and how does it all connect, and what do we do about it? Yeah. 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? 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 it's not way easier than you know 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 you know 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 see, oh, this person has extra gut inflammation or

they have leucomancy or they have this and that parasite. You know what is interesting, Marcus? 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 WALS 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, 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 in our immune system and across the spectrum of diseases and a spectrum of inflammation. And 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've 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 that 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? I 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, you know, 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 you know i was like i i really took me years and years to expect yes that people would get better because i was like well i don't know what i like i i really took me years and years to expect yes 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 right and people just recovered and it just was amazing to me yes 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 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 any anxiety medications and vertigo medications and migraine medications you know the drill and 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 vestibular 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.

Yeah. We don't have to. No. And so I just, you know, fixed her gut. She had really bad, I gave her stuff to clear out, you know, SIBO. She had bacterial overgrowth. She had like fungal overgrowth in her gut. She had really bad, I gave her stuff to clear out, you know, SIBO. She had bacterial overgrowth. She had like fungal overgrowth in her gut. So I cleared all that out.

I restored her gut with a gut health shake, which contained, you know, polyphenols and cranberry and pomegranate and green tea and gave her probiotics and prebiotics and, you know, just fiber and things to help her gut. A few basic nutrients, got her, you know, an anti-inflammatory gluten dairy-free diet came back six weeks later i didn't recognize her i mean she all the fluid went out of her body she was bright and alert she was funny and had not had a migraine and was you know symptom free her gut was completely better and she was off the medication that's amazing but i don't i don't want to discount also the fact that you acknowledged her and validated her yeah i mean which is a huge piece of i'm like you're not crazy you saw her yeah right i mean she was in bed and she i mean

i could tell she wasn't a malingerer she wasn't a whiner right but she get it's easy to dismiss these patients and go well it's just you know they're just psychological whatever just give them some meds and kick them on right right. But then they're psychological because they feel miserable. Right. Well, that's very important. Right. Right. I'm like, wait a minute. Like, okay, your body isn't working. Your brain isn't going to work. Right. 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 you and your doctors called you 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 something's not working. Yeah, that's right. 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 think, you know, I mean, you and I both had 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. No. But I do wish they would understand

that the paradigm that we learned is only part of the story. 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 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 ingelfinger he was dying from cancer and had written this uh very provocative essay where amy was talking about arrogance at the time and i would say it's probably arrogance is probably not the you know not the vice of today i think it's more um just not seeing right not seeing or denial it's a little of hubris, a little bit of denial. 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 um and yeah and like how do how do we start with that like as a doctor like just believing all patients and it'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 you know even more serious illnesses like Crohn's or colitis well that was psychological yeah it manifested physically but you know these were trouble patients right right I mean which is so ironic and unfortunate I mean for everyone I mean like 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 so yeah, would I want doctors to go through this? I mean, hell no. But so I sort of turned that question on its head, like what would medicine look like if doctors nurses health care 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 like so terrible what would it look like what would medicine look like if we could experience or consider weaknesses in residency training i know that i know that and uh but would we would we have that experience then to be able to translate to our patients right 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, you know, if you look at most healing traditions, a lot of shamans or healers went through some crisis, some health crisis, some trauma, something. Some initiatory illness, yes. It 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 and then we sort of pass it on right right? It's a kind of trauma. It is. It's a kind of trauma and then we pass it on to our patients inadvertently. So how do we break that cycle? And I would say one thing though, just to bring up related to that in terms of my healing was it was hard for me. I mean, even when I found functional medicine, I just had such little energy that it was easy still for me to have hope. I called it hope fatigue, right? To try another thing, 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 kind of have to surrender to it. Absolutely.

I mean, because those qualities feel like sunlight to someone who's suffering from a migraine. I know I need that sunlight, but it is killing me right now. 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, 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, right? Like how do we do that? It's not a body. I love that soul detox. How much are we carrying yeah it is subconsciously programmed into the way our dna folds you know into the way our our neurons are wired and so you know and grief is in is non-discriminate so like i thought i was going for my health you know just the loss of the function of my body yeah and all this stuff came out cobwebs right um from childhood from you know residency

relationships in the past and and then the shame the shame of having these this mysterious illness yeah the shame of being a doctor who cannot figure it out yeah and um that was really, really healing. So then, as you say, as a side effect, what ends up filling up that space is health. It is, oh, I suddenly become more optimistic. I have more hope because there's space for it. It's not something that I have to will myself in order to get because I couldn't do that. That's amazing.

And so you've taken all you've learned. You've been through so many different cycles of struggle struggle and you've recovered and come back on top and you've written this book. And, you know, what's beautiful is, you know, it's really your story, but it's an inspiring story. And it's a, it's, 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 step number one ask new questions um and so then you know number two i think was the resetting my inner clock right number three so i kind of um yeah i just build it stepwise as i'm living through

uh my healing journey so it's a how-to, but it's sort of an organic. But it's really beautiful. It's simple. Like, how do you set your rhythm? How do you sleep? Yes. How do you give yourself permission to receive and have people help you, right? Right. Right. Which was, yeah, it was really challenging. Because, you know, 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 god that's just horrible you know like how do you get a 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 rifle it ended up being a strange community building yeah experience and 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. 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. So how much is that? Right. Beautiful, you have to 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 put 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 so now that's it that's a quote from that i took from um jonah salk right one of the inventor of one of the polio vaccines. And that was another thing that was sort of reassuring to me when 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 why are we calling it woo woo it's actually very human yeah we've just forgotten it in our culture and there's so many other great things here 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 i mean these are just real nuggets of wisdom

around healing that you've really come to the hard way and uh practicing pleasure is my favorite prescription yeah that's a good 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 yeah we don't we don't prioritize fun and play and joy and right it's so great well you 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. Um, I think it was inspiring for so many people. And I, I think I really, uh, 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 suffered 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, this taboo about doctors not disclosing their health problems. Yeah. It's there are a lot of doctors suffering out there too. It's so true yeah i think you know my advice to doctors listening is to tell your story share with your patients absolutely don't have this you know doctor patient relationship which is sort of very distant and estranged be be a human let them know who you are and right that always works and it's right builds a relationship it helps them know that you've suffered through it. I mean, even if you haven't suffered, you can share something.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services.

If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.