The Dr. Hyman Show - Is Brain Fog Caused By Your Microbiome? with Dr. Todd LePine

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

Is Brain Fog Caused By Your Microbiome? with Dr. Todd LePine | This episode is brought to you by AirDoctor Many of us have experienced an inability to sustain our train of thought, difficulty focusing, the feeling like you’re living in a daze, and other types of brain fog. So what causes brain fog? The key insight is that your brain is not just some object sitting on the top of your shoulders. Your brain is an organ that’s connected to everything else happening in your body. And fixing your brain starts with fixing your body. When it comes to brain fog, that usually means attending to your gut health.  In this episode, Dr. Hyman sits down with Dr. Todd LePine to discuss the Functional Medicine approach to treating brain fog. They explain why brain fog is so inextricably linked to gut health and how brain fog can be triggered by a range of things from diet to allergies to autoimmune conditions to environmental toxins and much, much more. Dr. LePine graduated from Dartmouth Medical School and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, specializing in Integrative Functional Medicine. He is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner. Prior to joining The UltraWellness Center, he worked as a physician at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, MA, for 10 years. Dr. LePine’s focus at The UltraWellness Center is to help his patients achieve optimal health and vitality by restoring the natural balance to both the mind and the body. His areas of interest include optimal aging, bio-detoxification, functional gastrointestinal health, systemic inflammation, autoimmune disorders and the neurobiology of mood and cognitive disorders. Dr. LePine teaches around the world, and has given lectures to doctors and patients at American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM), Age Management Medicine Group (AMMG), the University of Miami Integrative Medicine Conference, The Kripalu Center in Lenox, MA, and is on the faculty for American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M). Dr. LePine is the head of the Scientific Advisory Board for Designs for Health and a consultant for Diagnostic Solutions Laboratory. He enjoys skiing, kayaking, hiking, camping and golfing in the beautiful Berkshires, and is a fitness enthusiast. This episode is sponsored by AirDoctor. We need clean air not only to live but to create vibrant health and protect ourselves and loved ones from toxin exposure and disease. Learn more about the AirDoctor Professional Air Purifier system at a special price at www.drhyman.com/filter In this episode, Dr. Hyman and Dr. LePine discuss: Brain fog is not a condition, it is a symptom Gut fermentation is as a common cause of brain fog How gluten, dairy, diet, food sensitivities, and gut dysbiosis can lead to brain fog Other reasons for brain fog including infections, tick infections, allergies, environmental toxins, autoimmune conditions, and more The relationship between the immune system and the gut How Dr. LePine worked with and treated a patient experiencing brain fog For more information visit drhyman.com/uwc Additional Resources: Supporting Our Innate Resilience https://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/2018/08/25/supporting-our-innate-resilience/ The Wrong Gut Bugs Can Make You Fat and Sick (and How to Fix Them) https://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/2017/09/21/the-wrong-gut-bugs-can-make-you-fat-and-sick-and-how-to-fix-them/ Getting Healthy is an Inside Job https://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/2016/03/16/getting-healthy-is-an-inside-job/ Building a Better Immune System for Lifelong Health and Vitality https://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/2018/11/06/building-a-better-immune-system-for-lifelong-health-and-vitality/ A New Approach to Autoimmune Disease https://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/2018/06/27/a-new-approach-to-autoimmune-disease/ Fixing Your Broken Brain + Lots More: 10 Takeaways from My Most-Asked Questions https://www.ultrawellnesscenter.com/2018/01/08/fixing-broken-brain-lots-10-takeaways-asked-questions/ The Broken Brain Podcast – My Personal Journey to Fixing My Brain with Dr. Mark Hyman https://drhyman.com/blog/2018/08/02/the-broken-brain-podcast-my-personal-journey-to-fixing-my-brain-with-dr-mark-hyman-14/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Certain foods may trigger brain fog, and it is something that I think is intimately connected to the gut. 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 today we have a special episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy, House Call, with one of my colleagues from the Ultra Wellness Center, Dr. Todd Lepine. You probably

know him by now. He's an extraordinary physician. He's been a doctor of functional medicine longer than I have, which is a long, long time. He graduated from Dartmouth Medical School. He teaches all around the world. He's one of the smartest guys I know. And he's just an awesome physician. And we get to talk about some really interesting cases today. Today, we're going to talk about brain fog. Now, that's not something I learned about in medical school. There was no class on brain fog. There was no ICD-10 diagnostic code for brain fog,

but it is a real thing that people experience, and most doctors dismiss. So, in traditional medicine, we don't really have a way of thinking about it, actually, except it is really, really common. And when people have it, they know what it is. I've had it. I'm sure you've had it. And it's not a fun thing. You feel like you're walking through silly putty.

You can't focus. You can't think. Your brain's all foggy. And it's very difficult to get through the day. And there's so many different causes of it. So talk to me in general about, you know know let's just sort of skip the part where what traditional medicine does with brain fog because maybe they'll give you an antidepressant maybe they'll i don't know what to do yeah ignore you but what what would what would be uh the major reasons that

we're seeing this pandemic of brain dysfunction and brain fog today? So, you know, brain fog is really a symptom, sort of like cough. So cough can be caused by a cold, bronchitis, pneumonia, post-nasal drip, asthma, a whole bunch of things. So you've got to figure out, okay, what's driving it? And there is no ICD-10 code for brain fog. You know, you might call it, you know, altered mental status, but oftentimes it's transitory. And that's the really interesting thing. And I've seen patients where they'll, you know, get brain fog when they're in a certain building, they'll get brain fog after they've had a certain meal, you know, though certain foods may trigger brain fog. And it is something that I think is intimately connected to the gut. I think the, and I will

talk about that at this this particular case is gut fermentation is oftentimes a cause for brain fog i mean it's like bugs fermenting the food you're eating creating all these nasty byproducts yeah and i i don't know i don't know mark if you've had patients who've had this is a really interesting thing because i have patients come in they say i feel like my gut is just like bloating and i'm fermenting and that's exactly what's happening so there's there is a condition. I just recently had a patient who had auto brewery syndrome and I've seen your own like beer factory. Exactly. So when you want to make beer,

what do you do? You take sugar and you add yeast to it and you can actually produce alcohol. And I've had a couple of cases where it was missed and it's actually not just the recent findings is not just yeast in the gut that do this, but also Klebsiella bacteria. So both bacteria and yeast can actually produce these compounds, which are toxins. Alcohol is a toxin. That's why when you get drunk, you're intoxicated.

And you actually produce alcohol and other toxins, which affect your brain. I never really had that insight before you said that word intoxicated. You're toxic. Toicated. You're toxic. Toxic. You're toxic. Exactly. I was like, wow, okay. That's how I explain it to the patients.

It took me 60 years to figure that out. Yeah, figure that one out. Exactly. But I think that what you're saying is very true. I mean, I've had two times in my life when I've had severe brain fog. One was when I had mercury poisoning 30, 25 years ago. And my gut was a mess then because the mercury poisoned my gut. I had terrible bloating, distension, diarrhea. And the second time was more recently when I had mold toxicity and I had C. diff and I also had

colitis and gastritis and my whole gut was a mess and I had severe brain fog and it was pretty debilitating. You could barely focus, answer an email, talk to somebody. You can't concentrate at all. And people think, oh, that's just sort of in your head. It's not in your head, maybe in your stomach. Well, it's manifesting in the head. That's the whole thing. And we have these artificial boundaries between the brain and the body and the mind and they're all interconnected. And brain fog is a real phenomenon, and then you have to sort of figure out what's doing it.

The other thing that is interesting that I see with some people with brain fog is just gluten and dairy. And I tell patients that one of the most addictive foods is pizza. And the reason for that is that pizza has gluten in it. That's true. You can eat a whole pie, right? Oh, yeah. I tell you, it's one of the foods that I'll occasionally indulge in, but I don't have it that often because it's not the best food for you.

You have my cauliflower pizza with goat cheese and a cauliflower crust. You can make a healthy pizza. Exactly, yeah. But the two foods which are interesting is that gluten and dairy both get broken down. The proteins in those get broken down into casein morphins and gluteal morphins and casein morphins are the ones from dairy and gluteal morphins are from gluten and those have morphing like effects. So you literally become a little high.

You get a little, you get a little high, you get a little foggy in the brain and it also can cause cravings and, and it can sort of cravings and and um it can sort of make you sleepy you know you eat it and then you get a little little little sleepy from it also uh that's you know when when children drink breast milk they go to sleep after they you know they conk out i mean that's because of the morphine like action uh in milk yeah so that's true i think you know it can be our diet. It can be food sensitivities like gluten and dairy, which are really common.

And often people going on an elimination diet will have an immediate relief of brain fog, which is something that you don't know you have until you don't have it anymore. Sometimes people just think of this sort of slow decline of their cognitive function. They're not realizing that it's actually something that can be reversed, and it can be reversed very quickly. So the second thing is the factors that are in the gut, bacterial overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, we call it dysbiosis. That can also lead to a lot of cognitive issues because your gut's connected to your brain,

and that causes this effect when the bugs are out of balance and it drives inflammation, and then you get inflammation in the brain essentially is what causes brain fog. Absolutely. Well, the other important thing, and I think I talked about this last time, is that the blood flow from the gut has to go through the liver. And the reason for that is to filter prior to the blood from the gut then going into the systemic circulation. So sometimes you'll have, in addition to leaky gut, you'll have problems with detoxification in the liver itself. And an example of that is the condition of hepatic encephalopathy which is brain fog that's that's essentially well talk about that what is that for people who don't

know what that sounds like a big word i learned i learned and i think i mentioned this before and it was one of the things that really stuck with me is uh when i worked at the va hospital there was a lot of alcoholics and when you're an alcoholic you basically turn your liver into into a pickled pickled liver you trash your liver, yeah. You trash your liver, and then you're not able to detoxify. And I would typically see this over and over where patients had cirrhosis of the liver, and their liver was not able to detoxify. And then when they would eat foods, especially high-protein-type meals,

they would get hepatic encephalopathy and literally go into a coma. So they would literally get delirium, confusion, brain fog. Brain fog. That's like the brain fog on steroids. And the reason is it was coming from their gut. And what I found so striking when I started learning about functional medicine was that here was a condition in medicine that we knew how to treat by fixing the gut.

We gave people antibiotics to sterilize their gut, to kill the bacteria that caused all these byproducts that made people have, you know, basically delirium or encephalopathy and brain fog. So it was like, wow, the gut is connected to the brain. Totally, totally connected to the brain. Absolutely. And in some cases, you know, there have been cases of people actually having psychosis from gut dysfunction. Yeah, you mentioned auto brewery syndrome. I remember reading a case of a woman who was arrested for driving under the influence.

And it turned out she wasn't drinking, but she had a high blood alcohol level that was coming from her gut. Yeah, it is. And it's a very real phenomenon you have to think about it and uh the way that you actually test for that is you you can it's actually quite simple is you just have somebody do what i call a pancake challenge you basically some pancakes full of carbs but throw some maple syrup on it eat it and get a blood draw at point zero you know eat the eat the meal and then half an hour hour later check your alcohol level that sounds that sounds like a fun medical test, the pancake challenge. I call it the pancake challenge. So we've talked about the gut.

We've talked about gluten, dairy, food sensitivities. There are other reasons, too. So infections. Infections can do that. Another one that is. Tick infections. Oh, absolutely. Tick infections.

Lyme. Yeah, those are, yeah, those, I would say that that's, in addition to brain fog, you get a lot of cognitive dysfunction, absolutely. Tick infections. I would say that that's in addition to brain fog, you get a lot of cognitive dysfunction too, memory issues. It's more severe. It's much more severe. The one thing that I see a lot is allergies. I call it the allergic brain. And you can have food allergies that can potentially do that, or even environmental allergies or mold. And the high levels of histamine, because histamine is actually acts as a neurotransmitter. And I've seen this in a number

of patients. I've had some patients with another condition, which we're seeing more and more of is mast cell activation syndrome. It's sort of a buzz, you know, diagnosis now, but it's a very real phenomenon and is related to the mast cells which are the types of immune cells in the body in the interstitial the sort of the spaces between the cells where they reside and they release lots of histamine and if anybody's ever had hay fever you see that the typical picture of a fever they're like you like this like half asleep and like they're walking through a fog it's right hay fever is an example of brain fog.

And antihistamines can actually have a benefit with that. Naturally, things like quercetin and nettles can also be very helpful. And you probably have used it. This is something that I use. I've been using more is the drug chromaline sodium, which is I've had some amazing success with that in more difficult cases. I wouldn't necessarily go to that for my first choice. What Todd's talking about is this drug that's used for asthma and allergies that is usually

inhaled. Yeah, usually inhaled. But there's a version you can take orally that, before you eat, inhibits your white blood cells from releasing histamine and creating an allergic response. And I've often found it extremely effective for some patients. So Todd, talk about this patient that you had that had really bad brain fog. This is a guy who'd come to see you who worked a lot. It was a little less stress and that could be, you know, easily dismissed as though you're just stressed and tired, but you went deeper. What did you find? Well, he actually

came into me and he had already seen a variety of different doctors. And the background is that the gentleman as a child had lots of allergies and asthma. So he had ear infections, bronchitis, also developed some sinusitis type symptoms. So he had multiple rounds of antibiotics. And I always emphasize to patients that when you have an immune dysfunction, look for the gut because 60 to 70% of your immune system is in the gut. And just like with what's going on with the COVID virus or the COVID-19 syndrome that we're seeing by coronavirus is it's not the virus or the bacteria itself that causes the problem. It's our immune system's response to it.

And in general, we want to have a, I call it a balanced immune system. So we want our immune system to be idling. Yeah. So basically just sort of sitting there and okay, we're enjoying planet earth. We're going out for a walk. We're not reacting to the- Not underreacting or overreacting. Exactly.

Underreacting or overreacting exactly underreacting or overreacting and when you overreact that we call that an autoimmune disease when you underreact we call that aids right so aids or cancer aids or cancer or overreactions allergies or right and then and i think you know we talk about like you know a weak immune system or a strong immune system it's really i think an intelligent and a balanced immune system that's how really, I think, an intelligent and a balanced immune system. That's how I like to think about it. And that's related to immunotolerance, which is what the gut does. So when we have a healthy gut, we have an immune system that is tolerant to lots of things. And you can eat certain things. You can go out in the environment. You're not going to react to dog dander and all these other things. There are some genetic, some people have genetic predispositions towards being more atopic or allergic,

but having a healthy gut, especially early on, the priming of the gut is so critical. You know, having a vaginal birth, being breastfed, not introducing certain foods like gluten early on. Living on a farm. Living on a farm. Exactly, being exposed. Being exposed to a lot of acid. And early on in the in living on a farm living on a farm exactly being

exposed a lot of and crawling around in the dirt and literally putting dirt and you know i call it you know your your body's immune system samples planet earth planet earth is a very dirty place there's lots of bugs and all kinds of things and your body learns to be immunotolerant and and and one of the things that is really i also focus on is part of this immune system is called the Treg cells. The Treg cells are like the conductor in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. So you've got, you know, the wind section over here and the horns over here, and they keep everything in balance. And the Tregs are really, really critical. And what we're finding- Regulatory cells.

They regulate. They regulate the whole, you know, the whole balance of the immune system. And the Tregs that we find out, the two things that are really simple that people can use to upregulate your Tregs to keep things in balance are fibers, fibers in the diet. Fibers are the key things that help with regulation of that. And then also, which I use quite a bit in the patients that I see, is vitamin A. Vitamin A helps to down-regulate the immune system and helps to keep the Treg cells in place. Hi, podcast listeners.

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to access this deal today and stay safe out there so this this guy came in with brain fog and he had a lot of stress but he also had other things he had mold exposure yeah he had he was working in a in a building and uh they found out that he was in a water damaged building unknown to him and he had uh mold exposure which you've been uh experienced yourself and lucky enough to have yeah yeah yeah and and and you know and we live in in you know a lot of people are in older buildings um they you know and you don't know you might buy the building and there's water damage you don't even know what's there i mean 50 of buildings have water damage in america that's a lot really yeah wow wow it is

that's a lot yeah so he was actually he came to me and he had the diagnosis of mold toxicity. In fact, he actually learned about this through one of your podcasts. I think you were talking with David Asprey. Oh, yeah, I was trying. Exactly. It was a moldy podcast. So that's how he sort of went down that road. And he got treated with a variety of different therapies.

He got some IV glutathione. He got some ozone therapies and other interventions, and he got about 50% better. And then within several months, he sort of went back to where he was. He was also, again, not sleeping much because he was doing a lot of litigation. It was a lot of stress. He wasn't sleeping well. The big thing that I see with patients with conditions like immune dysregulation is stress. And lack of sleep is a stressor, probably the number one stressor. So if people aren't getting a deep restorative sleep, that is a stress to the immune system. And I was trying to sort of emphasize that you can't,

you know, you can do that for like one or two two days but you can't do that on an ongoing basis so really really important i've always emphasized getting good deep restorative sleep with patients so i emphasized that with him so when he came in he also had a lot of digestive symptoms he was actually on a whole bunch of inhalers. He was on like a Brio, a Spireva, Ventolin, on Zolair injections, Flonase for his sinuses. He also had... Zolair is a very expensive, like $20,000 a year,

intense immune suppressing medication. Yeah. And he still wasn't better. He still wasn't better. No, exactly. And that actually worked by stabilizing mast cells, which you can actually naturally do.

Quercetin actually can help. High-dose quercetin can be very helpful for mast cell stabilization. Also good for COVID. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So when he came in here, I did a thorough workup on him, and I did retest him for mold. And he did have some mold, but I compared it to his previous labs and it wasn't that bad so I empirically treated him with some binders to sort of help but he had already moved out of the quote the moldy building that he was in. So you get out of the moldy environment and then use these binders to help get the mold toxins out of your system. Right because the

mycotoxins they do tend to recirculate in the body the enteropathic recirculation so they'll get reabsorbed by the body. And what are the kind of binders you use? In him, I actually use very natural things. I used clay, medicle, and I also used activated charcoal. That was pretty much it. These are things that don't get absorbed that suck all the bad stuff out. Oh, yeah, exactly.

And you worked in Meridian, right? Somebody would overdose on drugs. We would give them charcoal. That's right. You make them drink black charcoal. And every time they might vomit up on you and get black. We've been there, done that. Yes. Right. Yeah. So, so this guy, uh, had, had also other stuff, right? He had gluten issues. And unfortunately when he went to the previous doctors who did help him out, they didn't go deep enough. They didn't sort of, you know, get all the pieces of the puzzle. So they did not check him for gluten sensitivity, which he would markedly was gluten sensitive. And also did the Cyrex testing on him for gluten and Cyrex for leaky gut. And both of

those were markedly positive. So those are tests that we use at the Ultra Wellness Center that are a little bit different than traditional food testing that looks at antibodies that aren't true allergy, but there are reactions that our immune system is having against foods, and we can tell what you should and shouldn't eat based on this, what's causing an immune response. Exactly, exactly. And then I also did stool testing on them. I did what I think is sort of the state-of-the-art, the GI map test, which does quantitative PCR for the DNA of bacteria, yeast, viruses, parasites.

And he had probably one of the worst cases of dysbiosis I've ever seen. That's imbalance. Yeah, imbalance. Yeah, a lot of imbalances. I tell patients that everybody has hundreds of different kinds of bugs in their gut. And they're a little bit like weeds in a garden. No garden does not have weeds. You just don't want too many weeds.

And the interesting thing about the digestive tract and bacteria is that there is a phenomenon which is known as quorum sensing. And quorum sensing means that when certain bacterias reach a critical level, they start acting as bad actors. An example of that is like Clostridium difficile. So when patients get antibiotics and they wipe out the good guys, the bacteria, the C. difficile, somehow or another sense that there's not enough cops around and they take over the place and they start producing toxins. Same thing happens in this particular case. He had one of the highest levels of pseudomonas bacteria that I've ever seen. And we typically see that in patients with cystic fibrosis.

So he had bacterial dysbiosis, that organism plus other organisms. And he had a lot of gut symptoms, right? He had stickies. Yes, exactly. Groups. Exactly. A lot of mucus. In my opinion, that mucus, that sticky mucus, is a biofilm. That's where the bacteria live.

They live in that biofilm layer. And antibiotics and such are very difficult to penetrate that. If you're not having a smooth log that just comes out clean, there may be some problems in there. Exactly, yeah. And he also had yeast overgrowth, which was not unexpected. Because of all the antibiotics he had. Oh yeah, absolutely. And the acid blocker he was taking. He was on a proton pump inhibitor. That's one of my...

I hate them. They are good and bad. They can be helpful, but I remember when I was in medical school and we talked about this on the podcast, we were told they just came out and they were like, these are very powerful drugs. You don't want to give it to any patient more than six weeks. It shuts down its acid production it's risky long term and now everybody's on it they're over the counter they're over the counter over the counter and for life

and it causes all sorts of destruction of the gut it causes you to not absorb your nutrients it causes overgrowth of yeast it changes the ph leaky gut leaky gut i mean it causes irritable bowels osteoporosis osteoporosis pneumonia deficiency. Yeah, there we go. We can keep going. It's a great way to keep the business going, isn't it? Yeah, I wrote a textbook chapter on reflux and I was like, looking at all the data, I was like, holy cow, this is not good. Exactly, yeah. And unfortunately, they're handed out like Pez candy. Yeah. And patients stay on them long term. Come on, what's wrong with Pez candy? I used to eat that all the time. I had my little Pez dispenser. Those of you who are younger, you might not know what this is, but it's a little candy dispensing device with a little cute cartoon character on the top.

Donald Duck. You pull it open, and a little candy would pop out, and it was so fun to eat. It was? Yeah, right. I quit when I was like eight. So this guy had all this stuff. And he had gut issues. He had gluten issues.

He had mold issues. And what I find really important to emphasize is that in functional medicine, it's about looking at the whole system and not just treating one thing. And often it's many things at the same time. Because when the system breaks down, lots of things break down. So all these guys' gluten issues. Well, getting off the gluten wouldn't have fixed him. Or just fixing the mold wouldn't have fixed him. Or just fixing his gut wouldn't have fixed him. You've got to deal with

all these various things. And you had another thing that you found on him as well, right? Oh, yeah. His sinus issues. Sinus issues. He actually had sinus surgery for that. And it was really really a big thing and in fact, I actually just recently downloaded a paper from PubMed on the nasal microbiome So, you know we have bacteria on our skin. We have it in our mouth We have in our digestive tract in the vagina in the sinuses. They're all there everywhere everywhere and So disruption of the nasal microbiome can also cause brain fog. Typically, you see that a lot.

All the steroids he was taking up his nose and everything was affecting him. And it's also a dark, moist environment. So a lot of patients who have chronic sinusitis, it's actually been shown not so much to be bacterial as it is to be yeast. Fungal. Fungal origin. So you've got to really think about that. I typically will, you know, in his case,

he needed surgery. So he actually had sinus surgery that helped a little bit, but it didn't clear up the problem, which is really a dysfunctional nasal microbiome. So I actually treated him with neti pot nasal saline irrigation. You can also do, there are certain machines. I like the Sinopulse machine. It's like a water pick for your nose. Exactly. And you put a saline in there and it rinses it out. Rinses it out, right. For people who do have chronic sinus issues. And then I also, in his case, I actually used Silversilin, which is not a colloidal silver, but it's a silver salt.

And silver is actually a great antimicrobial and i used that in him with great success it was really very very effective so silver is also something that kills bugs kills bugs and put up your nose it'll help deal with whatever latent infections are there exactly and and then this particular paper that i was talking about uh which is discussing the nasal microbiome they were were actually making a proponent to actually use probiotics, things like lactobacillus, up into the nasal passages to recolonate the nose. Incredible. Yeah.

It's like a finger transplant up your nose. Exactly. And Dale Bredesen, who's been a leader in looking at the various causes for Alzheimer's, talks about the nasal sinus passages as a problem when you have chronic inflammation in the sinuses being a risk factor for Alzheimer's talks about the the nasal sinus passages as a problem when you have chronic inflammation in the sinuses being a risk factor for Alzheimer's because that that that is directly inflammation chronic inflammation exactly it goes right up into the brain so so you also did this nasal treatment you also treat his guts what did you do for his gut I treat I

mean everybody we did obviously we put him on an elimination diet. So you got him off of gluten. You got him off of gluten, exactly. Starchy foods that ferment. Got him off sort of a low-yeast, low-mold type diet. Got him on, put him on a, I actually did not treat him with antibiotics. I treated him with antimicrobial botanicals. I also used oral silver, which I'll sometimes use in conjunction. And I also

continued with binders, the activated charcoal and then another product, GI Detox. And it was pretty remarkable, his success. Within a month, he said, like the light bulb went on in his brain. So you mentioned a product called GI Detox, which is something we use that actually has charcoal and clay in it, right? So it actually helps to bind up all the nasty things that get produced by these bad bugs when they're fermenting the foods that you shouldn't be eating, right? So it's really, it's fascinating. So you also sort of looked at this holistically from a functional medicine

perspective, which is really quite different than most people. So the fact that this patient had gluten and mold and imbalanced gut flora and sinus issues was the reason for his brain fog, right? But if you take 10 people with brain fog, we might have 10 different reasons. Absolutely. Just like you have 10 different reasons for cough. Right. Mine was mercury, you know, that didn't show up in this guy. So really it's right. It's important. I think this is the thing that's so different about functional medicine is that we don't just stop thinking at the symptoms. We go, what's the cause of the symptoms? Absolutely.

If you say you have rheumatoid arthritis or you have a headache or migraine, migraine isn't a diagnosis, it's a symptom. It's a certain type of headache. Absolutely, yeah. And so we really have to look at the different causes for each individual. So it's very personalized. Absolutely, totally personalized.

And it's often treating it not just one thing, it's treating multiple things in the right sequence to get people better. Exactly. And so he was building on getting rid of the mold and getting out of the environment and ozone and glutathione, which certainly helped. But then there were other things, right? He got to get off the acid blocker.

He had to get off all these nasal sprays that were suppressing his microbiome in his nose. He had to get sleep. He had to get sleep, right? He had to manage stress. He had to manage stress. He had to irrigate his sinuses and use natural antimicrobials that kill the bad bugs in there. He had to reset his whole gut system and get rid of the pseudomonas

and build all this together in a protocol, which it sounds complicated, and sometimes it is, I guess. But that's what we do in functional medicine, and it's a very unique approach that is the future of health care. It's not something that most physicians are learning in school. It's something that is actually working far better than most traditional therapies for these kinds of things. I mean, if you have an acute problem, you go to the hospital, you know, I had atrial fib, you know, you got to go to the hospital and I get my little electrical system fixed. It's fine. But I think if you, if you have these weird symptoms that nobody can fix

or that they're trying to medicate. It just doesn't work that well. Yeah. And you really bring a very good point because, I mean, you know, regular mainstream medicine has its place. You know, you break a bone, you have, you know, a heart attack, you have a stroke. There's definitely places for acute care medicine. But when it comes to chronic care medicine, I would almost venture to say that the mainstream approach, which is either the scalpel or using expensive, potentially toxic

medications is actually doing more harm than good in most circumstances. It really is. It's unfortunate, but it really is. And then what happens is then one drug is layered onto the next drug, especially like in these young uh people with uh add and depression and stuff like that they come in with polypharmacy you know and i talked about the iatrogenic imperfecta which is that you know the patients are getting problems related to the doctor's treatments you know that's that's the the big issue these days it's true the thing about functional medicine it's agnostic when it comes to therapy right we sometimes use medications when it's appropriate but it's usually around finding the cause and treating the cause. So if someone has

a parasite, you might use a parasite medication, right? If someone has Lyme disease, you might use an antibiotic. But if that's not the right treatment, you don't do it because it's the only thing you have. That's the thing. We have a very limited toolkit in traditional medicine, and functional medicine expands that toolkit and expands the map of how we figure out what's wrong with people. Exactly. And you, you have to map it all out. And, and the, the matrix, what we use as a intellectual way of framing how we see the problem helps is like a, like a pilot's checklist. So we like, okay, well, let's see, how is the immune system working?

How is the gut working? How are the hormones working? So we look at all those different systems in the body and we do both traditional testing and specialized testing to help us. So we're not guessing. I always tell patients, when you see me, you're coming in to see me because you've got an issue that nobody else has been figuring out. And you went to the Mayo Clinic and the Scripps Clinic and Harvard, and you name it, and they're throwing up their hands you know, take an antidepressant and see you later. That's, that's, I see that's so many times. And, uh, we have to explore and lift up the rocks and shine the light on places that haven't been looked at before. That's right. So the kinds of tests you're talking about,

the food sensitivity testing, the mold testing, the gut testing, these are things that are definitely outside the box, but they are the future. I mean, this is how the body works, whether we like it or not. There was a recent textbook that was published at Harvard called Network Medicine, talking about the paradigm shift that's happening now around the body being this biological network and system. And that's really what functional medicine is. It's the application of this to what's happening today. And it's so powerful. And I think, you know, people out there are suffering from all sorts of cognitive issues. You know, we did the broken brain series and, you know, whether it's ADD or dementia or depression or brain fog or whatever it is, there's usually a reason. Yeah. That doesn't happen for no reason. And that's what we're

good. We're good at being detectives and finding the reason. Exactly. Yeah. And it's very, it's interesting because, you know, I was trained, I was actually a chemistry major when I went to Holy Cross College. And then when I went to medical school, after I did my residency, I did my training in internal medicine. So I'm, you know, a board certified internist. That's my, my, my specialty. And invariably I'll meet someone and say, well, you know, what is your specialty? And it's, it's so funny. And, and, you know, and if I, I specialize in humans. Yeah. And they would say, what kind of doctor are you? And I say, well, I'm a good one. A good one, right. And it's sort of funny. And then if I actually say the term functional

medicine, they get like this blank stare. What is functional medicine? So I've coined the term, I call myself, I say, I'm a psychoneuroimmunoendogutologist. That's good. Yeah. That's good. Which is basically understanding that it's all related. The psycho is the brain. You forgot the pato in there.

Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. And you forgot mito in there. Mito, yeah, right. Exactly, yeah. So it's all interconnected. It's this unified organism and there's a... It's an ecosystem.

It's an ecosystem, yeah. Everything impacts everything else. And the beautiful thing about the body is that if you give it the right environment and a tincture of time, in most cases the body is pretty good at self-healing. Yes. If you give it fresh air, if you give it sunlight, if you give it exercise... You take out the bad things. Take out the bad things. Exactly. You take out the bad things, put in the good things, and a tincture of time, the body is

actually pretty good at healing. There are some cases where we don't fully understand the human genome. I mean, we do testing for genetics and we can get insight into genetics. I'll actually talk about that in the next podcast. But I'm very optimistic that when we start to combine artificial intelligence and big data sets that we're going to start seeing some of these cases that are really complicated and say, oh, this is what's going on with them on a genetic level or mitochondrial level and be able to dial it in a little bit better. I mean, that's what we do. We do pattern recognition. So you've seen thousands and thousands of cases and you see these patterns and you can recognize them. Then you sort of know

where to go with the testing and figure out what's going on. You probably, you know, I play a game with myself. I don't know if you do this after being in this so long as I try to write down everything I possibly think is going on with this patient and what the test results are going to show. And then I get the test results. And 90% of it, I actually figured out before I even got the test. Because once you've done so much of it, you see those patterns. And every now and then, there's curveballs. I get all the curveballs myself.

I get curveballs and sliders and knuckleballs. I was the curveball. My own health issues were just curveballs, and that's what got me learning about this. Well, Todd, this has been such a great conversation. I think those of you listening who struggle with these issues, it's tough, but there is hope, and I feel that people need to learn about functional medicine, and you're welcome to come to the Ultra Wellness Center. We're now doing all virtual consultations if people want to come virtually. We don't have to have you come here anymore. We can do the testing and go to ultrawellnesscenter.com

to learn more about our practice. We have an incredible team of physicians and nutritionists, physicians assistants, and nurses who are supported by an incredible administrative team. And we take care of people from all over the world helping solve these complex problems. So if you would like to learn more, just go to UltraWellnessCenter.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. If you liked it, share with your friends and family on social media. We'd love to hear from you.

Please leave a comment. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from.

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Now back to this week's episode. 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.