The Dr. Hyman Show - Getting To The Root Causes Of Why We Are All Tired with Dr. Elizabeth Boham

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

Getting To The Root Causes Of Why We Are All Tired | This episode is brought to you by Essentia Twenty to thirty percent of patients visit their primary care physician with the chief complaint of fatigue; they're tired all the time and want to feel better. Unfortunately, conventional medicine rarely allows for physicians to spend enough time with patients to explore the many reasons someone might be experiencing fatigue. Functional Medicine, on the other hand, uses an extensive personal history to look at a patient’s patterns over his or her entire lifetime and connect the dots. In this episode, Dr. Hyman sits down with Dr. Elizabeth Boham to discuss the common drivers of fatigue and the Functional Medicine approach to treating it.   Elizabeth Boham is a physician and nutritionist who practices functional medicine at The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Through her practice and lecturing she has helped thousands of people achieve their goals of optimum health and wellness. She witnesses the power of nutrition every day in her practice and is committed to training other physicians to utilize nutrition in healing. Dr. Boham has contributed to many articles and wrote the latest chapter on Obesity for the Rankel Textbook of Family Medicine. She is part of the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine and has been featured on the Dr. Oz show and in a variety of publications and media including Huffington Post, The Chalkboard Magazine, and Experience Life. Her DVD Breast Wellness: Tools to Prevent and Heal from Breast Cancer explores the functional medicine approach to keeping your breasts and whole body well This episode is brought to you by Essentia. I didn’t even realize how bad my old mattress was until I upgraded it to an Essentia Organic Mattress. From now until September 8th, Essentia is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners an exclusive offer 25% off your purchase along with two free pillows (a $300 value)! Just go to myessentia.com/hyman. In this episode, Dr. Hyman and Dr. Boham discuss: The importance of getting a patient’s full-life timeline when treating fatigue How factors such as lifestyle, sleep, diet, exercise, stress, gut health, chronic infections, environmental toxins, hormones, and more can influence energy levels  Dr. Hyman’s personal experience with chronic fatigue syndrome due to mercury poisoning Common drivers of fatigue, including nutritional deficiencies, genetic variations, digestive issues, sleep apnea, and more Specific patient cases in which they have treated fatigue How acid blocking drugs (PPIs) can affect amino acid absorption and lead to energy loss Learn more about The UltraWellness Center’s upcoming “Eliminate To Feel Great” program at https://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/2020/08/17/eliminate-to-feel-great/ Additional Resources: A Simple Diet Experiment That May Solve Most Of Your Health Issues with Lisa Dreher https://drhyman.com/blog/2020/08/22/podcast-hc24/ Elimination Diets: Still the Gold Standard? https://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/2020/08/21/elimination-diets-still-the-gold-standard/ Supplements: Useful Or Useless? with Dr. Elizabeth Boham https://drhyman.com/blog/2020/07/19/podcast-hc19/ Dr. Hyman’s 10-Day Reset https://getfarmacy.com Dr. Hyman’s 10-Day Reset - Free Guide https://getfarmacy.com/free

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We're seeing nutritional deficiencies. I see a lot of genetic variations that influence somebody's energy level. We see digestive issues that influence energy level. We see chronic infections. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now time and again, I hear my patients say

they're eating super clean, they're exercising, and they're doing a lot of great things for their health, but they just cannot lose weight or find the energy they're really looking for. And when asked about sleep, they launch into a laundry list of reasons why they don't have time to get enough of it, or they say they just never wake up feeling fully rested. Now, I've been there too, and I used to think that MD stood for medical deity and meant I didn't have to follow the same sleep rules as every other human being. I stayed up late working long shifts in the emergency room

and I ignored the demands of my body to rest. But the lack of high quality sleep is associated with tons of health problems like insulin resistance, obesity, cardiovascular disease, mood disorders, poor immune function, lower life expectancy. And when I wised up, I noticed an amazing change in my health and my overall well-being. What we need to do is ready our systems physically and psychologically for sleep. We need to guide our bodies into a deep healing rest. And we really need to create the right environment and a relaxing haven in order to get optimal sleep. For me, my own sleep quality really improved when I made my bed an oasis that I can't wait to get into every night. All the calming activities in the world aren't going to help you sleep better if your bed is uncomfortable.

And I didn't even realize how bad my old mattress was until I upgraded it to an Essentia organic mattress. It's incredibly comfortable and non-toxic and it's totally revamped my bedroom. As someone who recently had back surgery, I find it's the perfect balance of support and softness. I also run hot and the Essentia has a chemical-free cooling core. It's a cooling surface that provides the best environment for deep restorative sleep. Now, a lot of people don't realize that most traditional mattresses contain a slew of chemicals that off-gas into your home, leaving you with poor air quality and lots of health risks. Essentia mattresses are certified by the Global Organic Textile and Global Organic Latex Standards, two of the designations that mean an ultra clean sleep. Essentia is also the

highest scoring mattress when it comes to health and recovery sustainability. Now, none of us can afford to ignore the importance of sleep. So make bedtime something you're excited about every night and check out the organic mattresses for Essentia for a safe and comfortable night's rest. From now until September 8th, they're offering the Doctors Pharmacy listeners an exclusive offer of 25% off your purchase price, along with two free pillows. That's a $300 value. Just go to myessentia.com forward slash hyman. That's myessentia, M-Y-E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A.com forward slash hyman. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever been tired and you

have fatigue, you better listen up because this conversation is going to make a lot of sense to you when nothing else does. Because it's with our leading physician, the medical director at the Ultra Ballinus Center, my good friend and colleague for decades now, Dr. Elizabeth Boehm. She is a star in her own right. She's an MD, a nutritionist, exercise physiologist. She went to Cornell, where I went also, and she's on the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine and teaches all over the

world and is one of the leading stars in functional medicine. Clearly, I think if I were sick or any of my family members were sick, we'd go to Liz. I'm just so excited to have you back on the podcast. Today, we're doing a special episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy called House Call, which is basically a series to discuss how we deal with problems in functional medicine differently than conventional medicine and what we do here at the ultra wellness center and today we're going to talk about fatigue so it's kind of this amorphous idea of well being tired and it's a common symptom but uh we don't do so well with it in medicine, right? Yeah.

Yeah, Mark, thank you so much for having me. Fatigue, they estimate that 20% to 30% of patients who come into their primary care doctor's office come in with the chief complaint of fatigue. I'm tired. I'm tired. And so it's a lot of us. It's a lot of people that we see, a lot of people we see here at the Ultra Wellness Center. One of their main reasons they want to come in is, I'm tired and I want to feel better.

So I think functional medicine is really well, you know, I think it's great for whatever we're working on, but I think it works really well with fatigue. You know, in conventional medicine, you know, all of our training, we were really focused a lot on acute care medicine and, you know, not enough on chronic conditions. And definitely, we're not often given, physicians aren't often given enough time to really delve into a topic like fatigue, which can be so complex. You know, so one of the great things in functional medicine is we really focus on, we really focus on getting that timeline of the patient's history, which is so important because it really helps us determine what's going on with that patient. Why do they have that fatigue? And I think that's really critical. And one of the great things about functional medicine is we talk about their timeline, which just means, you know, their whole life story. You know, what was their life like as a child,

even when they were a fetus? You know, what kind of illnesses did they have when they were younger? How did they feel when they were in their 20s? All of that really influences what's going on now and how we work with them when they come in saying, I have fatigue, I'm tired. You're right. And, you know, I think this is something that I sort of had the insight about decades ago with functional medicine, that when we were trained in medical school, we were trained to create an exclusive history. In other words, focus on the problem. If it doesn't, well, you go to the headache doctor, you go to the skin doctor, I'm going to take care of your heartburn. And we don't connect the dots. Functional medicine is an inclusive history where we look at every possible symptom, every possible exposure, where you were born, when you were born, whether you're breastfed, whether

you took antibiotics, whatever it is. And we try to connect the dots and see what you call the timeline of how this all leads to the person being sick in this moment. And when you do that, you often get to see the answer. And the patient goes, oh, yeah, when this happened, when I was 23, then I got, oh, yeah, I was in Thailand and I got sick and I've never been the same. And so we begin to hear these stories and you begin to connect the dots. But when you go to a traditional doctor with fatigue, what do they do? Yeah. Right. They get a battery of tests. Maybe they'll do a quick physical exam, do some of the basic tests. And then a lot of times those basic tests look normal.

I mean, that's what patients come to me all the time with. Yeah, my tests were normal. And they said, maybe you have some depression. And I don't blame physicians. So Prozac is the treatment for depression. I mean, for fatigue, right? Maybe you've had a little depression. And it's not that we're, you know, they don't blame physicians for that. They're given a very short amount of time to deal with this very complex symptom. You're basically anemic.

You have low thyroid. Yep. Or you are depressed or maybe you have cancer that we have to look for. But there's a short list. And if those things don't pan out, there's not a lot to offer. Yeah. Or they give you Ritalin. Right.

Or maybe they give you Provigil. Right. There's drugs, but they often don't work. So, I mean, I think what's great with functional medicine is we really, as I talked about, take that really detailed timeline and history and look to connect the dots. And we're wondering, okay, what's going on, of course, with that person's lifestyle? You know, of course, we're paying attention to sleep and diet and exercise and stress. But we're also thinking about all the different systems in the body and how they're influencing and diet and exercise and stress.

But we're also thinking about all the different systems in the body and how they're influencing somebody's energy level. So everything from, is that person dealing with a chronic infection, right? So chronic infections, we've got to think about and delve through. Like Lyme disease or a virus. Absolutely, right?

Yeah. And they're not acute infections. They're these things that are lingering, smoldering things that don't make you acutely ill, but that are staying there affecting your overall health. That can happen a lot of times, right? And sometimes acute infections turn into chronic infections. And sometimes people just have these smoldering infections in the digestive system that can really wear their body down, an overgrowth of yeast or some

bacteria and the body's just chronically having to fight that. And it's exhausting. So your microbiome can make you tired if it's not healthy. If it's not healthy, we see that all the time. Right. So, um, and then of course we're paying attention to the mitochondria, you know, that's the powerhouse of those cells that take your food and turn it into ATP or energy. And so there can be many reasons why those organelles aren't working well. And so we're thinking about that. Toxins. Yes.

Infections. Just genetic variations. And I think that's another thing that's really important that we pay attention to is, you know, does this person have some variations in their genetics that are influencing their energy and their requirement for certain nutrients? We, of course, pay attention to hormones, you know, the thyroid hormone, the adrenal hormones, the female and male hormones. We want it, we take it, we really are looking at all aspects of somebody's health. And that I think is really helpful to determine, okay, what is the cause for this individual person? Yeah, because fatigue doesn't

really mean a whole lot other than I'm tired. And it could be caused by so many things. For me, it was mercury. Yes. It was mold. And then it was my gut. And then, you know, I think I've become an expert in fatigue because I had chronic fatigue syndrome, which is like the most extreme version of it, where you can barely drag yourself out of bed and barely function. You have brain fog. I mean, that's the extreme version of it. But it's really a continuum. And we can really drive people to a solution by being these medical detectives that look at all these variables that people really don't look at. It's so important to ask those questions, right, of how long has this been going on?

Did it just start? Has it been your lifelong, you know, have you been life, like your whole life been a little more tired than, you know, somebody, you know, other people that you know? You know, if you're always feeling a little tired or is it some acute change that happened? When did it happen? Are you tired all the time? Are you tired certain times of the day? Are you tired in certain locations, right? And not in others when you think about things like

toxins and molds, right? So there's so many interesting questions that we have to ask. And so one of the things, you know, at the Ultra Wellness Center that we do is, you know, we've got one of our PAs will take a really detailed history before you even see the doctor that helps us, right? So, you know, like 40 minutes or even more getting your whole story. Well, first you fill out a whole patient packet, which is long and extensive. Then the PA gets a long history from you. And then we get a lot of time with you as well. And all of that really helps to put together your individual story, which is really what's helpful. You see the whole patterns, right? You see all these patterns, you connect the dots, you see how things are linked up. And then you can decide to dive into

different areas of testing, right? You say, well, you know, I had a tick bite when I was, you know, five years ago, and I've never been right since. Or, you know, like I love tuna fish, and I live on Martha's Vineyard and I eat swordfish every other week. And, you know, you go, like I love tuna fish and I live on Martha's Vineyard and I eat swordfish every other week. And, you know, you go, maybe it's mercury. Or, you know, you ask other questions related to their, for example, hormones. Well, you know, how's your libido and sex life? And if you're a guy, your testosterone goes down. That could be it. Or maybe your thyroid is not working.

Or maybe, you know, we look at your nutritional status because, you know, vitamin D can cause fatigue if you're low in vitamin D. So we kind of really do a comprehensive map based on your story, and that directs us to exactly what to test. And what are the kinds of things that you found are the common drivers of fatigue for patients? Oh, there's so many, and we can go through a few cases. But nutritional deficiencies, huge. You'd think that we were adequately,

we had adequate nutritional status, but so many of us don't, whether it's because of digestive issues and we're not absorbing well, or just inadequate intake, or we're dealing with some sort of chronic toxin exposure that's wearing down our body. Or eating processed food, or the soil's depleted.

Oh my goodness, right? I mean, the average apple you eat has been stored for a year. Yeah. Go pick an apple from a tree and go eat one that's been in a warehouse for a year. Very, very different experience. Yeah. So I mean, of course, we're seeing nutritional deficiencies. I see a lot of genetic variations that influence somebody's energy level. We see digestive issues that influence energy level. We see chronic infections and of course, toxins. Heavy metals. Heavy metals. You know, and I think it's really great. Some patients even come in with their

timeline, you know, and sometimes that's so helpful because they write down, you know, over the years when certain things happened in their health history. And then you can look at that and, again, you start to see some of these patterns. Yeah. And so when when i uh you know remember when i had chronic fatigue i you know went to doctor after doctor after doctor and they're like well there's nothing wrong or your test normal or this is a little off or that's a little off but nothing really and yeah you know take some prozac you know here's something for sleep right you know and it's just it's so frustrating as a patient to go through this

litany of doctors and not really getting an answer and you know and i think that the fatigue you don't often treat directly because you know you yeah you can take provigil which will sort of make you more awake or you can take ritalin or adderall which is like a you know stimulant to help you have more energy but but those are sort of like beating a dead horse. You have to figure out what's really going on. And, and I think, um, you know, when I, when I first sort of discovered what happened with me was the mercury was the thing that was driving it and, and it created a whole cascade of problems. So it affected my gut, it affected my immune system. So I was chronically inflamed. I started developing all these rashes and all these sores and all these things around

my eyes would look like a raccoon if I ate certain foods, I'd get bloating. And I also developed real cognitive issues and real trouble thinking and focusing and fatigue. And I realized that these insults that happen affect all the different systems in your body. So when you're diagnosed with something with fatigue, it's all the other symptoms and all the other pieces that give you the clues about what's really going on for this person. So it's not like one treatment for fatigue. There's dozens and dozens, depending on what you find with that story. Right. And that mercury for you just depleted your glutathione

stores and that then influenced all these other aspects of your health yeah right poison my mitochondria right and uh you know turned out i had a um a gene that affects my muscle enzymes my energy cycle and my mitochondria yep and at least to have an easier ability to be damaged by it which is why i had this elevated thing called cpk which is a muscle enzyme and it was it was this abnormal test but it wasn't really so severe that it was a disease, but it wasn't normal. And they're like, well, I don't know what's wrong. You know, like, we can figure that out using the roadmap of functional medicine. I think it's so interesting how some people just need more support than others in certain areas.

And, you know, we talked about this on another podcast about supplements. And I think that's what the key is, is when you figure out for that individual person where they need that extra support in a personalized way, it makes all the difference in the world. Yeah. I remember I was giving a lecture at Canyon Ranch one year and I'm like, this guy's like, you know, I'm always tired. I don't know what to do. I said, how many hours do you sleep? He's like six. I'm like, sleep eight. That'll be know what to do. I said, how many hours do you sleep? He's like, six. I'm like, sleep eight. That'll be $500, please. Sometimes it's just that simple, right? I'm like, sleep. So yeah, quality of sleep also matters. You know, sleep apnea is another cause. It's often very undiagnosed in patients. Often undiagnosed and something we have to look for.

You know, we look for the signs of sleep apnea from somebody snoring, not remembering their dreams, their blood pressure being elevated, they're not having a heart, gaining weight, right? Because it causes the weight gain, it causes you to gain weight around your belly, signs of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, that high fasting insulin, the high waist to hip ratio. All those things make us think, okay, we got to think about sleep apnea. And then when we examine them, sometimes you can see clues on exam. And it's, it's, it's critical that we diagnose it and treat it because it makes a huge difference in not only how somebody feels, but their risk for all sorts of diseases, right? From, from diabetes to heart disease to, you know, sudden death for that matter. Sudden death, that's not a good outcome.

No, that's not good. So Liz, you had a couple of cases I wanted to share with everybody. And this 35-year-old woman with weight gain and diabetes, tell us about her and how she presented and what you found and how you worked up the case and what you did with her. So this woman came to see me when she was 35, and she had obesity and type 2 did with her. So this woman came to see me when she was 35. And she had obesity, and type 2 diabetes, and depression, and heartburn. She had a lot of other things too. But those were

some of the main issues. And actually, the reason she came to see us was because her depression medication wasn't working. And she's like, I really need to find another way to deal with this. So she had, when we looked at her timeline, right, she started gaining weight when she went to college in her 20s and started to put on a bunch of weight, enough weight also. And maybe she was at that point eating, making a lot of the wrong food choices. She also started to get some heartburn. And in her 20s, so she was put on a PPI. She was put on the acid blocker when she was,burn. And in her 20s, so she was put on a PPI. She was put on the acid blocker when she was in her 20s.

And she was still on that same acid blocker now, 15 years later. So she was put on the acid blocker in her 20s for her reflux. And those medications, when they came out, they were not designed to be taken forever. They were six weeks for an ulcer. We were told they are very powerful drugs that suppress acid production in the stomach that cause long-term complications and they do yep but we now have them for sale over the counter and doctors prescribe them like candy and they have serious complications if they're used liberally like that absolutely instead of figuring out why you have heartburn and she couldn't get

off it because she the heartburn kept coming back so here she was 15 years later um and and then she slowly and her you know after college the weight just kept coming on so she just kept gaining more and more weight her her um health was just deteriorating in a way she just got more and more tired and then you know in her later 20s she started to have some depression and she was you know, in her later 20s, she started to have some depression. And she was, you know, she was tried on a bunch of different antidepressants. And they didn't really make any difference. And then a couple years before she came to see me, she was diagnosed with type two diabetes. So she wasn't yet on her any medication for diabetes, she was trying to control it with diet. But her blood sugar was high enough to get the diagnosis of diabetes.

And she's only 35. And, you know, and she, and she just wasn't feeling good. So she said, you know what, I've got to try a different way. So she stopped her antidepressants because they weren't doing anything and came to see us. And so for me, you know, the, you know, looking at her timeline and putting together, connecting the dots, when I see somebody with fatigue and depression and on a PPI, on an acid blocker for so long, one of the things I really think about is protein and what is that person's protein status. Why is the acid blocker a problem

for protein? Right. So you need acid in your stomach to break down your food. And it starts, acid also encourages a lot of our digestive enzymes to work, which is all really necessary for the body to break down its protein into amino acids that you can absorb. And then when the body absorbs those amino acids, they get used in the body for all sorts of different things, from healing your skin to making muscle, but also they're used to make your neurotransmitters. Your happy mood chemicals. Absolutely, right?

So they make your serotonin and your dopamine and your GABA, which help you focus and have energy and feel happy. That sounds good. Yeah. Focus, energy, and feel happy. I want some of that. So when you take an acid blocker, you're decreasing your ability to break down your food and break down your protein and pull all those really important amino acids from your food. And for some people, and depending on the length of time you're on it, it can have a huge impact. It also impairs other nutrients like B12,

which also is a big cause of fatigue and depression. Yes. B12, it impairs the absorption of a lot of your minerals. So we see people develop osteoporosis after years of being on these acid blockers. So people will have low zinc, low calcium, low magnesium. And zinc is more important than ever with COVID-19 because it helps to- It's so important for the viral attachment replication yeah it's so important for your immune system right so so um so I was you know I saw that she had this depression the fatigue the acid blocker and I go oh I wonder what's going on with her protein so we we do this cool test where it looks at plasma amino acids,

which are those building blocks of protein in your body. So you can measure your amino acids in your blood. And we did. So we measured her amino acids and she was low in lots of amino acids. I wasn't surprised. And you think I was seeing a protein, how can she be low in amino acids? We don't see protein malnutrition in America. But we do see large numbers of patients with very low amino acids for a variety of reasons. Right, right. And so I suspect with her that the acid blocker was a huge reason for that, that she just wasn't breaking down her food well and absorbing her amino acids well. And so one of the things we were able to do was give her some of

these amino acids for the period of time. So we gave her a complex of amino acids. And then I also gave her some amino acids that were really focused on production of neurotransmitters. So things like tryptophan, 5-HTP, tyrosine, GABA, these things that help the body with production of those neurotransmitters. And you have people take the amino acids between meals because it's better absorbed that way. And that was really helpful for her. That helped her energy. She noticed a tremendous difference in her energy. It actually helped her hair.

She wasn't coming in complaining about it, but of course it helped her hair. And it helped her mood. So it made a big difference in the depression. So she started to be more active and move more. And then of course, we wanted to wean her off of the acid blocker. And with the type 2 diabetes, we also needed to work a lot on her diet also, of course. So we put her on a low glycemic diet. We took away all the refined carbohydrates and the simple sugars and made sure she was getting good quality protein when she was eating and good healthy foods. And with that shift in diet, we've been slowly able to wean her off of the acid blocker. Which is, again, another one of the things we've talked about on the podcast, which is reflux or heartburn, and it's such a problem.

These medications are in the top three of all medications prescribed in the world, and they are very powerful and strong, and they do have this negative impact on causing everything from small bowel overgrowth and digestive issues they cause irritable bowel mineral deficiencies osteoporosis pneumonia and so forth but what's what's interesting is that the way they're designed makes it almost impossible to get off of them and you have to know what you're doing so you have to sort of deal with the causes of what the reflux is, which is often diet.

Sometimes it's a bacteria. But then you have to slowly taper it off because there's something called rebound that happens. So you basically stop it and you get a flood of acid, and that causes more heartburn. So you really have to know what you're doing. And people are like, oh, I've tried to stop it, I can't. For those listening, I want you to understand that there is a way to get off of these drugs, but you can't just stop it like that. You have to know what you're doing and you have to figure

out what the cause is. So like you said, you change your diet. She doesn't need it anymore. Yep. And well, you know, she needed it less and less, but we still needed to wean her, like you said, because there's that rebound that occurs when you've been on it for a long time. So we did have to wean her and use some other things to help with, you know, we used a little DGL. We, you know, we, we had to use some other things to help her digestion in addition to diet. And, and we were able to, you know, wean her off of it. So in the long run, her absorption of her protein is going to be better. So her mood's going to be better. So, you know, and of course now her, her blood sugar is getting way much better and she's losing weight and she's feeling happier.

You know, it's, it's, it's pretty phenomenal. So, so fixing her gut and giving her some amino acids, that's not something that most doctors will do when someone comes in with depression or fatigue, but it's really how we, how we approach patients at the Ultra Voluntary Center. And really the beautiful thing about the model of functional medicine, because it can help so many people with challenging issues that nobody can figure out. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's fun to do.

It's so fun. Yeah. It makes the medicine interesting because I remember I used to work in the emergency room for years and I found it really boring. And how can you say it's boring to work in the emergency room? There's all this excitement and this and that i'm like well once you've learned how to the recipe for everything what's the recipe for asthma or back pain or heart attack or stroke or someone who's got you know needs to be intubated or someone who comes in with a fracture whatever dislocated shoulder it's it's like a cookbook

recipe so right then you just look at the nurse and you go heart attack treatment stroke treatment it's like they know it's it's you have to write the orders but it's like everybody knows what's going on there's no thinking involved right you make that you know it's a kidney stone you do this and and and and and most of the things you see in the emergency room are relatively common and relatively easy to diagnose and occasionally there's a puzzling case but it's kind of boring uh and and found that functional medicine is a constant puzzle that you have to figure out. Everybody's different. It's totally personalized. Talk about precision medicine, personalized medicine, precision nutrition, personalized nutrition. That's what we do. That's what this is about. And no two people are the same. And you could

have somebody else coming in with depression and fatigue and diabetes, and they could have a different story with different factors and different causes. And I think that's why so many physicians are turning to functional medicine. Because, you know, of course, they have this inquisitive mind, and they want their problem solvers, and they want to look at how all the patterns come together. And I think that's really what has attracted a lot of people to the training, because it's getting us back to really, you know, looking at that whole person and the individualized person. It's true.

I think there was some tech conference out west where they said functional medicine was sort of one of the leading trends in medicine and health care. So I think that's true. Yeah. So you have another case, Liz, of a 50-year-old woman who also had been fatigued her whole life and been working hard. And tell us about her and what was going on with that. Cause it was a little bit of a different story. Absolutely. So she was 50 when she came to see me. And the real reason she came in was her weight. She had started to put on weight and she was frustrated with it. So she came in because she's like, I want to get some of the

weight off. Um, but she also noted that she had significant fatigue. It wasn't fatigue that kept her from working. So she was actually a worker. She was very successful with her job. And then she had worked her whole life. And she sort of pushes through, you know, but more fatigue than, you know, other people around her. She'd note, you know, even when she said even when she was a kid, she had more fatigue than her friends. And she would want to sleep more and rest more and not exercise as much. So she noted she had fatigue her whole life. But over the last few years, it had gotten worse.

And with the weight gain, she said, let me go in. Let's deal with this. So she came in to see us. As I said, she works all day. She'd come home. She'd cook dinner. She'd have a couple glasses of wine to calm down. And, and, you know, just got up the next day and did it again. So I thought that was really interesting when you hear that on somebody's timeline, right, that long history of fatigue. Yeah, it makes you think about different things, right? And so, and also hers was like,

not the level of fatigue. I mean, she still was functioning, but just not at her optimal. So, so, you know, I started thinking, okay, let's look at her genetic makeup. Let's look at her genetic makeup. So we did a genetic panel that looks at, you know, some SNPs, some variations in somebody's genetic makeup that can influence diseases that they get as well as influence need for different nutrients or supplements. And so one of the things we found out is that she had a homozygous variation with the MTHFR gene. That's a mouthful. I know.

What is that? Break that down for us. So the MTHFR gene is a gene that encodes for an enzyme. And homozygous means she has two copies, one from her mom and her dad. She got both, which has a bigger impact in terms of her life. And so that's the methyl tetrahydrofolate reductase enzyme. Another mouthful. Yeah. And that enzyme is involved in methylation or transfer of methyl groups,

which is involved in multiple different processes in the body. Everything from detoxification to making your neurotransmitters to, you know, energy production. So there's, it's involved in so many pathways in the body. Yeah. So it's basically like this process where you take the carbon and three hydrogens, which is called the methyl group. And I think of like the currency of the body where there's all these chemical reactions happening, literally billions of reactions happening every second. And one of the main ones that is going on is this process of called methylation, which is a transfer of these groups. And there's genes that regulate the nutrients that are involved in pathways, the enzymes that regulate these chemical reactions. And so you can have variations in your ability to do that that can

have impact on your health. And that's what you're talking about. Absolutely. You know, it's been associated with depression. People who have a homozygous variation of this gene, the MTHFR gene have an increased risk of depression they have an increased risk of fatigue they have an increased risk of miscarriages neural tube defects and in so it's it's significant there's been a lot of research on this gene it's very interesting and it impacts lots of different systems in the body and that enzyme needs B vitamins so B vitamins are really crucial for that to all work well yeah and we know that when people have this genetic variation, they can't take folic acid. That's a synthetic form of,

of folate. That's in a lot of supplements. They can't take that, activate it and utilize it. Or even the stuff you get from food sometimes, right? Yeah. Some of the stuff from food too. I mean mean a lot of food is naturally methylated but like a lot of our processed food has had folic acid sprayed onto it and it's fortified it's fortified the body can't really utilize it they can't activate it and utilize it in the body and so people you know like commercially it can become toxic absolutely problem so if you actually think you're doing something good, taking folic acid, and you have this problem, you're actually doing harm. Right, right.

They're saying that it may build up in your tissue, might increase risk of cancer. There's a lot of things that we're looking at with that. So we always focus on the better quality supplements that include a better form of folate, the methylfolate. That was really important for her in this situation. We also gave her a good multivitamin, a good B complex, and we increased the folate in her diet with all the foliage, the folate rich foods, the green leafy vegetables, but all your vegetables are rich in folate. So we increased those in her diet. And we also, and we also dealt with, with, we cut back on her alcohol because

alcohol uses up your B vitamins. Yeah. So she was drinking two glasses of wine a night to calm down, right? You know, a lot of times, you know, people have these genetic variations, but they can express themselves in different times of your life, depending on what else is going on. So, you know, um, um, you know, probably what happened with her is over years of just drinking a little too much alcohol, it became more of an issue because she was wearing down her B vitamins and she needs those B vitamins for that methylation process to occur. So, you know, both of the things came together. She had her genetics and her environment and they made the fatigue even worse. We often see that gene express itself or people have problems when they go to college, for

example. So kids that have that genetic variation, and then they go to college and start drinking more, and then they start having problems with depression. That's a kind of a pattern that we sometimes see because you've got the change in diet, maybe not eating as much vegetables, then you're drinking more alcohol. Dr. My mom's not there making you eat your veggies, right? And you've got that genetic variation. And then, you know, you know, there's so many things that come into play.

But I think it's important when you look at that timeline that helps us give us those clues. Yeah, so true. And one of the other big causes we see is just what people are eating. Like if you're eating a nutrient depleted, ultra processed diet with tons of sugar and inflammatory foods, it tends to cause you fatigue. We see that all the time. You know, people eating the wrong foods at the wrong time, eating a lot of refined processed foods, causing their blood sugar to spike. And then they, then it drops, not eating enough protein. I mean, there's so much with diet that have a that has a huge impact and like you mentioned the inflammatory foods so foods that

may be causing inflammation for that person you know gluten and dairy and and so those are the big ones those are the big ones but and so a lot of times we'll do you know one of the biggest tools we have in our toolkit right is that comprehensive elimination diet and it can be really helpful for patients. They work with our nutritionists and get on a really good, you know, try an elimination diet. And many times patients will say, I started to feel so much better, right? And my energy improved. So true. And we actually are going to be running an online group Zoom elimination diet that's five weeks guiding you through that whole process. So people can try it and experiencing it. And I found this classically using elimination diets for decades in functional medicine is probably the most powerful tool we use to sort

of reset people. And nine times out of 10, works if it doesn't it means there's something else maybe they're low thyroid maybe they're heavy metals maybe they have lyme disease maybe there's something else going on but maybe eight out of ten to nine out of ten people will see a dramatic change in their health in a very short time and it's it's a great test and it's it's why it's a great test you know that's why i wrote the book the 10-day detox diet and created the program called 10-day reset which is a basic program you could do at home with online support where you eliminate the bad stuff, put in the good stuff, and you get to see what happens. And we always joke about something called FLC syndrome. It's when you

feel like crap, and that includes being tired. And that often goes away very quickly. And we sort of looked at a group of 1,000 people who went through this, and there was a 62% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in just 10 days. That's amazing. Weight loss and blood pressure coming down and blood sugar coming down. It's so funny to me as a doctor that even the smartest people don't connect what they eat with how they feel. All the time. We see that all the time. It's incredible to me. And I

think if you get people to just try something, so look, this isn't forever. Just do it for 10 days. Yep. You see what happens. They go, whoa, you know, I didn't even know I could feel so good. And one of my patients said, Dr. Hyman, I didn't know I was feeling so bad until I started feeling so good. And I think we were used to that, you know, elephant stand in our toe our whole life. And when it gets off, we go, oh, wait a minute. It doesn't have to feel so bad all the time. Yeah, it's phenomenal. It is, I think, the best tool we have.

And like you said, so many patients, they just get better with just the change in diet, which is phenomenal. And it's a great thing to try. Yeah, so I think people come to accept things like fatigue, oh, that's just me, or I'm just tired, or I'm stressed, or this or that. And I think what you're saying is that there is a way to navigate for each person to what the causes are, and then figure out a personalized plan to fix those causes. And in one patient, it was getting her off the acid blocker, giving her amino acids. Another patient, it was figuring out she had this genetic variation, needed special forms of B vitamins to increase her

neurotransmitter function and her overall sense of well-being. It's what makes functional medicine so much fun is being able to actually look at these puzzles and figure out for each person what it is. Because fatigue is just a symptom. It doesn't tell you what's going on. And I think it's one of those symptoms that we do really poorly with in traditional medicine unless you've got like a low thyroid or you've got anemia you know and they give you iron or a thyroid pill and it has to be really low and really anemic because the borderline stuff a lot of times as you know it's missed all the time right yeah so uh don't fret if you have fatigue there are answers and now at the wellness center here in Lenox,

we are doing virtual consults all over the world. It's easy to sign up. You go to ultrawellnesscenter.com, learn more. We'd love to help you out if you have a need. And if you've been loving this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you.

And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Thank you, Mark. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll

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