The Dr. Hyman Show - How a Doctor Cured Her Autoimmune Disease with Functional Medicine with Dr. Cynthia Li

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

Think about how different our medical system would be if all doctors were required to have an extreme health crisis before practicing medicine. It’s through those toughest times with our own health that many of us turn to Functional Medicine, as we realize conventional care isn’t getting us what we need. But sometimes, being so involved in treating others’ diseases makes it difficult for doctors to even see our own symptoms for what they really are. This week’s guest on The Doctor’s Farmacy, Dr. Cynthia Li, is here to share her personal journey through autoimmunity and realizing her symptoms had deeper meaning. Dr. 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 recently published her first book which I highly recommend, Brave New Medicine: A Doctor's Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness. This episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy is brought to you by Thrive Market and by SomniFix.  Thrive Market has made it so easy for me to stay healthy, even with my intense travel schedule. I never let myself get into a food emergency. Instead, I always carry enough food with me when I’m on the go, for at least a full day. I order real, whole foods online from Thrive Market. Right now, Thrive is offering all Doctor’s Farmacy listeners a great deal: you will receive an extra 25% off your first purchase plus a free 30-day membership to Thrive. There’s no minimum amount to buy and no code at checkout. All you have to do is head over to http://thrivemarket.com/farmacy Most of us aren’t getting our best rest. But there is actually a proven solution I’ve found for getting high-quality rest, simply by helping you breathe through your nose instead of your mouth. They’re called SomniFix Strips. Breathing through your nose has so many benefits—it protects against mouth dryness and nasal congestion, boosts oxygen saturation for enhanced focus, and helps naturally produce nitric oxide that kills bacteria and supports immunity. SomniFix is now offering all Doctor’s Farmacy listeners 15% off of your first order. Just go to somnifix.com, and use the code FARMACY at checkout.

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. One of the themes also that comes up over and over again with chronic illness, and I know for myself too, is 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. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Now before we get started with this week's episode, I want to tell you about a company called Thrive Market. This made it so easy for me to stay healthy, even with my crazy travel schedule.

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Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. This is 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 been ill, if you know someone who's been ill, if you've had struggles with chronic disease like I have, and like our guest has, then this show is going to help you figure out a different way of thinking about it and give you hope. Because a lot of times when we get sick, we feel hopeless and that's not good because we actually have ways to think about disease quite differently. And our guest today is going to share as a physician how she's reimagined medicine for herself as well as

used a new medicine to help heal her chronic diseases. Our guest is Dr. Cynthia Lee. She received her medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She's practicing internist in many settings. She's been at Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco General Hospital, St. Anthony's Medical Clinic. She served the homeless. She's worked in very remote rural areas in China helping with HIV patients. She's worked with partners in health and all kinds of amazing community-based ways of healing people.

Her personal health challenges have really led her to a very different view of medicine that we learned in medical school, integrative and functional medicine. And she now has a private practice in Berkeley. She's on the faculty of the Healers Are program at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. And she's written a remarkable new book called Brave New Medicine. It's her first book, but it's an important book, as you'll see why as we have this conversation. So welcome, Dr. Cynthia Lee.

Thank you so much for having me here. So we were just chatting before the show, and it was kind of remarkable hearing your story. Because it seems in a lot of ways we've gone down the same path, which is trained in traditional medicine both suffered from a series of different chronic diseases which were mysterious and strange that traditional medicine can't help with and we both were in china and got sick we both had gi issues got sick we both you know had mold in our houses and got sick we both had GI issues, got sick. We both, you know, had mold in our houses and got sick. We both had Lyme disease and got sick.

So it's kind of fascinating. And I just sort of want to unpack your story because you knew you had it everything. You had a great career in medicine. You have a fantastic marriage, beautiful kids. And then, like happens to many people, one day you're fine. And the next day, you're not and everything falls apart and you had this mysterious symptoms that traditional medicine couldn't solve your test came back quote normal but you weren't feeling normal your doctors were confused you were lost

you were in bed you couldn't get out of bed with young kids and that's really the beginning of the change in your career that led to discovering a new way to heal yourself so can you take us through that journey and like where did you come from and how did you get here oh my god yeah well first of all this is not a journey I would wish on anybody so I mean when we were comparing our my god you know like i wouldn't yeah would not wish this on anyone i mean i know that millions right millions of americans suffer from these kinds of mystery conditions that are very debilitating so this is not um not a spurious experience by any means although although many doctors go well we don't we can't figure it out. Your tests are normal. They must be on your head, right?

Exactly, exactly. And I went through that myself. My own health challenges did not fit my own paradigm. So for a long time, I was stuck in my head. Like, I just need to get past it. I need to get past it. So just to kind of go backwards a little bit, about 15 years ago, I was a few years out of residency. So I was at this place in my professional life where I felt a sense of mastery, right? I just, I knew the studies, Pat, I knew the protocols, Pat.

You know, I was running ERs and just feeling like, okay, I've got this. You were a master of your craft. Yes, yes. And I felt really proud of where I had come to in my life. And I had married the love of my life. I did something really radical. I had always been sort of the good girl, the conventional girl, which is funny why I ended up taking this very unconventional path

as far as this culture is concerned. I was, yeah, I had a very conventional upbringing and my husband and I shortly after we got married, I did something radical and we, I quit my job and we traveled the world for six months. No itinerary, you know, just a backpack with, you backpack with a few necessaries in them. And I felt so free and so alive. And after we returned, I started a job at the county hospital where I was working with underserved patients and really found my calling. So it was during this time that I got pregnant. And again, you know, the pregnancy was easy. Nine months later, we had this miracle of a baby.

We were thrilled. But it was three months after that that I started feeling off and, you know, started feeling really tired my hair was falling out I was losing weight I mean like super rapidly and again it's just one of those things that I think as um as not wanting to complain as our culture tends to do is normalize you know unwellness to where you sort of tolerate it. And so I thought it was all postpartum stuff. Suck it up and push through. Exactly. Suck it up. And, you know, and a lot of times things resolve and, you know, life goes on,

which I had learned in residency, right? In the best healer is time. Everything goes away if you just leave it alone. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? I didn't realize at the time that only works for acute things, not chronic. So I was in very much in that mentality of invincibility, both because I was young and both. And then the other reason, because I was a doctor, there was a strange sense that because I understood chronic diseases, I mean, I was an internist after all, an expert in chronic diseases, that I was somehow immune to it. You know, my patients were over there and I was over here. Yeah. Since you knew all the diseases, you couldn't get them.

Exactly. And it took me a while to even recognize the signs. And I remember very clearly that I was, you know, I'd been kind of slogging through my day-to-day life, you know, with this new baby and an active husband and my job. And I was seeing a patient and she was a single mom, had like three kids, was working two jobs. She was exhausted. And she came to me for fatigue. And I was looking at her and I was just going through the checklist, you know, all the review systems. And I said, oh, my God, you're a textbook case of hyperthyroidism. I'm going to run these tests. And it dawned on me that, oh, my God, her palpitations, her insomnia,

her fatigue, you know, her weight loss, her hair loss. And I was like, oh, my God, I am a textbook case too. So that was a really big eye-opener for me yeah well I saw yourself in her yes and and also that I had a chronic disease most likely because thyroid diseases are usually chronic so that was the beginning and I had what was which by the way low thyroid and thyroid problems in women affects one in five women and half of them are undiagnosed. Yes.

And many who are diagnosed aren't properly treated. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it goes to the fact that we dismiss symptoms that are, I mean, they're seemingly vague, right? Fatigue, I mean...

I'm tired, I'm a little depressed, I'm not functioning in sex, my skin's a little dry, my hair's thinning. Right, right, exactly. Constipated, whatever, it's like normal. Absolutely. Oh, so for me though, my initial presentation was hyperthyroid.

Hyper, yeah. And then I fell hypo, so I was kind of on this thyroid rollercoaster. And what I had was Hashimoto's, an autoimmune thyroid condition. And when it happens in the postpartum period, most of those cases resolve in about a year. And so I followed actually that textbook trajectory. And about a year after I was diagnosed, I wasn't feeling well, but I saw my endocrinologist,

who was a top-notch specialist, and he said, yeah, you know, I think it's time for you to try tapering off your levothyroxine. And I did, and my numbers stayed normal. And I was, by his book and by my book, I was cured. But you still felt like crap. I still felt exactly the same. So that, it goes to show, you know, where I was in my mindset was, you know, what the paradigm that we're trained in superseded my own experience. Yeah. And what we're trained in is that everything hinges on the diagnosis. Yeah.

If you don't have a diagnosis, you have no treatment. And the diagnosis is a set of criteria, or it's a lab test, or it's a pathology report. It's something very, very concrete. So I'm living my life, and I was still living a full life. So I was also basing health on functionality. You were managing. Yes, yes. You weren't thriving. You were managing. Yes. Yes.

I was managing quite well. So then a couple of years later, my husband, our then toddler, and I take a trip to Beijing. And my parents and my sister were living there at the time. So I had taken these trips annually. And we went and i had a very dramatic experience there before before you go on i just want to sort of clarify for people for those who haven't been to beijing it's been cleaned up a little bit but on a sunny day you can't see a building across the street because the air is so thick with pollution.

And most of it is from coal, raw coal that they burn, and from some of the inversions that come from the weather patterns from the Gobi Desert. And it's so bad that many people in Beijing walk around with masks, literally with face masks. You might have seen those pictures. So we're not talking about just a little pollution we're talking about air so thick that you can basically cut it with a knife on a sunny day and can't see the sun yes yeah i mean my sister um taught elementary school when she was there and they every day they would they would get these you know these color um signals about whether or not they could go out and there were many days where they couldn't even go out at all. Stay indoors with high, heavy-duty air purifiers going on.

So, yes, it was very polluted. So it was intubation. A nice family trip. Nice family trip. And I will say uh we took a hike on um the wild wall so right that the the un sort of restored yes the beautiful sort of rustic but crumbling wall of the great wall and it was um it was a really beautiful hike, and I stood at this lookout tower, and I said to my husband, I said, I feel like myself again. I was feeling like I'm coming back, right?

My stamina was back, the aches and the pains, and just that low-grade fatigue was gone. So I felt an ounce of of real hope there and then we went to a dumpling house to celebrate and um you know you had asked me um before this like you know what might have triggered this turning point i don't i was eating disease i don't know but i was eating a ton of things some of which were like tons of different kinds of fungus like mushrooms like things that are you know can be immunologically triggering as well so i have no idea if that had any had anything to do with it if it was just the foreign food proteins. But I was having the feast of my life when I suddenly felt like I was going to pass out.

And I was going through all the differential diagnoses in my head and heat stroke, dehydration, I was drinking water. But suddenly, I mean, before I know it, my life flashes before me and I think I'm going to die, and then I pass out. So I come to an emergency room in downtown Beijing, and when I came to, I just came to a body that really wasn't my own. I didn't recognize myself. I could barely move my muscles um the entire room was spinning around as if i was on a boat that was really really um being tossed around in the high seas yes and that um was

something that was completely outside of my own box as a doctor i was calling the shots in the er because the doctor overseeing me was a resident. Yeah, I've had that experience being in a hospital in Thailand with severe gastroenteritis, telling him what to do. Yes, I mean, it is challenging being sick, but it's challenging being a doctor who's sick because people are still looking to you

to number one, stay calm, and number two, figure out what's going on. And I was using my really basic Mandarin too, trying to communicate. I also realized that I had brain fog. I didn't know it at the time. I just couldn't remember things. I was looking at my own EKG, which was normal, but I couldn't quite read it. You had a broken brain.

I had read, yeah, thousands of those, right? Yeah. So I was kind of in a state of shock, but really just trying to push through the misery of it. And in the smattering of tests, they did stabilize my blood pressure, which was low. I got IV saline. But all the tests turned out normal, as they so often do in these conditions. Must be all in your head, right, Dr. Lee? And the one that did not turn out normal was one that I really ordered as a precautionary test that we do for all young women. was a pregnancy test and that came back positive

so that was again a huge shock and my husband and i were really trying to wrap our heads around the fact that i like i felt like i was going to die but then oh my god wait a minute like i'm pregnant yeah so and i'm miserable um so at the time I did not realize that this was going to be a decade long journey. And you mentioned that you had a GI problem then, right? Yes. Well, that didn't manifest until the very next day. The next day I started having nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. And people said, well, it's probably the pregnancy and whatever you got, this dehydration, you just overdid it. But then my husband and my daughter got it too. So I realized, okay, you know what?

There's a gastroenteritis going on. All of this was in hindsight, though. So you went from literally the top of the mountain on the Great Wall feeling the best you felt in years to the worst you could possibly feel in a matter of days. Yes. And we were scheduled to get on our plane trip home like three days later after the ER visit. And it was some miracle that I made it. But I had my first full-blown panic attack

as we boarded the plane because I was so weak and I barely made it on. I I was so weak and I was I barely made it on I was in a wheelchair and I was thinking 13 hours 13 hours like what if something happens you know I can't do this but but I made it I made it back home and I remember calling my medical director and saying, I got a gastroenteritis and I am in the early throes of pregnancy. I'm going to need an extra week to recover, but I'll be back. Yeah. Or so you thought. So I thought, and I never did. I never returned. So that was really the beginning of the rest of my life. And it took me being housebound for two years

to break out of that paradigm that I knew. So you were still looking at traditional medicine to solve the problem. And they weren't giving any answers and you went to see everybody. Yes went to see specialist after specialist and again another sort of you're depressed take prozac right yes well i mean even things like i was afraid to say i was depressed because i was like i don't want to kill myself i'm just miserable you know like i'm miserable i'm not depressed yes yes um but i knew from the other side

what doctors did with patients like me so i had a lot of symptoms that i kept to myself what they did meaning meaning yeah antidepressants or potential you know a major psychiatric evaluation or um getting stigmatized as a difficult patient. Yeah. We have a very, you know, in the medical world, we have a very pejorative way of talking about these patients. We use a fancy medical word. We say it's super tentorial, which means it's in your brain, it's in your head, and it's very nasty and not true. And I think your experience is very important because i think most of us who suffer aren't doctors and so we don't have that insight but when you actually are a physician and you get that you know i had someone say to me the other day

oh you know i don't believe all this fatigue stuff when i want energy i just jump up and down and run up the stairs and i get energy i'm like like, no, you don't get it. Like when you get your tank emptied and you don't know how to refill it, it's real. It's not in your head. It's not psychiatric. It's your biology. And I had exactly the same experience. So I get it. And it's sort of what led me to be a functional medicine physician and to so be passionate about telling the world, which I think also why you write your book, sort of share with the world, look, I'm a physician. I know the science.

But I hit a dead end when it comes to the paradigm that we were trained in. And I needed to find a different way. So tell us about how you- Can I ask you, were you as hardheaded as I was? I mean, did it take you? Oh, well, first of all, too, for me, I think partly it took so long was because I was pregnant. And all the specialists told me that this is a difficult pregnancy. And part of me wanted to believe it or that a lot of it would resolve.

And amazingly, I had this baby who's, she's healthy and she's the strongest one actually in the whole family. So there was that piece. But I'm just curious, did it take you as long as it took me to realize there was another path? Well, it was interesting. I mean, I literally went down hard. I mean, I was the same story. I lived in China.

I was exposed to mercury. I came back from China, and I was up in a a lake in Maine and I got some kind of bug, some kind of stomach bug. And I never had anything like it. I thought it would get better and it didn't. So the mercury was sort of like the sort of underlying problem. Yes. And then the straw that broke the camel's back was getting an acute stomach issue

which caused a leaky gut and this massive inflammation and my whole system collapsed you know i not only did i then i had the stomach issues and diarrhea and pain and bloating i also had immune issues my rashes all over my tongue would swell up when i ate certain foods i get rashes around my eyes i'd have all sorts of abnormal blood tests my low white count positive ana which is like autoimmunity i had elevated liver function tests i had severe cognitive problems i couldn't focus i couldn't remember anything i couldn't really barely work i had trouble sleeping i mean just my whole system was down and was called chronic fatigue syndrome

which you know for a long time we thought was psychological and and now there's real good data that there are a lot of biological markers of what's going on in chronic fatigue syndrome that's not just some fabricated thing we call it a syndrome in medicine when we don't actually understand it it's like oh you have irritable bowel syndrome what does that mean it means your stomach hurts and you have diarrhea or constipation or bloating it's like that doesn't mean anything so for me it took me a while because this was 25 years ago and there wasn't like a big functional medicine movement but thank god i was working at a place called canya ranch where there was a nutritionist kathy swift who

introduced me to this guy, Jeff Bland, who's the father of functional medicine. And I heard him speak and it was like the light went on. I'm like, oh, okay, there's a different way of thinking. I said, well, if he's either crazy or he's a genius and I better figure out which one. So I started to learn, read about it, experiment on myself. So I was working part-time, experiment with my patients. They would get better.

I wouldn't get better. I couldn't figure it out. I mean, it took me years and years and years uh if I know what I knew now then I would have gotten better a lot faster but I didn't have all the information I didn't have all the tools I didn't know but I did find a huge level of mercury and all sorts of other issues so I think um for me you know I was I don't even know if it's stubborn, but I knew, like you going to specialist after specialist, that this wasn't in my head. I knew I wasn't depressed, like you said, although I felt depressed. I felt fatigued. I felt unable to cope or manage.

But I knew it wasn't in my head. Yes, it was affecting my brain, but it wasn't emotional or psychological. I think you were, yeah, a step ahead of me. So I ended up referring myself to a psychiatrist because- Well, I went there too. By that point, I wanted a diagnosis, right? I wanted something I could hang my hat on. Hey, everyone. For those of you who know me you know that i love to cook and spend time in the kitchen it's truly a revolutionary act and in fact it's the gateway to your best health i tell my patients that to enjoy and appreciate cooking with real

foods is the best way to regain their health which is why i'm coming out with a new cookbook called Food, What the Heck Should I Cook? My team and I put together this cookbook with over 100 delicious recipes from real food. I think you're going to really love it. And if you want to learn more about it, just go to foodthecookbook.com right now. Sign up to get the free video instantly in your inbox of five steps to conscious cooking that I created to guide you through how to cook in your kitchen, all the secret tips I use. Or if you know that you really want to own the book, you can actually pre-order it right now. So when you pre-order and you show your proof of purchase, you're going to get really great bonuses, including four cooking videos of me

personally cooking some of the best recipes from the book. You'll get a recipe ebook with exclusive bonus recipes. And you're gonna get so many special offers from my favorite merchants, things like Vitamix, Wayfair, Thrive Market, and lots more. I'm so excited for you to check out my new book. So just go to foodthecookbook.com. Thanks, and I'll see you in the kitchen. And I hear this a lot from my patients too. It's giving a name to something

somehow makes it more real. And I had a moment in the bathroom. I remember I was coming out of the shower and I was feeling my heart rate racing and my blood pressure dropping, feeling like I was gonna faint. And I was going through all my symptoms and I basically diagnosed myself in the bathroom with chronic fatigue syndrome and dysautonomia, the total dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, which is the branch that controls largely unconscious vital body functions

like heart rate, pressure digestion you know this it's like i really say well it's like air traffic control well but worse but more serious because as soon as it's gone you you realize what it was sort of keeping together managing all these moving parts uh so nothing really felt like it was working within myself. And like you said, though, I mean, these are syndromes, which kind of mean nothing. So I didn't want that. I wanted something to say it's treatable. I would say the name of your disease isn't the cause of your disease. Right.

Exactly. This autonomia just means your nervous system isn't working right chronic fatigue syndrome just means you're tired all the time right exactly it doesn't tell you why so um yeah so i did i went to a psychiatrist i think you know where a lot of patients like us end up one day um and she said you know something that made me almost laugh you know she said this is not you're not depressed, you're not anxious. I think it's your hormones. I think it's your immune system.

I mean, she was really actually going into the systems. But at the time, I was like, well, but my endocrinologist said it's not my thyroid. And an immunologist, why would I go to an immunologist? And so I kind of exited. And had I known about functional medicine or even integrative medicine at the time, um, it would have been a much smoother path, but I,

because I had to rebuild the paradigm from the bottom up in order to even get there. Um, it took me many more years. Yeah. So how did you come out of it? So, um, the first thing I did was, uh, 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. You didn't start off with crystals? No, I didn't. 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 robbins and cotran exactly that's the we all take second year medical school right and kumar kum Kumar was my pathology teacher. Oh, wow.

So I took it out. I still had it. It was highlighted, dog-eared. I mean, and it actually was good for me. Like if I know neuroplasticity, right, it kind of brought me back to this time where I had more of a sense of agency over my life. So in that sense, it was also healing. I didn't recognize it at the time um 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 and they actually talk about this was you know this was

published i don't even know which edition but 20 years ago, where they say the one cause, one effect paradigm does not work anymore, right? We're in 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. Yeah. This continuum, this process. Yeah, that's right. I remember going back and reading chapter one and it said, any pathologic change is always preceded by a biochemical change. Yes. Which means that anything you see like on a microscope, there's got to be a lot of years

of stuff going wrong with your biochemistry and physiology before that happens. Yes, years. And we don't 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 know what it is. Right, right. medicine we just wait till you have something wrong and then we go yeah now i don't know what it is right right because in the the way that we've been trained inflammation which is what i had right widespread inflammation in my nerves inflammation in my gut inflammation in your brain in my thyroid exactly um it doesn't qualify as a treatable disease inflammation right no that's

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

which was sort of the preceding trigger. And then before that, okay, wait a minute, you know what, when I was in residency, post-call, 36-hour shifts, my muscles would feel really crampy. Like I felt like I'd run a marathon. And I was dizzy. And I just assumed, well, of course,

everyone feels this way because they're exhausted. Right, and so I started going backwards and realizing, okay, this has been going on for a long time. And for some people that can be really, you know, sort of disheartening. But for me at where I was, it was a little ounce of hope because it meant that I could sort of stepwise, piecemeal address inflammation in a way that I could tolerate. What I was really afraid of because I was so brittle was having any kind of setback that would push me down further. And so if I could do it in a way that was more controlled and gentle,

then it felt like something I could move forward with. So what did you do? Or the things that helped you recover? So one of the things was, yeah, was identifying- Because was by the way chronic fatigue syndrome was not something most people recover from right fibromyalgia is not people 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, finally, right? Yeah, so what I ended up doing also was distancing myself from the diagnosis and the prognosis because it was more despairing.

My marriage was held together by a single thread. 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 I learned things that I was surprised I didn't know already. I knew about the pineal gland and the hypothalamus, and we have this master clock, and we have jet lag, and that's why. But I didn't know about every organ having its own clock, its own rhythm. And that's- And even a whole field of chronobiology where the different kinds of chemo is better given

at different times of the day to work better. Yes, I know. This is in conventional medicine. Right, and it makes, I mean, it makes like complete rational sense, right? So I started, first of all, being more regimented about just, okay, you know what, I'm gonna 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, you know, 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 dysrhythmic lives. stress in my body. Yeah, rhythm. Yeah. We all live dysrhythmic lives. I feed my dog at the same times every day.

Why don't I do that for myself? And he gets walks now at the same time. Why don't I do that for myself? So I started syncing myself also with my kids. Like, okay, I'm going to take care of my kids. I can take care of myself at the same time so i think that also as in that caretaker mentality you know as a mother or a partner or a doctor is we we tend to put ourselves last and so it was kind of time to put myself first you know as my first patient that's good and so you did the rhythm and what else change

your diet and then um yeah and you know a lot of it was just asking new questions um the diet piece i thought i was eating quote healthy um you know which was largely vegetarian i was cooking meals but also doing a lot of pre-packaged meals but you also doing a lot of prepackaged meals, but not a lot of processed stuff. And it wasn't until I saw an acupuncturist. So the acupuncturist that I saw, Robert Levine, who's in Berkeley, California, he was brilliant, really brilliant. And he's still practicing. And he's a dear friend of mine, a mentor of mine. I learned a ton from him about understanding the body in terms of systems. So when my thyroid was out of whack, it wasn't just my thyroid. It was my whole hormone system, which is tied then to the digestive system,

which is tied to the immune system. Like it suddenly started making sense. The knee bones connected to the thigh bone, right? Yeah, exactly. And the body is connected to the brain which is actually amazing in medicine that our entire training teaches us the opposite that there's all these organ systems right we take the gi system and the liver and the lungs and the brain and the heart and the hormone and you go to specialists for every different part of you

and nobody connects the dots. 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, we can extrapolate that to any size system, right?

We look at our communities and our world, right? And, you know, one of the things i feel like that drives almost every everything if not everything that we do as individuals and that we do as societies is how do i get more energy yeah right my qigong teacher was talking about that how do we get more energy you know whether it's through you know chi means energy yeah whether it's through solar energy you know fossil fuels whether it's yeah i mean it's food um nature movement um so you know i began to shift my thinking in relationship to health and disease in a much more living sort of embodied way. 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, you know? And you need more of these heavier foods. Like you're doing lots of salads, which are great, but not for you right now. So I hadn't even thought about a personalized diet. And I was like, more meats? What are you talking about? You know, and this is before paleo days and all that.

And so I began researching ancestral diets and the work of dentist Weston A. Price. And- Melvin Connors. Right, and it suddenly made sense. Like, oh yeah, okay, I'm gonna eat like my ancestors ate. I'm gonna prepare food the way my ancestors prepared so i can maximize nutrient density nutrient density

equals more energy yeah um and then the gluten issue came up uh you know i was really skeptical yeah of it you know 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? So, and I do remember asking my endocrinologist, like, what can I do?

What can I do? And he said, nothing, it's genetic. It's genetic. Oh, gosh, no, it's not. Right, right. It's a genetic predisposition, but not predetermination. And so, but the gluten thing didn't actually arise. I think I was partly in denial about it.

You know, 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, uh, you know, and the dentist kept saying, well, don't feel guilty. Don't feel guilty. You know? And I was like, kept saying, well, don't feel guilty, don't feel guilty, you know, and I was like, wait a minute, I wasn't feeling guilty until you just said that. But it made me investigate like something else is going on. Like, I know how we eat, I know how she brushes. And I know cavities happen, but like six, it just it didn't compute. So I started researching. And that's when i came across weston a price's work uh around um 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 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 science. Hippocrates said all diseases begin in the gut. So we're just kind of going back. And I realized I have to learn how to heal my gut as another step. Did you still have digestive symptoms after that initial gastroenteritis in China? Or did it get better?

They were largely quiescent until I removed gluten. And I removed gluten. I removed gluten and I had massive withdrawal. Diarrhea, irritable bowel. And again, this was kind of before the time that I realized I understood about detox and how healing happens is that often it gets a lot worse before it gets better and that it could be a good sign. So I, um, I was really frightened by how severe my, my reaction was when I stopped gluten. So I was thinking it was a bad thing. Um, but then, you know 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 my younger daughter, so my older daughter's teeth, like, you know, really basically resolved.

I mean, they became really strong. Some of her cavities even filled, like they recalcified and didn't have to get filled. My younger daughter, who didn't really have anything that was alarming, but she had like this perioral eczema, which is this dermatitis, which is very difficult to treat with steroids, which is how we treat most dermatitis. Everything red on the skin, they put steroids on it. Exactly. Why is the skin irritated? Coming on it exactly why is the skin irritated right from the inside

not the outside so she had that and she had she would get asthma when she got colds and both of those are totally totally resolved off of gluten well off of gluten but also doing the ancestral diet so off the 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 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, you know, 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 and research to translate over to clinical care. Yeah. I think that's not a good day. The guy who discovered that we should wash our hands before giving, 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, Semmelweis, 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 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. sense. We don't need science to show us that,

right? Well, I mean, when they didn't know about bacteria, common sense was... 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. to the point where I was much more able to get out of the house. And one of the things I also explored, which I would say maybe is down the unconventional path, 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? And it was the pediatrician who said, well, what are you interested in? I said, well, you know, I really, I love the traditional Chinese medicine paradigm. It makes so much sense to me, the systems thinking, you know, about the gut, you know, sort of being the foundation of healing. And I'm really, you know, ancestral health, you know, figures into it. And she said, it sounds like you, you know, you're interested in functional medicine. I was like, what is that? What's that? What is that? So, and she really strongly recommended that I go see the, take this course with Institute for Functional Medicine.

So I, it was sort of a bone for me, right? Like I could, I was aiming to get healthy enough to be able to travel, to go attend a conference. And so, and it came to Santa Monica 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 this is 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 it 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. You need a navigator. I did.

And I had a very unconventional navigator, was we had a visit from some friends of ours who ended up staying with us and we had known them for years but they'd never stayed with us and we've always known them through sort of the sustainability work right so I was I had been doing environmental health my husband is in public policy around renewable energy so we knew them through work circles and anyways we were hosting them for a weekend and they come we knew that the wife pia was um was also clairvoyant so she was she was a sustainable architect and her husband was one of the leading climate physicists so there was a very skill to have exactly so they're very dynamic couple we knew about her

clairvoyance through sort of hearsay but we we'd never experienced it up front and kind of never really were curious enough to go there oh yeah exactly that's how i felt so they ended up staying in our house and um one of the things was that uh my younger daughter was having night terrors and um for four months which did not bode well for my insomnia and we had tried everything i mean and and actually gone out kind of on an alternative limb to right she was doing like chamomile drops and um you know some homeopathy uh 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're all looking at each other like, okay, woo-hoo. Right, right. And she said, well, but it's really heavy. And so she said, do you mind if I just walk around? So she's walking around and she said, it's heaviest in the 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 any P syndrome anymore. Absolutely. Any P syndrome is not enough pain. Yes, yes. When people have enough pain, they're going to doEP syndrome anymore. Absolutely. 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, 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 smudge stick, which I had never heard of before. It's a Native American way of creating energy from a woman. Exactly. So she just goes around and she said, well, it's really important that you come with me.

You're the lady of the house. And your intention really matters. And I'm like, but my intention is I don't actually believe what you're doing. She said, no, no, just say whatever doesn't belong here needs to leave. And the thing that really convinced me to do it with her was, well, first of all, it's 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 them out of my body

because this was the seller of the house who we'd met three times like to a t and so she said 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, whoa, weird, but okay. Like that's really spot on. So we just walked around and, you know, and I was kind of just being very sympathetic too. I sympathized with the seller, right?

That he had to leave his home. Yeah. So, you know, but 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, um, I actually approached her and I said, well, if you can lift the heaviness in a house, can you lift the heaviness in my body? You know, I mean, I'm much smaller than this house. And she said, oh, you know, it doesn't work quite like that. And she said, but I can do one thing. I can teach you how to develop intuition, which I had never heard of.

I did not know that intuition was something like music or art, like you can develop it. Yeah, you can practice it. And she was very pragmatic about it. And she said, no, no, this doesn't mean you're going to be clairvoyant, right? But it just means that you can learn to open this other side of your brain that has probably been closed off for a long time because of your training and your upbringing so i um so she taught me how to do that um 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 heart well actually they were both really hard they were both really hard yeah silence analytical mind being in my body. And that second part was the hard. Well, actually, they were both really hard.

They were both really hard. Silence, 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, um, learning how to read sensations for as messages and not just symptoms that were making me miserable. Yeah. Yeah. I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body if you listen to it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the intuition piece came in incredibly handy when I was introduced to functional medicine. I wasn't really practicing it because I was doing steadily better. Were you trying some of it on yourself?

I was trying some of it on myself, but it was, you know, I mean, you know how it is when you're, like, it's like, you know, 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, you know, to develop if they're interested. It's simple. It just takes a lot of repetition and quiet listening. So you found, you know, one of the causes was gluten, right? And toxins you got from China that you worked on getting rid of. Was there anything else? I did a lot of detoxes. So, 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, 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. And then as my whole system got stronger, I was able to really wean off of those. 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. Yeah. I mean, 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, you you know 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 lime which you said you had or mold if you're which i hadn't almost died from a couple years ago um allergens those those are the things that actually you know 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, 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 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'm doing. I'm just going to try this stuff. And it seems to make sense and it's not going to hurt them. And people just recovered. And it just was amazing to me. I mean, I had a woman the other day who came in with vestibular migraines, which is a terrible kind of migraine where your head is spinning, you're in vertigo. It's like you were saying you experienced, she had severe migraines 25 times a month. She had severe other quote,

other symptoms. So she was seeing the neurologist for that, but they weren't worrying about her gut and she was having severe bloating, fluid retention, you know, digestive issues. She had anxiety. I mean, she couldn't even come in my office without the door being open. Wow. And she was really smart young woman who in my office without the door being open. Wow. And she was a really smart young woman who wanted to go to be a nurse practitioner. She was a nurse. And it wasn't in her head. And she was on all these antidepressants and psychiatric medications and anti-anxiety medications and vertigo medications and migraine medications.

You know the drill. And I'm like, well. And then medications to counter those side effects of those medications right and so you know I just followed the basic map of how do you help people restore health and function and for her I was like well you know she's got a lot of inflammation going on I could see her she was swollen she had fluid retention she had gained a bunch of weight and you know I wasn't treating her migraine I was helping restore her gut function. And I was helping her eat a diet

that was anti-inflammatory. And I was helping her with certain nutrients she was low in. And I never really had a patient like this before that was that severe, that had 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 fixed her gut. She had really bad.

I gave her stuff to clear out SIBO. She had bacterial overgrowth. She had fungal overgrowth in her gut so I cleared all that out I restored her gut with a gut health shake which contained you know polyphenols and cranberry and pomegranate 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 flu 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 right? I mean, which is a huge piece of healing. I'm like, you're not crazy. You saw her. Yeah, I saw her, right? I mean, she was in bed and she, I mean, I could tell she wasn't a malingerer or she wasn't a whiner, but she gets, it's easy to dismiss these patients and go, well, it's just, you know, they're just psychological or whatever. Just give them some meds and kick them out of the way. Right. But then they're psychological because they feel miserable, right? Well, well, that's very important.

I mean, right, right. I'm like, wait a minute. Like, okay, we call these things. If your body isn't working, your brain isn't gonna work. 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 your doctors called you a difficult patient. Yeah, I mean, I call myself a difficult patient. You wanna be a difficult patient. But it's the difficult, right? 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. But you didn't know what else was out there.

I mean, you and I both have the experience of being knocked to our knees in order to figure out a different way. I don't wish that on all our medical colleagues, but I do wish they would understand that the paradigm that we learned is only part of the story. Yes.

And that, yeah, everything I learned in medical school is useful and I use it and I rely on it. But there's another meta layer of understanding how the body is organized because those are just the piece parts. Like, what does the puzzle look like when you put it together? That's what functional medicine is. And it's such a powerful model. It's what we do at the ultra wellness center in lenox you know i have uh 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 that people can recover from and now you're doing that in your own practice you've written this 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? You know, to your point though, I mean, I write 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 very provocative essay where, I mean, he was talking about arrogance at the time. And I would say arrogance is probably not the vice of today. I think it's more just not seeing, right? Not seeing or denial.

A little bit of hubris, a little bit of denial. 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.

Like, what would it look like, right? Yeah. And so, yeah, would there be more empathy? Would there be more belief? I mean, like, 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 as a doctor? Just believing all patients.

That's really important because as physicians, we were subliminally trained to have a dismissive attitude to many categories of patients. If you had irritable bowel, well, that was in your head. Or if you had chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia, or if you had even more serious illnesses likeyalgia 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? So yeah, would I want doctors to go through this? I mean, hell no. 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, what would it look like? What would medicine look like if we could experience? Sleep and lunch are considered weaknesses in residency training. I know that. I know that.

But would we have that experience then to be able to translate to our patients, right? I mean, we're ultimately teachers. Well, that's what functional medicine is. It's a science of creating health. Yes. And when you do that, disease goes away as a side effect. Yes. And you're right.

I think if you look at most healing traditions, a lot of shamans or healers went through some crisis, some health crisis, some trauma, 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 then we sort of pass it on, right? It's a kind of trauma. It is. It's a kind of trauma.

And then we pass 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. Yeah. To try another thing. To try something else.

To try again. And what I ended up discovering that was easier was to release. So instead of sort of going, you know, 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, right? Like, I know I need that sunlight, but it is killing me right now.

You know, my husband was this sort of embodiment of resilience and confidence and optimism. I couldn't stand to be around him. You know, it was stressful from where I was. And so what I ended up stumbling across was, oh, my God, like I'm carrying around a lot of grief. Okay, yes, I've got, you know, my lost identities and time lost and all the suffering, but like, you know, all this stuff came out, right?

I went to a grief ritual. I didn't, I didn't know those things existed, but you know, back generations ago in cultures, those like soul detoxes. Yeah. Right. Like how do we do that? It's not a body. I love that soul detox. How much are we carrying that is subconsciously programmed into the way our DNA folds, into the way our neurons are wired. And grief is non-discriminant. So I thought I was going for my health,

just the loss of the function of my body. And all this stuff came out, cobwebs, right? From childhood, from residency residency relationships in the past and and then the shame the shame of having these this mysterious illness yeah the same thing a doctor who cannot figure it out yeah and um that was really really healing so, as you say, like as a side effect, what ends up filling up that space is health, right? 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, you've taken all you've learned, you've been through, you know, so many different cycles of struggle and you've recovered and come back on top and you've written this book and, and, you know, what's beautiful is, you know,

it's really your, 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 missed the boat a lot of times and how you can on your own become empowered to sort of find a brave new medicine but you also share at the end of the book you know 15 steps that are about healing about how to care for your body and how to heal so in a way you sort of make it really simple for people in how to actually create health for themselves. Can you take us through those? Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of the steps were ones that we covered.

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

but it's sort of an organic. But it's really detailed and 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. Yeah.

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 around? You know, you can't even get around. And, you know what? I started thinking about 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 down i can wait for a carpool. So there's a lot of things I think that happen with healing.

Like, for instance, a diet. I might prescribe a diet that's healing for myself or my family or my patients. And maybe it's less about the diet per se than just getting them to connect to their food. 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 get a daily dose of nature, detoxify your house and yourself. And it's really well laid out and very simple. It's almost like you've taken all the concepts of functional medicine and traditional Chinese medicine

and everything you know about healing and integrated medicine and put 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 it's not- Now that's a quote that I took from Jonas Salk, right?

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 woo-woo.

Why are we calling it woo-woo? It's actually very human. We've just forgotten it in our culture. And there's so many other great things in there, 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, 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. Yes. Practicing pleasure is my favorite prescription. That's a good one.

It's amazing how many patients won't do that unless a doctor prescribes it to them. Yeah, it's really true. I think we, we don't, we don't prioritize fun and play and joy and 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 a human. Let them know who you are. Right. And that always works. Right. It builds a relationship. It helps them know

that you've suffered through it. Right. I mean, even if you haven't suffered, you can share something. Absolutely. Thank Absolutely. Thank you for sharing your story. And everybody should get Brave New Medicine, a doctor's unconventional path to healing her autoimmune illness. It's been out since September 1st, 2019. It's a wonderful story, very inspiring and very practical. So thank you for joining us. Absolutely. Thank you. And you've been listening to the doctor's pharmacy

this is dr mark hyman if you love the show please leave a comment please share with your friends and family on facebook or twitter or social media and if you don't already subscribe please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy so two quick things number one thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast it really means a lot to me if you love the podcast i'd really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family second i want to tell you about a brand new newsletter i started called mark's picks every week i'm going to send out a list of a few things that I've been using to take my own health to the next level. This could be books, podcasts, research that I found, supplement recommendations, recipes,

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