The Dr. Hyman Show - How to Find the Real Cause of Your Disease and How to Fix It with Dr. Elizabeth Boham

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

So many Functional Medicine practitioners like myself have gone through their own healing crisis. For me, it was a total brain and body breakdown 30 years ago due to mercury poisoning from when I lived in China. For my good friend and fellow Functional Medicine doctor Elizabeth Boham, it was triple-negative breast cancer diagnosed at the young age of 30, despite already embracing many principles of a healthy life. Going through these experiences has led us to want to help others heal on the deepest level, which is what brought us both to the power using Functional Medicine and food and lifestyle choices to truly heal.  This week on The Doctor’s Farmacy, Dr. Boham joins me to discuss what it means to get to the root cause of disease and how the principles we practice do exactly that. Dr. Boham is a physician and nutritionist who practices Functional Medicine as part of my team at The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Through her practice and lecturing, she has helped thousands of people achieve their wellness goals. 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, a topic she is passionate about as a breast cancer survivor. This episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy is brought to you by Theragun and by Thrive Market.  The Theragun has quickly become one of my favorite tools to relieve my muscle soreness and give my body a deep massage at home. It’s a percussive therapy tool and handheld device that helps to relieve tension and increases blood flow to sore areas. I like to use it after training, yoga, sports, and even just on off days or if I’m sitting for too long. The Theragun has made a huge difference in my recovery, and I know you’re going to love it too. If you order right now you’ll get two free attachments with your purchase for a $40 savings, just go to http://theragun.com/drhyman. 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.

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. How do you create a terrain in your body, right? That soil where cancer is less likely to grow. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. I make time to move and sweat every day and I also love making time for recovery. Things like massage and acupuncture, jumping in a cold bath. Yep, I do that. Stretching, saunas, I love all that stuff. But I recently found something that has quickly become one of my favorite tools to relieve my sore muscles because I work out hard and give my body a deep massage at home. And it's called the Theragun. It's so awesome. I genuinely believe that this tool changed my life and I travel with

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proud to be an investor in their company. All right, let's get back to the episode. 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 suffered from any chronic illness, if you've had cancer or heart disease or autoimmune disease or digestive issues or any, basically anything that isn't getting sorted through your regular doctor or you have to take a bunch of pills to fix it, this is a show that's going to matter to you because we have as our guest an extraordinary physician, one of my close friends and physicians here at the Ultra Wellness Center, Dr. Elizabeth Boham. So Elizabeth has quite a story. I first met her when she came to work at Kenya Ranch

out of her residency when she had just recovered from breast cancer. And we're going to get into that story in a minute. But just to give you a little background on Liz, Liz is the person who should be a model for what a doctor is. Not only is she empathetic and she's smart as heck, but she's also been trained as an exercise physiologist and a registered dietitian and a physician. So she's got it all covered. And she went to Cornell in Columbia, is well-trained and has been working with me for, oh gosh, is it 20 years now? So I think we have at the Ultra Wellness Center probably close to 60 plus years of collective experience in functional medicine with our physicians here, which really doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.

And she has been working here treating our most difficult patients, getting extraordinary results. She sees the power of nutrition every day in her practice to transform our patients. And she's just out there in the world teaching and a huge leader in the space of functional medicine on the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine. She's written for textbooks, the textbook of family medicine, the obesity chapter. She's been featured on the Oz Show, Huffington Post, Chalkboard Magazine, Experience Life. She's created an extraordinary DVD out of her own experience called Breast Wellness, Tools to Prevent and Heal from Breast Cancer, which explores a functional medicine approach to keeping your breasts and your whole body well, which by the way are connected. So welcome, Liz.

Oh, Mark, thank you so much. It's so great to be here and with all of your listeners. And really, it's been amazing working with you for 20 years. It's hard to believe, right? Really, yes. It's hard to believe. So let's start right in. You were a young trainee physician. You were 30 years old.

Yes. And who thinks a 30-year-old is going to get breast cancer? But that's what happened. So tell us what happened. Yeah, so I thought I was really healthy. As you mentioned, I was studying exercise physiology and nutrition, and I was in medical school. I was in my residency, but I was definitely practicing what I preached.

I was trying to take as good care of myself as I thought I could, and I didn't have any family history of breast cancer. So when they told me 20 years ago that at the age of 30, that this was this triple negative aggressive breast cancer. How do you find it? Do you have a lump or? I had a lump. I had a lump. I was actually, I was actually doing breast exams because I was trying to figure out how to do them on women, on my patients. So I was practicing on myself, not thinking I was going to find breast cancer, but just like, oh, I've got to figure out how to teach women how to do breast self exams. And so I would say the month before, it wasn't there.

I mean, from my ability to feel it. And then the following month, it was. And my husband was like, you really need to get that checked out. I'm like, really? You think so? He's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's not a doctor. No. He's just a caring husband. Yeah. He's just sort of, sort of wakes me up sometimes. And so, you know, I was really lucky because I had just worked with a breast surgeon on one of my rotations and I had my, my friends who are my attendings. And so they just sort of brought me through the system really quickly, which is, which is good because I had a pretty aggressive form and of breast cancer. So, uh, the timing was

really made a big difference for me in terms of how well I, I did. Um, so I went through a bunch of treatment, chemotherapy and radiation and everything. But as a celebration to my last round of chemotherapy, my mom brought me to Canyon Ranch in Lenox, Massachusetts. Yeah. And she brought me for a mother-daughter weekend. And, you know, I had no hair. I just remember swimming. I remember you had really short red hair. Yep.

I was swimming in that amazing pool there. And my mom went to a lecture on osteoporosis because she needs to work on her bone density and met Dr. Cindy Geyer, who then she had an appointment with her. And being an amazing mom like she is, she said to her, you know, my daughter would really like to come and do a rotation here. Without asking you. No, no. She just knew that I just loved it there. So when I got home and after I'd finished some more treatment, I got, I ended up hooking up with and doing a rotation here.

And that's when I first met you and my hair was just coming in. It was sort of like a little curly and short, right? When it's starting to come in. And that just blew my mind. And a few years later, I was lucky enough to get a job at Canyon Ranch where working with you and Todd Lapine and Kathy Swift and Cindy Geyer and just was phenomenal. And that's when I went to the first IFM course, AFMCP, and totally blew me away.

Because as anybody who's kind of going through- That's applying functional medicine and clinical practice, right? Thank you. Yeah, that first week-long course in functional medicine. And anybody who's kind of gone through this whole cancer thing or just gotten a disease or gotten a diagnosis that sort of throws you back, you know, gotten a diagnosis that sort of throws you back. You're like, why would this happen to me? I really wanted to ask that question. Why? Because I didn't, you know, I didn't want it to happen again. And I wanted to recover from it. And I wanted to help my patients get better and not, you know, kind of figure this whole thing out. And functional medicine really helped me put all those pieces together. You know, my nutrition background with my medical school training and figure out just

why things may have gone wrong in my body. You know, what got out of balance. I was eating right and exercising, but what was wrong with what I was doing? And because functional medicine really looks at, okay, let's personalize this to the individual. You know, you may have breast cancer, but the reason why you got breast cancer may be very different from why somebody else got breast cancer, right? And not all breast cancers are the same, right?

Not at all. And even if you take triple negative breast cancers, right, there'd be multiple different reasons why different people get that disease. And, you know, what was going on in my body? And so just learning functional medicine helped me figure out, and, you know, what was going on in my body. And so just learning functional medicine helped me figure out, okay, you know, okay, maybe I was eating well and exercising, not, you know, for some people, that's a really important area that we focus on in terms of

prevention of cancer. But for me, we needed to, I needed to focus on, you know, managing my stress better, right. Or, um, helping my body detoxify. We can talk about that more later, right? Like in terms of like variations in terms of your genetics, and I'm not that great of a metabolite detoxifier, and I had to manage some heavy metals in my body. And your hormones have to be metabolized and detoxified. And that plays a big role in cancer. Absolutely, right? And I have a variation, one of my genes that impacts, you know, how I do that too. So, so we needed to focus on that. And my digestive system was a mess because I had way too many antibiotics as a kid for chronic urinary tract infections. And we know that women who get antibiotics have a higher risk of breast cancer.

They do. They absolutely do. And we also know... Because just to draw the connection, we know that your gut bacteria play a big role in hormone metabolism and what's get absorbed and how the hormones get broken down and excreted. And if your gut's a mess, that whole system gets messed up. Absolutely. Absolutely. And even our bugs in our gut impact how we're able to take certain foods, those phytonutrients, those amazing components of our plant foods, and turn them into even more healthy components that help us with metabolism and detoxification.

And so it has a huge impact on our risk. They've even done some studies looking at the microbiome of breast tissue. So when they compare breast cancer microbiome to women who've had, you know, a breast reduction and, and they've looked at their, the microbiome, the bugs in their breast tissue, it's very different. So, so even the, even the, yep, of course the gut, the gut bugs make a difference, but it's what's, you know, we're going to learn more and more about the bugs in all parts of our body that influence. Who knew there was like a microbiome in your breast tissue. Yeah. Right. And that influencing things. So, yeah. And I was on just crazy amounts of antibiotics as a kid, which really, unfortunately impacted so many aspects of my, my health. So, so when I went

to the training in functional medicine, it was like this big aha, right, that everybody says. And it really just was like, okay, I can use this way of thinking, this different way of thinking to help myself and to help my patients to really add things to their care. Yeah, it's so powerful. And breast cancer is common. One in eight women in the united states will develop invasive breast cancer over their lifetime uh and there's in 2019 there's an estimated 268,600 new cases of invasive breast cancer and and about 62,000 cases of non-invasive breast cancer

and you know you mentioned you know you had chemo you had radiation which is important you need to deal with the issue or surgery, whatever you need. But then the doctors go, well, we're going to do active surveillance. And what that means is they're going to follow up with mammograms or MRIs or whatever. It's just kind of watchful waiting as opposed to doing anything. It's really inactive surveillance. It doesn't say, why did this happen yep and we change the conditions in the human body that may prevent it from recurring yeah and it's just like

this blank space that happens after you get cancer i remember one woman came to see me she had three different cancers and nobody said well gee maybe there's something going on in this woman's body that's making a good home for cancer. How do we change that and make it inhospitable for cancer? And we found all sorts of stuff to deal with that she had never addressed and that the doctors never thought about. And that's the beauty of functional medicine. And that's what you said for yourself. You figured out your gut was a mess.

You weren't detoxifying. Your genetics were off. So how did you fix that? Yeah, how do you create a terrain in your body, right? That soil where cancer is less likely to grow. And so when I'm working with somebody who's had cancer or any disease, but let's look at breast cancer for here, you know, when you take that functional medicine approach, you want to look at all aspects of their health to personalize their treatment plan for them. So what can they do to create this healthier terrain where the cancer's

not going to come back or they can even attack the cancer they're dealing with now better? So you, of course, always start with those lifestyle factors, right? You want to make sure that they're getting good rest and sleep and eating the right foods, avoiding all that extra sugar and refined carbs and getting a lot of fiber in their avoiding all that extra sugar and refined carbs and getting a lot of fiber in their diet. Yeah, sugar and refined carbs. That's what doctors or oncologists tell their patients to eat. Have ice cream, have milkshakes, don't lose weight.

I mean, it's feeding the cancer. Absolutely, right? And making sure they're doing some movement or exercise and managing their stress. We pay attention to the mind, the emotional, the spiritual aspect that impacts how the body is working, how the body is able to heal. And then we look at- And that's foundational for all chronic disease. So that's just like the basics. And then you go deeper. So where did you go? Then you go deeper. And then you go and look at how all the different systems in the body are interrelated and influencing that terrain, right? So like we were talking about with blood sugar and insulin, we make sure that somebody doesn't have any signs of insulin resistance or that pre-pre-diabetes that we know increases risk of cancer.

Yeah, I mean, obesity and cancer are linked. Diabetes and cancer are linked. People don't understand that. Yeah. And even before somebody gets diabetes, right, that whole period of time where too many doctors are missing the metabolic syndrome pre-diabetes time where rate of cancer is much, much higher. So even if blood sugar is normal, but the insulin is high, the body's resistant to their insulin. The body's making more insulin than it needs to. That can, you know, feed cancer. And insulin makes your belly fat grow, but it also makes cancer grow. Yes. And it's not just breast cancer. It's prostate cancer and colon cancer and lung cancer, you know. Pancreatic cancer. Yep. All respond to higher levels of insulin. And so, you know.

And half of the people in this country have prediabetes and 90% don't know it. And I would bet it's more because now we have about 75% of the population is overweight. I mean, it's probably three quarters of the population has some version of insulin resistance or prediabetes. And even if somebody is not really overweight, if they're over fat, right? If they're that toffee, right? The thin on the outside, fat on the inside. If you're over fat or have too much weight around the belly, you're also at high risk for insulin resistance. The belly fat is a killer. It is a killer. Yeah. So we always focus on insulin and insulin resistance. We pay attention

to the gut microbiome, as we were talking about. And we also look to see, is there anything causing inflammation in the body? Because we know that cancer likes to grow in the face of inflammation. You know, studies show that when CRP, that marker for inflammation, one of the biomarkers for inflammation is higher, then cancer is more likely to grow. And so whatever we can do to make sure that there's no other reasons that there's inflammation going on in the body, that's, I think, really important to focus on. So we test for signs of inflammation and we look to lower inflammation. We also focus on what can we do to strengthen your immune system, right? How do we strengthen those natural killer cells, which we know that can go and find abnormal cells and get rid of them. You know,

how do we do that with certain nutrients and- Foods. Absolutely. Mushrooms. And then we focus a lot on toxins. Like vitamin D plays a huge role, right? In immune regulation. Absolutely. Hundreds of genes it regulates. Absolutely. It's been linked to higher rates of cancer. Yes. Yes. I mean, I think in men, African-American men have higher rates of prostate cancer. It's often because they have very low vitamin D rates. Yep. Right. Because they're living in this country and they're not getting enough sunshine. Right. They're out in Africa and there's sunshine all

the day. Yep. And then of course toxins, right, we know toxins have a huge impact on risk of cancer because they can lower the immune system function and they can impact hormone levels in the body and they can impact the liver and how well the liver can detoxify. Toxins have this huge impact in so many aspects from the plastics that we're crazy exposed to to you know heavy metals to um to pesticides and these things can act like you know especially like the pesticides and the plastics they can act as they can bind to that estrogen receptor in the body and impact what do they call them they call them xenoestrogens xenoestrogens right which are like foreign estrogens that are coming and it's all plastics. And we're all basically cesspools of all this stuff. Yes. Right, right.

And even they just did another study on the freaking tea bags, right? Those tea bags that are the fancier tea bags that are actually plastic. And they're leaching micro particles of plastic into your tea when you pour hot water over them. I know. Right. So you want to just use your loose tea. That's what I say. But yeah. So this is powerful. So what you're saying is someone gets diagnosed with cancer. You just don't say, well, come back every six months or a year for a scan. You go, wait a minute. There's a lot of stuff that can be addressed. Your diet, looking at hormones and insulin resistance, looking at hormone metabolism, which is something

that most doctors don't look at. We'll get into that in a minute. Looking at toxins, looking at your gut microbiome, looking at your nutrient status. These are all things we test here at the Ultra Wellness Center. So we have ways of looking for these things that most doctors just don't look at. And you know what? We find stuff, which is amazing. Absolutely. And then we can help figure out both through the patient's story and the tests we get to determine, you know, where to work for that individual person. Where do they need to focus? You know, green tea is probably good for all of us because of how it's anti-inflammatory, it's anti-angiogenic, right? It helps prevent those blood vessels from feeding a cancer cell.

But not in a teabag. Not in a teabag, exactly. You're loose tea. But there's certain people that it's even more important for, right? So we can then personalize care, which I think is phenomenal. Yeah, one of the most striking things is the gut connection too because there's a group of bacteria in the gut when they grow too much that we can actually look for and we can test through a stool test, actually. I mean, most

doctors who are oncologists don't look at stool tests. I mean, if you have breast cancer, why should I look at your poop? But we know how connected these things are. Even at Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Tara Tseng, who's the head of the Genomic Personalized Medicine program there, is very focused on the microbiome of the gut and how changes in that lead to breast cancer. Right. So tell us about that connection. Well, you know, so there's this enzyme in the digestive system called beta-glucuronidase. And if that enzyme is too high, that can help estrogen to get uncoupled, thank you, and then reabsorbed into the body.

So if you have too much of this one enzyme, we know that that ends up leading to higher levels of estrogen in the body. And we know that estrogen is associated with breast cancer, whether it's causing breast cancer or just causing breast cancer to grow. We know that when estrogen levels are high in the body, that can cause more breast cancer. So it's interesting to note that when there's a shift in the microbiome, there is a shift in this one enzyme, beta-glucuronidase, and then that can cause that uncoupling, allowing

that estrogen, as opposed to just getting released and pooped out, it gets reabsorbed into the body, resulting in higher levels of estrogen in the body. Yeah, basically the liver packages up the estrogen, sends it down into the poop, and it's supposed to just go out. But this bacteria sort of unwraps it from its package, and then it's free and it can get reabsorbed in the body. And then you end up with these chronically high levels. Yes, right. Which could lead to breast cancer in women, but we also see it leading to hormone imbalances in men too. So we are looking for it often.

And it can lead to fibroids and heavy bleeding and menstrual issues and all kinds of things. Yep. And then we also look at other stuff when we do testing here, looking at hormone metabolism, which is something pretty important, but most doctors don't clue into because they're not just estrogen. There are many estrogens and when it gets metabolized, it goes down these different pinball pathways.

And depending on which one, it can increase your risk of cancer or decrease it. So tell us about that. Yeah. And there's some types of, there's some types of estrogens that are healthier for us and other types that are more concerning. And, you know, we can influence estrogen metabolism with a bunch of phytonutrients, which is really, I mean, part of why that metabolism occurs, there's some, of course, genetic components, but you can influence that based on some foods. Yeah. influence that based on some foods. So, you know, broccoli is this amazing food, like your cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale. They have what's in them. They have some phytonutrients like glucosinolates, which gets converted into sulforaphane in your digestive system. And that, by the way, is like a patented thing that's used by John Hopkins to treat breast cancer, which is a broccoli pill, basically. Yeah, and that can help with influencing metabolism of estrogen. And it's also been shown, sulforaphane's been shown to

increase through epigenetics, right, which is how your genes express themselves, it can increase the production of this enzyme that makes glutathione, which is this master antioxidant detoxifier. So that when you eat more broccoli or take sulforaphane, right, but eat more broccoli, we always go with food first, then you can actually produce, it helps your body with the production of this amazing antioxidant detoxifier, glutathione. So... Yeah, it's powerful. I mean, I just remember a case I had a woman a number of years ago had early changes that were going to lead to cervical cancer. So she had a pap test and wanted to take out part of her cervix. And she was very stressed

about it. So we did a bunch of testing and we found that she, when we looked at estrogen metabolism and her genetics, she had genetics that impaired her ability to what we call methylate, which is super important for preventing cancer. It's like the B vitamins, but she also was making high levels of this toxic estrogen called 16, which is sort of one of those pinball pathways, and not enough of the two has estrogen when it's metabolized. And what we did was we essentially changed our diet to help, because right, sugar makes you have more 16, starch and carbs makes you have more 16, whereas all these things you're talking about, like the phytochemicals in plant foods, like the broccoli family, even

soy. Even soy, yes, helps you make equal, which helps with metabolism. What kills me is that breast cancer doctors will tell their patients not to eat soy because it's got estrogen, which it actually isn't acting like estrogen. It's binding the same receptor, but it actually can block the effects. Right, lower estrogen in the body, actually. And then they don't tell them to stop eating sugar and carbs and alcohol, which actually causes the cancer, which is very strange to me anyway so this woman had this pathway that was causing her pap test to become abnormal her cervical cells to get precancerous yep and so i changed her diet and i gave her a lot of these b vitamins like folate b6 and b12 and i gave her an extract of the broccoli called diendylmethane which has been actually

researched. If you look it up on PubMed, which is, you know, the doctor said, where's the evidence? There's plenty of evidence. There's 900,000 papers published every year. Who reads them all? Most doctors don't. And there's millions of articles. And if you look, you'll see there's evidence.

They just don't use it because it's sort of out of the framework. But this woman had problems with these pathways. And I simply gave her these components and nutrients. And not only did her metabolites improve, but her pap test reverted to normal without any surgery. Yeah. Right? And I think this is the kind of medicine we do here at the Alchewanna Center, where we actually can dig into these issues. We can find out what's really underneath it. We can help people modify those risks in a way that you did with your own breast cancer. I know. Yeah. It's so powerful. It's so powerful. And folate is amazing when it comes to cancer,

but so often supplements are full of folic acid, which is the synthetic form that is not good for us, for most of us. And a lot of people can't make it active into the active form. So you probably gave her the methylated folate. Yes. Yeah. And what you get from your plant foods, you know, folate comes from foliage, right? Your green leafy veggies and, you know, that's mostly methylated and easy for the body to assimilate. So that's why we're always telling people, you know, those, you know, get in your eight to 10 vegetables with some fruit a day, you know, really more vegetables, but just to get in all that folate. So true. And there's so many, you know, nutritional deficiencies we see,

and it relates to not just cancer, but other issues. It's amazing the amount of nutritional insufficiencies we see when we start to look, right? And I think that's the problem is a lot of times we're not looking and we're missing, we're missing some insufficiencies or frank deficiencies. And they're not quote diseases yet, but they lead to abnormal function and make people feel bad. And people don't often connect the dots. I think whether it's people who get fatigue and fibromyalgia from low vitamin D or people who are having mood issues from methylation problems. I remember this one patient and she had a history of multiple miscarriages and multiple

abnormal birth defects. You know, we have neural tube defects. She had an encephaly baby, which is like a baby born with basically without a brain, which is terrible. It's the worst kind of neurological defect. And she read an article I wrote on methylation online, and she asked her doctor for the test for her genes that affect this. And he found that they were abnormal. And he said, well, I'm going to give you folic acid.

She said, no, no, Dr. Himes does take this special form of folate called methylfolate, because she fixed her pathways that allowed her to actually fix this chronic problem. I mean, I'm amazed at sometimes when people come in to see us, how little testing has been done. We see this a ton with autistic children. You know, I had a 10-year-old who came in and he had like mild to moderate autism. He was really struggling with some of his development, his coordination, and his interaction with other kids. But nobody had done some basic nutritional testing on him, which I was just...

Nobody had checked his iron levels, which that's something that every doctor can do. And so why wouldn't you check his iron levels? And he had low iron, which impacts his energy and is impacting him in terms of development. It can make heavy metals more toxic to the brain. And so we replaced his iron. And of course, we cleaned up his diet, you know, and took him off of, you know, got him on a more nutritionally dense food, you know, more nutritionally dense foods. Yeah, we got him off of the sugars and the food coloring and stuff and took away some inflammatory foods for him. But then we just replaced him nutritionally. You know, we did some more testing on his mitochondria, which, you know, those are

the powerhouse of your cells and they help with taking your food and turning it into ATP or energy. And so when we looked at his mitochondria, we saw that he had some deficits there. And so we really worked to support his mitochondria with extra carnitine, the activated B vitamins, magnesium, CoQ10. And with the shift in his diet, giving him some iron, you know, giving, supporting his mitochondria. He, he really did so well. I was just talking to his mom the other day and she was just impressed. He's doing so much better at school. He's interacting more with other kids. He's, he's, he's, he's improving energetically too. Okay. Hold on. This is, this is like a headline news here. So autism has been on the rise for decades. I think the numbers keep getting worse and worse.

It used to be one in 2,000, then one in 1,500, then one in 150, then one in 69. I think it's one in 30 boys. It's pretty frightening. And it's not just better diagnosis. It's actually a real thing. And yet we typically think of it as a brain problem, right? But Dr. Martha Herbert from Harvard said it's actually a systemic disorder that affects the brain, not a brain disorder.

And you mentioned a number of things. You mentioned diet. You mentioned inflammatory foods, which basically autism, if you autopsy an autistic brain, it's inflamed, right? It's inflamed. They measure this on kids who died of autism and their brains are on fire. They have high levels of toxins. They have massive nutritional deficiencies. 90% of them have gut problems. And yet, you know, most neurologists don't actually, or psychiatrists don't look at all that stuff. And that's what we do here. And what you said was that you did a few simple things, right? Changes diet,

optimizes nutritional status, fixes mitochondria, and like, this kid improved. Now, kids with autism don't get better, right? That's the basic common consensus among medical professionals. And yet, what you said is really true. And it's not just like a wacky thing. Suzanne Goh, I'm sure you know, from Harvard, is a Harvard neurologist, pediatric neurologist, who studied through very fancy testing published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that a lot of these kids have mitochondrial problems in the brain. And so giving them these mitochondrial helpers, these are no drugs, these are just basic nutrients that the body uses that they have insufficient levels of actually helps

these kids get better. Yeah. It's, it's phenomenal. I, I, you know, I love working with kids on the autistic spectrum because we see significant improvements. Now we, we don't always see improvements. I mean, we have kids that, that don't improve. Well, I should say we often see improvements. We don't always see them totally reversed, totally normalized, right? But there's so much we can do. And we get a lot of kids who actually normalize as well. You know, I mean, I find it amazing. It's a miracle.

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, it sounds like crazy, right? But it's actually something we do see. Yeah, and especially when they come in young. When we get, I think because of the inflammation, right? The younger, the, the earlier we can get rid of the inflammation that's causing problems in terms of brain development, I think the better. So I had a child, I was talking to his mom just the other day, he's five now, but when he was two, when he was two, they brought him in and, um, which is great.

So when they're, I feel when we I feel when they're younger, we can have more impact. But so they brought him in when he was two, and he had that really typical story. He was developing really well. He was a beautiful child, doing great, starting to have words. And then around 15 months, he had this regression and um he started losing the words he was already saying and he was losing all of his language and he became really moody and irritable and um just they were they were really distraught so they brought him in and um when when you took when i took his full history we realized that at around one, he had this really bad pneumonia. Yeah.

So he was given a bunch of antibiotics, but then he actually needed IV antibiotics. So he wasn't getting better, and so he needed these IV antibiotics as well. So we said, okay, we've got to focus on the digestive system here. And we did a bunch of testing and we found that he had these gluteomorphins, they were caseomorphins. And these are the components from gluten and dairy that can cross the blood brain barrier and impact the opioid receptor in the brain and impact your child's or an adult's for that matter, but our ability to focus and our energy. Like you're stoned all the time. Yeah, you kind of have this brain fog and tired and moody and irritable.

And so... Wait, before you jump on. So the reason we get these is because the gut's a mess. Yes. And 95% of these kids have gut issues and they can't break down these proteins. And then that's when they cause these reactions. Right. And so when a child... And we can actually test for these in the urine. We can measure them. Yep. Which is what we found in him. And when a child has high doses of antibiotics at a really

young age, that can really change their digestive system and how well it's working. Because that's really when the whole digestive system's getting formed and the intestinal barrier is getting formed. And so he had this major shift in his microbiome that caused probably inflammation, I'm suspecting, and resulted in these gluteomorphins and caseomorphins. So again, we changed his diet. We took him off of gluten and dairy and his mom started to notice really improvement right away. I mean, he didn't go right to normal right away, but he started to have significant improvement right away. And then, you know, we, of course, gave him more omega-3 fats, both through food and supplements, you know, vitamin A that can help with eye contact. And we checked him for heavy metals

and we helped support his detoxification systems and really helped support his immune system with zinc and the vitamin A. And he really, you know, I was just speaking to his mom. Now he's five and he's in a regular school. He's integrated into normal school now. He's speaking, he's interacting with other kids. He's not as irritable. You know, the school doesn't have him. He doesn't have that diagnosis

anymore per the school. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. I mean, I think, you know, we see a whole spectrum in here and, you know, one in six kids has some neurodevelopmental issue, whether it's learning disabilities, ADD, whether it's Asperger's or various forms of autism. And the problem is, you know, we don't really have any great treatments for this. And I think that we in functional medicine pull back the hood and look much deeper at things that are modifiable. What can be changed to help these kids' brains work better? And whether it's Alzheimer's or autism or any brain injury or mood issue, we actually have a way of helping people, whether it's depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar, schizophrenia even.

That's actually where functional medicine originated was through Abraham Hoffer, who basically started thinking about the biology of schizophrenia and using high-dose nutrients to improve the function. And the first paper ever to be written about this was the Orthomolecular Psychiatry by Linus Pauling in 1969, published in Science Magazine, talking about how we can use nutrients to optimize brain function.

So we see this, and it's pretty striking. And I remember one patient, only one patient I had in almost 30 years who had autism, I couldn't find anything wrong. And I think it was a genetic cause. I couldn't find any metabolic or nutritional or any other treatable cause. But most of these patients, you can find stuff. And whether they get 10% better, 50% or better, 100% better, it's really worth digging. Yeah. And so often they're just told, oh, go to this therapy, which can be helpful, but that's all that's done. And so it's really worth digging yeah and so often they're just told oh go to this therapy which can be helpful but that's all that's done and it's so it's amazing to me and again i'm always

amazed that the things like iron levels not checked or or lead's not checked it's a brain problem why check any of that stuff right right yeah i just reminded me of this kid i had years ago who's uh came in as two and a half and uh he was really a mess same story yeah fine 15 months you know a bunch of insults antibiotics uh we hear the same story over and over yeah and he was bad was non-verbal not talking disconnected and we found so much wrong with him his gut was super inflamed he had bacterial overgrowth he had yeast overgrowth he had heavy metals he had severe b vitamin issues methylation problems magnesium deficiency zinc deficiency and we just started working on all these things just systematically and it takes work you know the dietary changes getting him off gluten and dairy

had gluteomorphins like you said we detoxified him over time we got him on b12 shots we got his nutritional status optimized and the parents were super diligent and did absolutely everything which is not easy because these kids are not easy to work with and they don't want to eat this they don't want to take that they don't want to swallow this but if you are diligent and you work with these kids this kid completely normalized and i was like holy cow like all his life cow. And his mitochondrial function was off and all of his labs went back to normal. And he went back to normal. And we see that. It can be so impressive.

I mean, I don't want to give the impression that we can cure every case of autism, but I do think it's something that is not being treated in any rigorous way by traditional medicine. And it needs that comprehensive approach, right? So that's where functional medicine, I think, is so phenomenal because it gives us that map to do things, to think differently, to personalize the care, right? And to look at all the systems in the body and then focus on what's important. Where is that important area to work on for that patient. It's really made for, you know, it's really a great system to use when working with kids or adults.

And basically anybody with anything that traditional medicine doesn't really work well for, or you know, even things that we do have good drugs, like autoimmune disease, there's good drugs, but you know, it's like, you know know using a sledgehammer yeah pound a nail and you have to figure out what the issues are and help people get to that and that's that's really at the ultra wellness center what we do differently is we really look at what are all those underlying factors what are the root causes how do we test for them differently you know when you go to the regular doctor you get like you know your lab work done and you get oh my tests are tests are all normal. I did 30, 40, 50 tests maybe. Well, there's so much going on in your body. There's literally 37 billion, billion chemical reactions every second. And how

many of those are we testing? Well, we test not all of them, obviously, but we test a lot of the relevant ones that no one else is looking at. Yeah. Like I had this, I had this woman who was, um, 38 and, um, was, was really struggling because she had gone to her primary doctor and everything was okay. And then she went to a GI doctor because she was having all this, she was having a lot of GI issues. She had had them her whole life, bloating, um, you know, hard time with digesting her food. She felt, she didn't really feel good after she ate. She had some intermittent food coma, some intermittent diarrhea and constipation. And she was tired of course. And she was having a hard time with gaining weight, which, you know,

we actually get a lot of patients with that here at the ultra wellness center. People want to lose weight, but we also get a lot of people who really are struggling with gaining weight. And so she was underweight, but she had this belly that would bloat. And so she was feeling tired. And, you know, when we started getting that good history and looking deeper and learning all about her story and then doing a physical exam, I mean, she started telling me, oh, you know, my nails. My nails are all weak and peeling and I can't put on muscle and I'm just feeling tired. And I went to the GI doctor. He did this colonoscopy and an endoscopy and everything was okay.

Looking at the structure, not the function. Yeah. And he actually, the GI doctor had actually done a SIBO test, a test for bacterial overgrowth. Yep. And had treated her with a medication for Zyfaxan, which helped, but then her symptoms came back. And so she was really frustrated. And when she came to see us, I started putting everything together and ended up testing her for these parietal cell antibodies and was amazed when I found they were positive. So parietal cells are

the cells in your stomach that make acid, which is necessary for breaking down your food and digesting protein particularly. Exactly. Yep. Digesting your protein so you can absorb it and then pulling your minerals out of your food and helping your body absorb B12. And so she had these, by the way, all the drugs that are given out like candy the acid blockers like prelosec prevacid they all stop that whole process i know it's just crazy that's how they work so you don't absorb iron you don't absorb b12 you don't absorb magnesium you don't absorb zinc you can't absorb your protein you get all these side effects yeah yep and that's why people who take acid blockers have an increased risk for having infections in their stomach right

that small small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or just pneumonia for that matter because the acid in their stomach is not high. And they get osteoporosis because they can't absorb calcium. They do that too, yeah. So this woman had these antibodies against the parietal cells in her stomach and so that was really the cause of her not being able to produce enough acid so she couldn't break down her protein absorb her protein gain weight like she wanted to do and also not having enough acid in her stomach resulted in her getting this

overgrowth of bacteria in her intestines and the small intestines and And it also resulted in her nails being weak and peeling and her hair shifting. So, you know, we just sort of put all those pieces together. So most doctors don't look at your nails if you have a stomach problem, right? But they're all clues. And functional medicine is all about being a medical detective and asking questions that most doctors don't ask and connecting the dots that most doctors don't connect and actually seeing how all these things are related. Yes. Because you're one body, one system.

Yes. Yes. So we, you know, we ended up replacing the acid in her stomach. We used a supplement called Betaine HCL. So when she ate, she would take some acid to help her break down her food. But then we also had to ask the question, well, why is she making these antibodies? And is there anything we can do to calm down that autoimmune process in her body? It's an autoimmune disease to the cells in the stomach that make acid.

Yep. Yep. And it's actually common. Yes. It's amazingly common. And we check for it all the time. And I'm amazed by how often I find it. And then if we find it early, then we can prevent the B12 deficiency that comes if we didn't find it for And then if we find it early, then we can prevent the B12 deficiency that comes if we didn't find it for years and years and years. So then what happened? Right. So then... Come on, I want the punchline. So then we realized that she had an issue with gluten and that may have been triggering this autoimmune disease. Which by the way, gluten can cause like hundreds of autoimmune diseases. So then we took her off of that and then we replaced the stomach acid. And, you know,

we had to give her some extra nutrients for a while because she wasn't really breaking down and absorbing. And sometimes just to help the digestive system heal, you have to give extra nutrients, right? So we gave her some extra amino acids and and things to help with healing the digestive system zinc and glutamine and um and and and you know what she just she started to her digestive system started to work better she could digest her food she was able to get rid of the bacterial overgrowth we had to treat her again but but she was able to get rid of it then it didn't come back. And her nails started to improve and her hair started to improve and she just felt better and have more energy.

So that's fun. Amazing. So it really is like being a detective. Because most of the time when you go to the doctor, you go to a doctor that's a specialist in a particular thing. I'm going to go to a specialist in my stomach. He's not thinking about all these other things. Yeah. And in functional medicine, we have a different way of asking questions, a different way of thinking that figures out the root cause, like a medical detective, and then uses different strategies to help optimize a system. So you didn't give her a drug.

You gave her things to support her stomach acid, which has been used for centuries in bitters, right? Yes. Which have been around as medicinal cocktails of herbs that help you digest your food, and that's what they do. Yes. Yeah. Amazing.

So not only are you a doctor and an exercise physiologist, but you're also an actually certified registered dietician, right? An RD, which is kind of amazing, a rare breed. And you have actually been one of the leaders in teaching other physicians about how to use food as medicine. So tell us about this whole concept of food as medicine and how that relates to working with patients here at the Ultra Wellness Center. You know, I think food, using food as medicine is amazing because there's so much we can do, right? We can, we can prevent disease by shifting somebody's diet, you know, and we can, we can treat disease by using food as medicine, everything from,

from diabetes to heart disease, to autoimmune disease, to digestive issues, you know, using food as medicine is amazing. And it doesn't have the side effects of medications. And there's so much we can do. And so I think we can do- We have some good side effects. Yeah, good side effects, right? And we can, you know, we just, we need to personalize it to the patient, right? And we're really lucky here at the Ultra Wellness Center, even though my background's in nutrition, we also have four amazing nutritionists who we work with.

And every new patient who comes in after they see the doctor, they see the nutritionist, which really helps me because they do all the practical stuff. Like, actually, how do you do this? Which brand of this and which product here? Right. And how do you make this practical and doable for the patient? Because sometimes we ask them to do a bunch of things. Yeah, it's easy for us.

We just say, don't eat this, do eat this, and then they have to figure it out. But the nutritionists really make the difference. Yeah, yeah. And so, but what it's amazing to see, and I think when, you know, you always say this too, right? You know, 80% of what we see improves when we just pay attention and change lifestyle. And, you know, sometimes we have to really look deeper and dig deeper, but a lot of times just by making, you know, personalizing the plan for the patient,

personalizing their diet for the patient, you know, that can really help them improve. Let's talk about that because, you know, you know, so many, there's so many camps of nutrition. It's like the diet wars out there and everybody's fighting with everybody, paleo, vegan, this, that. And what you're saying is it's not as simple, right? It's about figuring out what's right for you. So how do you go about doing that with nutrition? Yeah, you know, and I think that that's going to be really the future of nutrition, right, is how we can personalize the nutrition prescription for that patient.

And, I mean, of course, every patient, we want them to change to a whole foods diet and get off the junk, you know, and get rid of the processed food with the added sugar and food coloring and additives. So just baseline. Yeah, baseline. Eat real food. Yeah. And then we need to figure out, okay, would they do better with lower carbohydrates, right? Like do they have signs of that pre-diabetes we were talking about earlier, that insulin resistance? And would they do better if we really lower their carbohydrate intake?

I mean, people could be carbohydrate intolerant, just like they're gluten intolerant. Yes, and they develop carbohydrate intolerance, whether it's over time, aging, or because they're eating the wrong foods, or maybe there's toxins in the environment. We know that BPA, for example, that hard plastic, not only does it increase risk of breast cancer,

but it increases risk of insulin resistance. And it's everywhere. It's on your credit card receipts, on your ATM receipts, on your receipt you get at the gas station. You don't want to take those in touch. No. And I don't know why we would think that. My people say, do you want your receipt? I'm like, no thanks. And another plastic bottle that's BPA-free is not the answer because it's going to have some other plastic that's like slightly modified so they can get away with saying it's BPA-free, but it's, I'm, you know, probably impacting the... Stainless steel bottles. That's the way to go. Or glass, right? Yeah. So, you know, so then we can determine, you know, based on getting a good history from our patient, gathering all that information, seeing what they've done in the past,

looking at biomarkers, what are they dealing with? We can determine where and how to sort of manipulate the diet for their best health. Yeah, looking at their insulin levels, their cholesterol levels, their hormone levels. CRP, right, hormone, yeah. Inflammation levels, food sensitivity testing. We even do a DNA diet test, which is amazing, right? It's really interesting. And I think that we're going to learn more and more in this area in terms of our genetics and how that influences what diet we should be on. You know, I think the science is... It's like literally a sweet tooth gene. You can tell people are going to be more likely to be cravers and carbohydrate addicts and help them learn how to fix that.

Absolutely. Where do they need to focus? So I think the personalization of nutrition is where it's at and can be really helpful for people. And I think sometimes people, because when they just read about nutrition, they get kind of confused and overwhelmed and I don't know where to go and what to do. And so when you help to really personalize a plan, that can really help them be successful and move forward. It's powerful, for sure.

Let's talk about something else, which is something we treat a lot here, and it's something that I personally experienced and knocked me to my knees almost 30 years ago, and that's heavy metals yeah and to me it's remarkable how much this is a blind spot in medicine it's just like off the radar right like lead we know okay lead can cause things to go wrong and kids can be leading to behavior issues aggression and so on and we know if you eat way too much mercury or you're poisoned, that's an issue. But this low level chronic toxicity is something that is just

off the medical radar. And yet it's something we see all the time. Can you talk about what it does and what we see and how do we actually treat this? Yeah. It's all about the toxic load, right? So we're so focused on, is there one toxin that's crazy high levels? And then we know it's a concern, but we're learning, right? Or we know that when there's low levels of multiple different toxins, they can be additive and they can really impact so many different systems in the body. They can impact your immune system and, you know, weaken your immune system. They can impact your neurological system. They can impact every system in the body.

Bring your gut. Absolutely. You know, I remember... You know, after I met you all those years ago, was it really 20 years? It was, I think, actually. But at some point, you looked at my mouth. Oh, yeah?

Yeah. And you're like, oh, Liz, you really got to get rid of those. So I had a mouthful of silver amalgams, right? And who knows if that're like, oh, Liz, you really got to get rid of those. So I had a mouthful of silver amalgams, right? And who knows if that was linked to cancer, but in the literature, it is linked to cancer. And it definitely, for me, I know that it impacted my immune system because once I had them removed and detoxified, you know, my immune system really improved. But I remember you looked at my mouth and you're like, you got to get those taken care of. And I'm like, Oh, really? That's so much work. You know, I had little kids, exactly money. I had little kids and, um, and it just seemed overwhelming to

me. And, um, and, and I worried, you know, Oh, what would, what sort of, what if it went wrong? And, um, but you, you were like, like you you really should get those taken care of i remember like two years later you looked at my mouth yeah you should really get those taken care of so finally yeah i definitely listened to you and um you know had them safely removed right they you know they used a dental dam so that the mercury and oxygen so the mercury didn't get back in my system high speed suction you can't just go to regular dentists to take them out it can make you worse i know a guy who was a doctor who did that, and he ended up with a heart failure. Yeah, you really need to have them removed.

You need a heart transplant, so you be careful. You know, you really need to remove them safely. And you know what helped, you know, what I do with all my patients when I'm trying to make that decision of, do these fillings need to come out, is we test. Yeah. And we can test to see if a lot of that, um, their mercury levels in their body. And we can look to see as a lot of that mercury coming from the amalgams, right. Is it, you know, you can help determine, is it more fish or is it more fillings that the, why the mercury

is high and how is the body handling that mercury? Right. So that really helped me, you know, I had the pattern that was like, okay. And again, you're not going to get that test at your regular doctor. That's a specialty test. And it's made by a company called Quicksilver. We do that here at the Ultra Wellness Center. So those are the kinds of things we do that are quite different. Absolutely. And it helped me go, okay, your, your mercury, you've got, your mercury is coming from those amalgams and you know, your body is not handling them well. And as I mentioned earlier, I'm missing one of these glutathione-producing genes. And so genetically, I'm not...

Which is important for cancer prevention, too. It is. And so, you know, genetically, I'm not that great of a glutathione producer or detoxifier. You mean both, doc. Yeah, I know. So I really, when I did the test, you could really see that, you know. And I see that all the time with my patients patients where when we look, we can say, okay, these fillings should be removed.

Or sometimes I say to patients, you know what, I don't really, you know, if you want to, if you have somebody who can safely remove them in a, you know, maybe that makes sense. But if it's not really, okay, this is obvious, then, you know, which it was with me, this is obvious. You really need to have these replaced yeah it's a calculus if you're really healthy and you feel fine and your levels are low i mean i had a guy i remember was 75 at a mouthful of fillings yeah um i tested him and challenged him he had no mercury in his system he was able to get rid of it clear it yeah it's fine

depends on the microbiome of your mouth. It depends on whether you grind your teeth or chew tobacco. Yeah. And probably that whole toxic load, right? And our genetics. And our genetics, yeah. Right. And how it all comes together. So I had them removed and then went through this whole detoxification process where I supported, I took extra glutathione and a binder and some nutrients that helped support my body's production of glutathione, NAC, and the sulforaphane we were talking about earlier. And as I was saying earlier, it made such a huge difference to my immune system. You know, I was somebody who had those chronic urinary tract infections as a kid. I was more prone to colds and flus and viruses.

And, you know, it made a huge difference in my immune system. And also made some difference, you know, in terms of my neurological system. I noticed a shift in terms of the brain fog aspect, in terms of my ability to think more clearly. I was pretty amazed. Yeah. And so... I remember when you went through that.

Yeah, after many years yeah it's so powerful and what you're saying is there is a science of how to do this yes it's not like oh detox like it's some kind of quacky thing your body actually has a detoxification system it's well described by science there's ways to activate it and optimize it and help it do its job you know you mobilize the toxins you can increase the circulation, get rid of them. You can actually upregulate those pathways that clear it from your body. You can bind it in your gut to make you poop it out and pee it out. So there's a real science to this. And it's just this thing that's the biggest blind spot in medicine. Yes. And helps so many of our patients. Like I had a woman who I started seeing maybe two years ago, and she was 50,

and she had chronic sinus infections. She was getting antibiotics at least three times a winter, sometimes even five. In fact, her doctor just gave her prescriptions so that if she felt one coming on, she could just go get refilled. Unlimited refills for augmentin. So it became this, but it's not uncommon. We sort of laugh about it, but it's unfortunately not uncommon that people get into these chronic infections, right?

Their body gets one infection. They take antibiotics, which wipes out a lot of the good bacteria, which is our first line of defense, right? So those good bacteria that line our nasal passageways, our stomach, our intestines, our skin, our urinary system, right? Those are the first line of defense against getting another infection. So you take antibiotics, it gets rid of some of the good stuff, so then you're more prone to getting another infection, which is what happened to this woman, right? She was just getting a sinus infection after sinus infection.

And, you know... By the way, when you go to the ENT doctor to check your sinuses, they don't check your heavy metals. Right. So, you know, we did a lot of things for this woman, right? We took her off of dairy, which causes a lot of mucus. We cleaned up her diet, of course. We supported her immune system with all those nutrients that are really good for the immune system, the Asian mushrooms and zinc and vitamin A and vitamin C. But we checked her heavy metals. And she had high levels of heavy metals. And so we needed to, you know, she actually had had her fillings removed a few years ago. But when we did some further testing that provoked tests, we found that her mercury and even her lead was a little bit elevated.

And, you know, a systematic approach, but a really comprehensive approach that was working to, you know, giving her a lot of fiber that helps bind to the heavy metals we used. We actually used some chelators with her. We used the nutrients like the NAC and sulforaphane. And we... It all helped increase glutathione, what you were talking about. Exactly, which helps her detoxify.

Gave her glutathione, which you can give liposomally, but you can, we can also give it IV. Yeah. Well, what's really interesting is that, you know, something you just said, which is that she had her feelings out and she was still toxic.

So a lot of people are like, oh, I'm going to stop eating fish. I'm going to get my feelings out and I'm going to be okay. Yes. And that's not necessarily true because what happens is if you've had a lifetime of fillings or you've had a lifetime of tuna, canned tuna, it's going to accumulate in your body and it gets stored in your tissues. It's

not in your blood. So if your blood tests are fine, you don't know that you're fine. You have to do a very specialized test that most doctors don't do, which is a challenge test where you take a chelating pill and collect your urine for six hours. And that's the kind of stuff we dig into. And what's amazing to me is that over doing this probably 10, 15,000 of these heavy metal tests is that it's so variable how it affects people. In one person, it can cause depression. Another person, a sinus infection. Another person, Alzheimer's. Another person, cancer.

Another person, gut issues. Yes. And it just goes on and on, autoimmune disease. And yet we don't think about looking for that when we're diagnosed with these problems. And often that's the key. I remember I had one guy who had ulcerative colitis and I was doing all my normal functional medicine tricks and nothing was working. And I'm like, so I remembered medicine tricks. And nothing was working. And I'm like, ooh.

So I remembered what my mentor said, Sid Baker, who's been a mentor for a lot of us in functional medicine. He said, have I done everything I can for this patient? Is there something I'm missing? Is there something I'm missing? So I went back to the basics. Is there something that he's got that's not agreeing with his system? Usually it's a short list.

It's toxins, infections, or microbes, allergens, poor diet and stress. And we checked his heavy metals and it was off the chart. And this guy couldn't gain weight. He had weight loss, blood in the stool, was really quite sick. And we got rid of his heavy metals and he completely normalized. So it doesn't mean to say that everybody with ulcerative colitis has mercury. Because I would say just because you know the name of the disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you, right? It doesn't tell you anything except you have these symptoms. It doesn't tell you what the real cause is. And that's what's so different about functional medicine.

It's so different about what we do here at the Ultra Wellness Center. And we see people from all over the world who come to get help when they've tried everything else and nothing works. But you don't have to wait until you've tried everything else. You can come here first. So in terms of your vision for the future of healthcare, where do you think we're going and what do you think the future is going to look like?

Well, you know, I think that, I think we just, we need to focus on personalizing healthcare, right? And working with that individual patient and having the time, having the time to be able to, as clinicians, to get to know our patients and get all that history so we can determine where we need to go, you know, and where we need to focus to help them get well. That's so good. You know, one of the things we do here that's a little different and I think really helps our patients and something that I personally use to get better from chronic illness is intravenous nutrition. And, you know, you were trained as a not only

registered dietitian, but as a family doctor, you want to do a fellowship in nutritional medicine. And what that generally means is a lot of IV nutrition, but not the kind we do here. And yet we're doing things that are a little out of the box, but seem to have profound benefits. So talk about the benefits and how intravenous nutrition works and how is it different from what we use in the hospital and how do we use it with patients? Yeah, I mean, IV nutrition can be really a great tool to add on and help our patients heal. So, you know, there's a few reasons why that is. So when you give something IV intravenously through the vein,

then you can bypass the digestive system. So if somebody's digestive system isn't really working great, all the people we've talked about so far, if they have inflammation, if their ability to digest and absorb their nutrients is compromised, we can bypass that and use IV nutritional therapy to give them the nutrients their body needs, whether it's B vitamins or magnesium or glutathione, or there's so many things we can... Vitamin C.

Vitamin C, yep. And the other reason that IV is great is we can give higher doses. And sometimes higher doses are necessary when somebody's really depleted or... Or they're really sick. Yep, or they're really sick. Or we're really using nutrients actually as medicine or treatment, you know? So we're taking it to another level. And so because of that, IVs can be really, really powerful.

And they can really help some of our patients turn the corner when they can't really do it with pills, right? Like they're like, okay, we know they're B12 deficient, but they're not absorbing all this B12 I'm giving them. Or you can give really high doses of IV vitamin C, which you can't give orally because it's hard on the digestive system. Cause of diarrhea. Yeah, exactly.

So it can be really a powerful tool. And, you know, so it's fun to use and really see some of our patients that have been okay. You know, I'm just not, I'm not getting there. I'm not getting there. And that helps them really turn the corner. Yeah, for me, it was huge. I remember when I was first sick with chronic fatigue and the mercury poisoning, I needed massive doses of IV vitamin C and glutathione and B vitamins and things that

helped me deal with that. And recently, when I got sick from mold poisoning, my gut was a mess because I'd had antibiotics for a bad tooth and that caused colitis. And it was a whole mess and my gut wasn't working. So I did a lot of high dose IVC and glutathione and other nutrients. And it really was a big part of me getting better. So I think it's an underappreciated tool. Not everybody needs it, but although there's a lot of health promoting benefits of it too. So people use it just for prevention, longevity, but it's a really powerful tool. And we're doing it here at the Ultra Wellness Center.

And I think it's something that is in the future going to be more and more just part of general care. In fact, is it cancer centers that are using this for cancer treatment, high dose vitamin C? They're in hospitals now, they're using it as a treatment for sepsis in the ICU when you have an uncontrolled infection, the antibiotics aren't working, you get vitamin C. I mean, we do it in the hospital when people have an arrhythmia for a heart attack or something that happens with their heart. After all the drugs don't work, we give them intravenous magnesium. It's sort of funny where when people are coming in preterm labor, we give them IV magnesium as a treatment to help slow down and relax the uterine muscles. So there's so many benefits of intravenous nutrition. And I think that's something that

people don't always appreciate. Yeah. And we can use, you know, we can give glutathione. So there's so many ways we can give glutathione, but, you know, we can give it liposomally, which means you squirt it in your mouth and it gets absorbed through the cheek, through the cells in your mouth. But IV is another great way that you can give glutathione, which just helps support that body's detoxification system. Yeah, it's so powerful. Helps with colds and flus. Are there any other patient stories that stand out in your mind over the years that were just like an illustration of how a functional medicine model

is so much better a mousetrap than traditional medicine? Yeah. So, you know, this is actually another one of my, my kids on the autistic spectrum, but you know, this was, this was kind of interesting because he is somebody who, um, his diagnosis just went away very quickly. And I don't always tell the story because, because then I think a lot of people assume that everybody who comes to us with, with autism will, will just resolve right away. There's a joke.

So if you've seen one kid with autism, you've seen one kid with autism. Yeah. They're all different. Yeah. But he, you know, he came in. He was nonverbal at the time. He was, you know, banging his head on the ground. He was, you know, coordination was off.

And, you know, again, we just did our workup. We did our normal workup. But the amazing thing for this child is he had a methylmalonic acid that was crazy high. And a methylmalonic acid is a test that looks at vitamin B12. So it's the functional marker of B12. And sometimes, again, it's not – a lot of kids don't even get blood work. But even if their B12 is checked, it's checked with serum B12. Yeah, which is not reliable. No, it's not a lot of kids don't even get blood work but even if their b12 is checked it's checked with serum b12 yeah which is not reliable no it's not a great test and for him it wasn't and it

didn't pick up his b12 deficiency and so when we did his methylmalonic acid we saw a very high level which means he was very low in b12 and we started giving him b12 injections and this is because the gut is where you absorb it. A lot of these kids who are autistic have messed up guts. Yeah. And there probably was also some genetic reason that I don't even, I don't completely know why his B12 was also, I mean, it could have been just gut, but there's probably other things too.

And it was amazing because because the parents were like okay he's fine now i was like really okay that was easy but it's usually not like that usually not that easy another case you told about kid you had giardia it was an autistic kid years ago that had giardia and uh that's a basically a parasite that inflames the gut yeah and that also led to his brain becoming- Being inflamed, right? Inflamed. And that was treated and he got better.

We always have to look for what's causing the inflammation, right? Because you have to pull away that inflammation so that can calm down the inflammation in the body, calm down the inflammation in the brain, and then help with that normal development that we expect to occur. And you mentioned the methylmalonic acid and the B12. That's part of the cycle of creating glutathione in the body. Yeah.

Right? So everything is connected. Yes, you did teach me that. I remember you teaching me that all those years ago. Yeah, it's all connected. And so when we actually start to see these patterns and connect the dots, that's the power of functional medicine. That's what we do here at the Ultra Wellness Center that's so different.

And there are many new practices out there who do functional medicine and people are doing great work out there but we're unique here because we collectively have over 60 years of experience treating thousands and thousands of patients uh over many decades and yeah it's it's uh you know if you're stuck if you have struggled and you are looking for answers for yourself or someone in your family or friend, I mean, we're here to help you. Yeah. And it's just been such an honor and a privilege to work with you all these decades. And we're keeping going. And it's pretty awesome.

And I think now the world is sort of catching on. Functional medicine is actually a thing, which is striking to me. Because when we started, it was sort of this invisible thing that nobody knew about. But I think you've been a key leader in the movement and you go around the world teaching people. You go to South Africa and London and everywhere around the United States to train future doctors on how to do this. So thank you for your dedication, Liz. And thank you for being part of the Ultra Wellness Center. Thank you for having dedication, Liz. And thank you for being part of the Ultra Wellness Center. Thank you for having me, Mark. It's amazing. So if you love this podcast, we'd love to have you leave a comment. We'd love you to share with your friends and family on social media and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next

week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, everyone. It's Dr. Mark Hyman. 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.

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Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. That's P-I-C-K-S to sign up free today. other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.