The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Prevent And Reverse Fatty Liver Disease with Functional Medicine with Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Episode Date: August 2, 2021How To Prevent And Reverse Fatty Liver Disease with Functional Medicine | This episode is sponsored by Rupa Health and Athletic Greens Having a healthy liver is a vital component to combating the toxi...c junk and chemicals in our environment. A healthy liver means your body stays healthy, you don’t get sick, and you maintain plenty of energy. Unfortunately however, 90 million Americans—and a growing number of individuals worldwide—have what is called fatty liver disease, which literally means your liver fills with fat. This then paves the path for chronic disease and inflammation. But the good news is that fatty liver can be easily treated and reversed with some basic dietary and lifestyle changes. In this episode, Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Elizabeth Boham to discuss how our high-starch and high-sugar diets are largely responsible for driving fatty liver disease, how to know if you have a fatty liver, and how they work with patients to prevent and reverse it. Elizabeth Boham is a physician and nutritionist who practices Functional Medicine at The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Through her practice and lecturing she has helped thousands of people achieve their goals of optimum health and wellness. She witnesses the power of nutrition every day in her practice and is committed to training other physicians to utilize nutrition in healing. Dr. Boham has contributed to many articles and wrote the latest chapter on Obesity for the Rankel Textbook of Family Medicine. She is part of the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine and has been featured on the Dr. Oz show and in a variety of publications and media including Huffington Post, The Chalkboard Magazine, and Experience Life. Her DVD Breast Wellness: Tools to Prevent and Heal from Breast Cancer explores the Functional Medicine approach to keeping your breasts and whole body well. This episode is sponsored by Rupa Health and Athletic Greens. Rupa Health is a place for Functional Medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. You can check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Athletic Greens is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners a full year supply of their Vitamin D3/K2 Liquid Formula free with your first purchase, plus 5 free travel packs. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman to take advantage of this great offer. In this conversation, Dr. Hyman and Dr. Boham discuss: What is fatty liver and why are we seeing so much of it, even in children? The difference between fatty liver disease and cirrhosis of the liver How food, medication, alcohol consumption, and environmental toxins drive fatty liver disease How fatty liver is connected to high blood sugar, insulin resistance, heart disease, metabolic dysfunction, cancer, Alzheimer’s and more The types of foods, herbs, and nutritional supplements that can help heal fatty liver disease How much alcohol consumption is too much? Testing for and diagnosing fatty liver disease Patients who they have worked with to treat fatty liver disease Additional Resources How Addictive Foods Are Driving Fatty Liver Disease https://drhyman.com/blog/2021/05/07/podcast-minisode78/ Fatty Liver is More Dangerous than You Might Realize. Here’s How to Heal It https://drhyman.com/blog/2016/05/05/fatty-liver-is-more-dangerous-than-you-might-realize-heres-how-to-heal-it/ Do You Have a Fatty Liver? 90 Million Americans Do! https://drhyman.com/blog/2013/09/26/fatty-liver-90-million-americans/ How to Reverse and Prevent Insulin Resistance https://drhyman.com/blog/2021/07/19/dp-minisode40/
Transcript
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Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.
We're seeing this huge rise in fatty liver, not only because of alcohol, but because of
how high blood sugar, high levels of insulin, toxins like glyphosate and all the other toxins
you mentioned, medications that people are taking, all are putting stress on our liver.
Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.
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week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman.
That's Pharmacy with an F, a place where conversation doesn't matter. And if you've
ever heard about this weird thing called fatty liver, you better listen up. This is not something you should ignore,
and it's something that affects almost one out of every two Americans. So we are going to go
deep into fatty liver today, otherwise known as foie gras in French, and we're going to talk with
none other than our own Dr. Elizabeth Bowen from the Ultra Wellness Center. She's been my colleague
and friend for decades now. She's the medical director of the Ultra Wellness Center.
She's one of the leading physicians in the functional medicine movement, training doctors
all over the world. And she's what every doctor should be. She's trained as a family doctor. She's
had a fellowship in nutrition and has also studied as an exercise physiologist and trainer. She's
the real deal. Welcome back, Liz.
Oh, Mark, it's great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Okay, so let's talk about fatty liver. First of all, what is fatty liver? Why should we care,
and who has it? Oh, my goodness. So fatty liver is when the liver cells, the cells in your liver,
are replaced with fat cells. So fatty liver just means that some of the cells in your liver have been replaced with fat cells.
And so there's fat deposited within your liver.
Why do we care?
Because then that means your liver can't work as well because it doesn't have all those liver cells doing the job that the liver does, right? So the liver really helps our body detoxify, metabolize chemicals from the environment, metabolize our own hormones,
metabolize and get rid of toxins. And so we definitely don't want to have an under-functioning
liver, that's for sure. And the prevalence of fatty liver disease is really, really high. And
unfortunately, it's increasing. But about 90 million people in the US have fatty liver disease.
And so it's increasing in this country, it's increasing worldwide, the amount of fatty liver
we are seeing. So why do we see so much fatty liver? think oh it's alcohol you know alcoholics have big
livers they have liver failure it's hepatitis but you know what is the most prevalent cause by far
of fatty liver in america i mean so right so you can have alcoholic fatty liver disease so
you can get a fatty liver because of drinking much alcohol. And we'll talk about that and what is too much.
But really what we're seeing, why we're seeing such a skyrocketing of the amount of fatty
liver is because of the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which the major reason is this
drive and this increase in insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, which is connected with
everything as we always talk about, but also
fatty liver disease. And it's prevalent, right? So we know with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease,
it's about, there's studies saying 10 to 46% of the people in the United States have it, or even
six to 30% of people worldwide. So somewhere in that quarter to half of people are dealing with
fatty liver disease and it's increasing, it's increasing worldwide. And we're seeing it with
our children too. So as we know, how does that really impact their overall health and development
and risk of death as they get older? Significant. Yeah, it's huge. So what is the biology here? Like,
who gets it? And, you know, I mean, we talk about like 90 million Americans who have this problem.
It's almost one out of two Americans. Right, right. It's something when we went to medical
school was like, what? That's not a thing. And now it all of a sudden became a thing.
Used to be all fatty liver from alcoholics. You know, we got that. But we never saw real
problems with this when I was in medical school.
And now it's like 90 million Americans. And maybe even one out of two Americans overall have
some level of dysfunction for liver. Right. So what happens first is that the fat cells
replace the liver cells. And that's called fatty liver or steatosis. And then what can happen over time, if there's inflammation with that fat
deposition in the liver, that's called fibrosis. So that's fatty liver with inflammation.
And if that continues to progress, we can get scar tissue in the liver. And that is called cirrhosis, which is this, that's the non-reversible
stage. So fatty liver, the great news is it's very reversible. Even the fibrosis,
when there's inflammation is reversible. Once it becomes cirrhosis or scarred,
then it's not reversible. And so the damage to the liver is non-reversible and definitely increases risk of cancer and
lots of problems as we spoke about.
And why somebody progresses from the fatty liver to cirrhosis really depends on your
genetics, the rest of your diet, of course.
The microbiome probably has this huge impact. It's not really all understood,
but it's so fascinating, some of the research looking at that as well.
Yeah. Well, that's right, Liz. I mean, the microbiome is such a key part because it
drives inflammation and fatty liver is an inflammatory disease of the liver.
Yes. And the microbiome can release toxins and can
cause leaky gut and can cause all sorts of problems. But it seems as though prevalent
of fatty liver is really because of our high starch sugar diet. I mean, the average American
eats about a pound of sugar and flour every single day. You know, 152 pounds of sugar,
133 pounds of flour a year. That's an enormous amount of flour and
sugar every single day. And what that does is it drives the pathology of fatty liver. And when you
think of fatty liver, people are like, oh, if I eat fat, I'm going to get a fatty liver. Well,
it's actually not true. It's the opposite. Fat actually can heal a fatty liver, such as a ketogenic diet or even high
levels of MCT oil. But with fatty liver, the real cause is the carbohydrates and the sugar.
So it's the starch and the sugar that drive insulin that lead to fatty liver and cause
high triglycerides and cause low HDLL, and cause inflammation, and more insulin resistance,
and you end up with this vicious cycle. And the problem is, you know, from a traditional point
of view, we're good at diagnosing it, but not great at, or we're not even that good at diagnosing it.
We know how to diagnose it, but we're not really skilled at treating it or reversing it, which is
kind of stunning, because like, oh, well, just, you know, take these drugs, or, you know, have
better control of
your blood sugar or lose weight. That's another one. Just lose weight. It'll get better. Well,
that's an easy thing to say to people. It's a hard thing to get people to do.
And a lot of people who have fatty liver are pre-diabetic, insulin resistant, or diabetic.
And again, 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, which means that 88% of Americans
are at risk for fatty
liver because they have some degree of metabolic dysfunction. And that metabolic dysfunction is
caused by sugar and starch and processed foods. And it's driving the insulin resistance that
causes the metabolic dysfunction, which is defined as high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high
blood pressure. So this is such a common issue. And then when you add on alcohol
on top of that, and you add on medication on top of that, let's say people are taking Tylenol,
which is damaging to the liver, you end up with, you know, not a very fun environment for the
liver. And on top of that, you have all the environmental toxins that we're all exposed to,
pesticides in our household cleaning products, in our skincare products, in our food, in our water,
we're constantly inundated with compounds that are putting a stress on our liver and making it
work harder to detoxify. So you add all that together and then you go, wow, we're in a big
problem. So why is fatty liver a problem? I mean, so my liver is a little fatty, who cares? Like,
why is it an issue for people? Why do we care to fix it? Other than the fact that you can get cirrhosis and die from liver failure.
That's not a common thing.
Other than that.
But that's a late stage thing.
The other problems are not late stage and they happen to a lot of people and they're
unrecognized as related to fatty liver.
Right.
I mean, they can happen quickly.
Fatty liver can develop quickly. They know that
within two weeks of heavy drinking, having one and a half to two ounces of hard alcohol
every day for two weeks, you can start to see signs of fatty liver, which is, you know,
that it can develop very quickly. What's great to also understand within
a lot of this research is that it can resolve quickly. So when somebody has fatty liver because
of alcohol and you take them off of alcohol, that you can see resolution of fatty liver within
four to six weeks. So, you know, that is, it can progress, unfortunately, quickly if we're not taking care of ourselves.
And then it also regresses when we start to make some shifts. And as you were mentioning,
we're seeing this huge rise in fatty liver, not only because of alcohol, but because of
how high blood sugar, high levels of insulin, toxins like glyphosate and all the other toxins you
mentioned, medications that people are taking, all are putting stress on our liver and making
it so then our liver can't do what it needs to do to detoxify. So it becomes this vicious cycle of
we're inundated with toxins that are impacting our liver, but then the liver can't work as well.
And so then we can't get rid of the toxins that we're inundated with. So it becomes a vicious
cycle of having issues with our detoxification system in our body. And as we've spoken about
before, the liver is such a critical organ within the body's natural ability to detoxify and handle all the toxins we're exposed
to. Maybe we weren't put together to handle all of these toxins, unfortunately, that we're exposed
to, but we do have this ability to handle toxins and we want to take care of our body so we can
handle the toxins that we are exposed to. And so it's really important that we take care of our body so we can handle the toxins that we are exposed to. And so it's
really important that we take care of our liver. And so what is considered, you know, what's
considered normal for alcohol intake, you know, for men, it's less than 10 drinks a week. And for
women, it's less than five drinks a week. And so we know that problems with the liver can occur when we're drinking too much. So we see problems when people are binge drinking or consuming more than 14 drinks a week for men or more than seven drinks a week for women. So I think it's important we also talk to our patients about what is moderation with alcohol? How do we take care of our liver, both from all aspects of nutrition and lifestyle?
So there was also an interesting study came out recently looking at cancer and alcohol
and showing that there's a dramatic increased prevalence of cancer.
Even a little bit of alcohol may actually increase the risk of cancer.
So it's not just fatty liver, but it was a Japanese study with 63,000 adults where they looked at people who were drinking alcohol and it was a concern. But that aside, besides just the
overload on your liver, besides just the stress on your liver's ability to deal with all the normal
toxins we have to deal with, what happens when you have a fatty liver is it drives inflammation
in the body. And it's linked to heart disease, to cancer, to diabetes, to even dementia, and all sorts
of things that we don't think necessarily related to a fatty liver.
So fatty liver is sort of an early warning sign and clue that there's something wrong
in your body.
And it's causing a risk, an increased, dramatically increased risk of all these other problems.
But that said, how do we know if we have fatty liver?
You know, one of the first ways we find out is with general blood work. So if you do a metabolic panel, comprehensive metabolic panel on a patient, and we look at these markers like the AST and the
ALT, and if they're elevated, either high end of normal or elevated above the normal range,
that's something we really have to be thinking about is, is this fatty liver?
Should we go on and do an ultrasound of the liver to see if we are seeing some fat deposition
in the liver?
And so that's one of the ways we start to see it most frequently with our patients.
Yeah, absolutely. And so there's other tests you can use,
which I've had personally, just because I've got sort of biohacking,
kind of like to check everything,
but you can do an MRI and look at liver fat, you know,
and it should be less than 2%. And many people have very,
very high liver fat. I thankfully have less than 2%.
You can also, they're actually also
doing fiber scans, which look at the fibrous content, the fiber, sorry, the scar tissue from
the fatty liver, and they can use ultrasound scans. And those are good for measuring the degree. They
can do liver biopsies. And I think, you know, what we see is really in functional medicine,
a roadmap for healing the liver in ways that
just doesn't exist with a traditional medicine or conventional medicine.
So talk about what are the ways that, you know, in addition to the testing we talked
about, we'll look at insulin resistance, we'll look at the particle size, we'll look at inflammation,
we'll look at a lot of things that traditional doctor wouldn't look at.
What are the beginning things we do from a dietary lifestyle and supplement perspective
to reverse fatty liver?
I mean, one of the first things we do, right, is of course we get a good detailed history from our
patients and try to get a sense of what's going on for them, get an understanding of their timeline
of their health. And that can help us find out what may be driving health problems in that person. So if there is
concerns about fatty liver, you want to get a sense of what their toxic load has been in their
lifetime. What is their weight? What is their nutrition? What are they eating? And what is
their microbiome like? And so we can really evaluate all of that and get a sense of how
best to help this patient, that individual patient
improve. Because we know that for some people, it may be more focusing on toxic load. For somebody
else, it may be focusing more on alcohol intake. For somebody else, it may be more they're eating
way too many carbohydrates, refined sugars, soda, coffee drinks, muffins, and not exercising enough in that whole metabolic
syndrome process. So we want to really help focus the treatment plan on that individual patient.
And I think that's what's so special about functional medicine is it's really looking
for that underlying root cause for that underlying patient so that they can reach their optimal health. And, you know, we know that
problems with the liver and fatty liver impact our immune system and how well we fight off
infections. It impacts how we can digest food, metabolize food. It impacts our nutritional
state in our body. So there's so many reasons why we really
want to look deeper here. Absolutely. And I think in addition to the dietary stuff and getting rid
of the environmental toxins that we can, sort of decreasing our overall toxic load. And we've
talked about this in other podcasts, like the Environmental Working Group's Guide to How to
Reduce Your Exposure to Toxins in Food and food and household cleaning products and personal care products. But there's also a lot we can do from a dietary perspective to upregulate
those pathways in the liver that boost glutathione, all the brassica family, the onions and garlic,
all the spices that we can use, and even herbs that can be very helpful, like milk thistle and
others to help improve the liver function. And then there's a whole bunch of nutrients that the liver needs to function. And in fact, you know, you and I were
both trained in traditional medicine and we worked in the emergency rooms and, you know, people come
with a total overdose. We give them this quote drug called mucamist, right? Which is actually
N-acetylcysteine. It's a supplement you can get over the counter. What it does is it boosts
glutathione and helps the liver to regenerate glutathione, which is what's depleted often with
fatty liver and internal liver damage from overdose. And so there's a lot of things you
can do to boost glutathione. You can take glutathione, you can take N-acetylcysteine,
lipoic acid, milk thistle, curcumin. And we use a lot of herbs. We use also the B vitamins,
zinc, selenium, amino acids. And we do a lot of things to help the liver heal.
And what's amazing is when you use this cocktail of substances, things like milk thistle,
lipoic acid, N-acetylcysteine, glutathione, and so forth, livers will come back. And it's
striking to see the drop in liver function tests, the improvement in fatty liver content. And I encourage people to really think about,
one, checking to see if they have it, two, thinking about how to actually upregulate your
lifestyle so that you can protect your liver and live a liver healthy lifestyle, which is a lot of
what we do in functional medicine. And then make sure you're on the right supplements to help reverse the problem. So Liz, tell me more about a patient that we've had, because I think,
you know, sometimes patient stories are really helpful and instructive and give us a sense of
how we do things differently at the Elder Wellness Center here in Massachusetts and Lennox and what
you found and what you were able to sort of help him with and how it all worked.
Yeah. So I had a 50-year-old gentleman who came in to see me and he was told by his primary doctor that his liver function tests, his ALT and AST were mildly elevated. And so he came in because
he was frustrated with his weight. He wanted to lose some weight. He was about 25
pounds overweight. And he just mentioned to me that his doctor had said his liver function tests
were a little elevated and that they were going to be rechecking them in a few months. And so,
you know, we really got a good detailed history from him and we got a sense of what his diet was like and what his alcohol consumption was like.
Because that's one of the first things, of course, we think about with fatty liver or these elevated
liver function tests is we're like, okay, how much alcohol is this person consuming?
And what was interesting to me about him was, you know, he was pretty moderate in his alcohol
consumption.
He was having about two glasses of wine a night.
And so not for a man, you know, that kind of almost falls within what's considered moderation.
So I was, you know, he was not a binge drinker.
He was not overusing alcohol from the criteria we were talking about earlier. But I think the amount
of alcohol he was consuming in connection with his diet and probably his genetics and many other
things like his microbiome that we've spoken about, that all together was really impacting
these liver functions for him. And so we noticed with his diet, it was, you know, not rich enough
in vegetables, that's for sure. And, you know, really, that was probably the biggest thing I
would say with his diet, it was just, you know, devoid of a lot of vegetables. And you were
talking about some of the things supplements we use for helping the liver, you know, one of the
things we think a lot about is sulforaphane,
right, which comes from your cruciferous vegetables that helps and encourages the
production of glutathione in the body. And so one of the things we really worked on with him
is making sure he got some cruciferous vegetables every day, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, brussel sprouts, you know, really to help support the liver and help
it heal, essentially. We also had him take a break from alcohol. You know, we said, you know,
let's just pull away alcohol for a period of time, really help that liver calm down and let it give
it some time to heal. And as I was mentioning earlier, we really can see the liver
function tests go down pretty quickly for some patients. We can see if somebody did have fatty
liver, you can watch it improve within a few weeks of cleaning up the diet and decreasing
alcohol intake. So it can be, especially if it's not too far progressed, we can see changes pretty darn quickly. And,
you know, so with him, we really focused on cruciferous vegetables, lots of the
sulfurous vegetables like onions and garlic, we gave him turmeric, we gave him dandelion root to
help his liver and gallbladder work better, lots of green leafy vegetables, we made sure he was
eating enough protein, you know, we know that protein is really important for the detoxification process in the body.
We need to be eating enough protein to do that. And so we made sure he was getting enough
and foods that were rich in fiber to bind toxins, things like the beans and legumes and nuts and seeds, ground
flaxseed. And I did, I gave him some N-acetylcysteine, some NAC. I gave him some liposomal
glutathione and milk thistle. We put him on a really good multi that had methylated B vitamins
in it. I gave him a little bit of an extra methylated B vitamin and really focused on those
nutrient dense foods so that he wasn't wasting his calories
because he was 25 pounds overweight and we needed to cut back on that weight. So we really needed
to pull away those foods that were not nutrient dense. So things that are just people are eating
way too much of that are getting into our diet that are not giving us all of the nutrients the body needs
to work properly. Yeah. So incredible. So incredible. So I feel like we see this so
prevalently. It's so misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed. It's such a huge impact on your long-term risk
factors for all sorts of chronic illnesses from heart disease to cancer to diabetes and more.
And it's something that traditional medicine doesn't
really deal with very well. And you might've been told your liver function tests are elevated or
don't worry about them or they're not that bad or, you know, whatever, you know, we'll watch it.
That is just not a good idea. And I don't think we are equipped in our traditional training with
understanding how to actually figure out what to do for these patients with abnormal liver function tests. And I certainly was never trained. But the beautiful thing about
functional medicine is that we have a way of evaluating the liver differently. We have a
different diagnostic test we use. We have different therapy options. And we see tremendous improvements
in liver function and quality of health. And it's not just about the liver. It's like when you treat
what's going on with your patient, it's like everything gets better. His hormones get better,
his liver gets better, he loses weight, his sex drive improves, you know, like everything gets better. Blood pressure goes down. And all of a sudden, you've got a person who's,
instead of going on a trajectory towards increased risk of disease and death, to actually
having a more vibrant, healthy life. So it's super encouraging when you see these kinds of
patients because they're really relatively easy to diagnose and treat, and yet traditional care just doesn't cut it for the most part.
Yeah.
I mean, within four months on the plan, his liver functions came down to totally normal.
You know, after he lost 10 of those pounds, and then within a few more months, he lost another 10 pounds.
And his fasting insulin came down to
normal. His liver function tests, his markers of inflammation in the body improved. And then
eventually, I've been seeing him for a while. So at this point, he does have one or two glasses
of wine a few days a week. He does drink some some alcohol at this point. He never, as I said,
he never had a problem with alcohol abuse or alcohol overuse disorder. It just was,
he was drinking too much for his body. And so at this point in time, he's having a little bit of
alcohol and doing okay with that. And it's not causing a bump in those liver function tests or
some problem with his weight or insulin
resistance anymore. So he did really well. Well, that's so great. And I think for those
listening, if you had issues with liver function abnormalities, if you have fatty liver, if you
think you have it, or if you know someone who has it, please tell them about this podcast,
go listen to it. Come see us at the Ultra Wellness Center. We take people from all over the world.
We have virtual consults we do now. we can accommodate you all the way. We're pretty booked up. So you might have to wait a
while, but the beautiful thing is there's lots of free content. We're doing groups on online too
now, which will be able to help, you know, sort through your problem even without getting an
immediate appointment. Uh, and, uh, we'd love to see you. So, uh, come to visit us and also share
your experiences with maybe what you've had with fatty liver. Have you struggled?
What have you done?
Have you fixed it?
Leave a comment.
We'd love to hear from you.
Subscribe to every of your podcasts and share this with your family and friends on social
media.
And we'd really be excited to get this out there because this is a big problem and everybody
needs to know about it.
And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy.
Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman.
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And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods
to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use
and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the
weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays, nothing else, I promise.
And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up that's
drhyman.com forward slash pics p-i-c-k-s and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you
my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger
longer hi everyone I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner
database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed
healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.