The Dr. Hyman Show - Reversing Multiple Sclerosis And Autoimmune Disease With Functional Medicine with Dr. Terry Wahls

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Whether it's anxiety, depression, diabetes, insulin resistance, as long as we are managing our diet and lifestyle, we can have a rich, full life, relatively normal physiology, no evidence of disease, and do great. But if I think I can go back to that previous diet and lifestyle and not get sick, that's incorrect. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark.

Starting point is 00:00:31 Now you probably heard me talk about how much I love infrared saunas on the podcast. Well, they've been linked to many different benefits like better muscle recovery, calming of the nervous system, improved circulation, even activation of the immune system to support healing. Saunas also promote the release of feel-good endorphins that give you that blissed-out feeling and give your skin a healthy glow. Now, I know everyone doesn't have the room or the budget to have their own sauna at home, so I was really excited to learn about Higher Dose's Infrared Therapy Line. They have an infrared sauna blanket that gives you all the benefits of infrared in an easy-to-use portable blanket at a much lower cost than a standalone sauna. The blanket's really cool. It has layers of amethyst, which is a crystal to

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Starting point is 00:01:45 with chronic pain, work out frequently, or just need a moment to relax, lying on these mats even a couple of minutes a day will help ease your mind and body from the inside out. Get your own infrared sauna blanket or infrared PMF mat at higherdose.com today and use my exclusive promo code pharmacy75, that's F-A-R-M-A-C-y 75 at checkout to save 75 that's higherdose.com and the exclusive promo code is pharmacy 75 or just go to higherdose.com pharmacy f-a-r-m-a-c-y to get your 75 off today and i'm all about using food first when it comes to nutrition but there are certain nutrients i recommend everyone supplement with because it's impossible to get adequate amounts from that alone. And one is magnesium, which our soils contain less and less of, meaning our food contains less too.

Starting point is 00:02:32 Exposure to things like sugar, caffeine, and fluoride, and even stress deplete our magnesium stores. And we all have been pretty stressed, I know, lately. 80% of Americans are actually deficient or insufficient in magnesium, probably 45% are deficient, which is a huge problem for our health. Considering the epidemic of stress we're facing, we should all be really conscious about our magnesium intake because it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. That's the calming, relaxing nervous system. Magnesium is also crucial for more than 300 other chemical reactions in the body

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Starting point is 00:03:45 giving away free bottles of their best-selling products P3OM and mass enzymes with select purchases. This offer is available while supplies last. So like fast, just go to magbreakthrough.com. That's M-A-G-B-R-E-A-K-T-H-R-O-U-G-H.com slash hymen and use the code Hyman10 and you'll get 10% off this really great formula. I think you're going to love it as much as I do. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you suffer from an autoimmune disease or a neurologic condition like multiple sclerosis, you better listen up because today we have an extraordinary guest, Dr. Terry Walls, a good friend of mine, a member of the faculty of the

Starting point is 00:04:33 Institute for Functional Medicine, and a leader in re-imagining how we take care of really hard conditions like autoimmunity and multiple sclerosis. So Terry is a clinical professor at the University of Iowa where she conducts clinical trials. She's doing the hard work of research in this space, which is so necessary. And I applaud you for that, Terry. She's a patient also with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, which is not a fun diagnosis and confined her to a tilt-reclined wheelchair for four years. She was in a wheelchair for four years and she completely restored her health using food and lifestyle and designed that specifically to help her brain get better.

Starting point is 00:05:11 And now pedals her bike to work every single day. She went from wheelchair to riding her bike 20 miles a day. And if you don't think that is an argument for the principles of functional medicine, I don't know what is. She's the author of The Wall's Protocol, How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles in Functional Medicine. And The Wall's Protocol, A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles. And the cookbook, The Wall's Protocol, Cooking for Life, The Revolutionary Modern Paleo Plan to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions. Okay, that's a mouthful. You got to come up with shorter titles. Okay. She conducts lots of great clinical trials. We're going to talk about some of those today to talk about the effect of nutrition and lifestyle food as medicine, particularly for multiple

Starting point is 00:05:55 sclerosis and other progressive health and neurologic conditions. She teaches the public and medical community about her approach using food and therapeutic lifestyle to restore health. And she hosts a seminar every August where everyone can learn how to implement the protocol with ease and success. So welcome, Terry. Hey, thank you much. So we don't have a lot of return guests on the podcast, but you are one of them. And the reason I wanted you back is because your work is so important and it continues to evolve and you continue to evolve and you continue to learn.

Starting point is 00:06:25 And we continue to learn from you about how do we address these horrible conditions that are on the rise, the autoimmunity that is affecting 80 million people. And for people who don't understand autoimmunity as a single entity like MS or colitis or Crohn's or Hashimoto's, it's common, but it doesn't add up to massive numbers when we look at it all together. So when you look at all autoimmune disease together, it's 80 million people, which is more than people almost that have cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined. Okay. There's a lot of people. And, and the question for you today, Terry, to start with is, you know, how has, has your thinking changed since we last talked? How has your regimen changed?

Starting point is 00:07:05 Do you incorporate the same principles? Are you adding new things? What's different about your approach now? So we're adding new things. And I also have learned just how critical it is to deal with the mental, emotional, spiritual, so that people are willing to do the work. Because creating new habits, creating new daily practices, it takes effort. And for people to go on this journey with me, I need to spend more time on that mental, emotional, spiritual side. So I spend more time there. And then yes, we have created this really wonderful, robust process, process mark, the walls behavior change model that actually has 1516 steps to help

Starting point is 00:07:56 people make these changes, step by achievable step. And we personalize the diet and lifestyle recommendations to match what they're willing and ready to do. That's amazing. And Terry, what have you noticed about your own health? Working with this over the last, I don't know how many years it is now, over a decade, right? What have you learned? What has changed? What are things that you've changed in your own routine? Well, you know, I spend a lot more time thinking about hormesis. So that mild to moderate stress. And I do it in a wide variety of ways. I do temperature hormesis. So talk about hormesis. What is that? So hormesis is a time where you have a mild to moderate stress on your physiology, followed by sufficient time for your physiology to repair, get back to homeostasis, and rebuild itself. So this is why strength training is so powerful. This is why high-intensity interval

Starting point is 00:09:03 training can be powerful, but you have to allow enough time to fully recover. It's also why temperature training is so powerful. So I take saunas probably six to seven days a week, and I'll take them up to, and now this will shock your listeners. I could take a sauna up to 125 degrees comfortably, 140 degrees comfortably, even 160. But then, of course, I follow that with a cold shower. And I do cold showers and for five minutes. And in the evenings, I'll do an ice bath. Ah, sounds fun. Yeah, yeah. So, you know,

Starting point is 00:09:42 It's a relaxing way to go to bed just jump in an ice bath you know and what's interesting mark is you do that ice bath yeah yeah it is the fastest way to fall asleep i have the deepest sleep on the days that i do uh an ice bath really and you don't follow it like a warm thing and before you go to bed you get in bed freezing but you know my my wife does complain about the cold legs what you're saying is kind of heresy in some ways because we always learn with multiple sclerosis that you never put people in a sauna you avoid the heat it's really bad for them right well that and then it's better to fall asleep with a hot bath so you need to very gradually increase your temperature stress. So many people with serious autoimmune conditions have difficulty with autonomic dysfunction, and they'll have a lot of difficulty with temperature hormesis.

Starting point is 00:10:37 So they'll have to come at this very, very slowly. And as they heal and recover, lower their inflammation uh and lower the inflammation in their brain they'll find that they can increase their temperature hormesis and so we start with a room temperature bath and a slightly cooler bath or slightly warmer bath and gradually expand the temperature with which they can tolerate. But absolutely, you can't put people immediately into a cold shower or an ice bath or immediately into a sauna if they have a neuroimmune condition. They will not tolerate it. Yeah, but over time, they can, you see. For you now, it's helpful.

Starting point is 00:11:22 Yeah, I think it's interesting. When we talk about hormesis, it's not a concept that most doctors know about, most people know about. I certainly hadn't heard about it until the last decade or so. And essentially what you're talking about is a stress to the body. It's sort of like, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, which is how intermittent fasting works or prolonged fasting or exercise. When you exercise, you're creating a stress to the body. Those actually help sort of cause a trauma or a stress, you're creating a stress to the body. Those actually help sort of cause a trauma or a stress, which then creates a healing response in the body. And that's what you're describing. As long as you have sufficient time to fully recover, you know, and for years,

Starting point is 00:11:57 when I was an athlete, you know, cause I, I did, um, uh, long distance running. Uh, I did long distance running. I did martial arts. I did not spend enough time in recovery. And many athletes do this. We train so hard. We don't spend sufficient time in recovery. And actually, we probably would have made faster gains if we would pay a lot more attention to recovery. What does recovery look like? So in my patients, we talk a lot about this, that I want them to have their stress of their exercise or their temperature stress, but then they have to have a sufficient duration of the

Starting point is 00:12:43 recovery before they can go back to that stress again. So many of my patients, you know, they're severely disabled. So for them, a two-minute exercise may be all they can do and still function for the rest of the day. And so we discuss, you do the gentle exercise, and can you function normally later in the day? How long does it take for you to recover? And then gradually increase their exercise.

Starting point is 00:13:14 Interesting. Now, Terry, you talk a lot about the food as medicine. We're going to get into that a little bit more. But you sort of touched on it a little bit about stress and how that played a role, particularly in your case of getting MS. Can you talk more about that and the stress of medical school and what happened to you? My trigeminal neuralgia began during medical school. And yet looking back, I grew up on a farm, physically very active, lots of vitamin D, probably really a very good diet.

Starting point is 00:13:43 Went into medical school, became a vegetarian, went very low fat, was no longer outside. So my vitamin D levels plummeted. I was certainly not taking supplements. I was not sleeping at night very much. We certainly had enormous amounts of stress and going through those clinical rotations. It was during my third year of medical school that I started getting, you know, my facial pains, the zingers, as I call them. Yeah. And I would have them, you know, for the next 20 years and then 20, and they were gradually getting worse. And that was during my clinical practice.

Starting point is 00:14:28 I was very ambitious. I was in physician leadership. Again, a high-stress job. My zingers were getting worse. And then I developed motor symptoms and had weakness in my left leg. Wow. And the stress is really- Clearly, stress was always there and was a big driver that was happening just before

Starting point is 00:14:54 the onset of my zingers. And then I had a transient episode of dim vision in my left eye. Again, that was associated with stress. And I had some severe work stress just before the onset of my left leg weakness. And so you feel like how have you dealt with stress in a different way and how that helped you with your MS? It's interesting. During college, I've learned how to do transcendental meditation. And during medical school, quit that um and you know when i was diagnosed with ms even though i knew that stress was a big factor i did not go back to meditation um it was not uh until you know i was in the wheelchair i went back to reading the basic science as working on my diet

Starting point is 00:15:39 again discovered functional medicine uh and then it's like, you know, I got to do everything. And that's when I went back to meditation. I thoughtfully redesigned my paleo diet. I discovered electrical stimulation. And I think it was the combination of doing all of that. And so now my routine, Mark, is I get up in the morning i do my meditations um then i'll do my exercise um then i do my sauna then i do my cold shower and that routine in the morning that's how long does that take you it takes me about two hours to do all of that. And I learned to put that in my schedule.

Starting point is 00:16:26 And then in the evening, most evenings, I will, again, do a round of meditation and a ice bath. Oh, really? Wow. So you don't do a hot bath first, you just do the ice bath alone? I just do an ice bath. That's brave. I like to do a sauna first.

Starting point is 00:16:50 And sometimes saunas, they're really very nice. But the reason I keep going back to the ice bath is the quality of my sleep is better. Oh, really? Wow. I'm going to try that. So you just get in a cold bath and how long do you stay there? Well, I, I set my time and I read for 20 minutes, 20 minutes, but not like ice, ice bath. So when you first start doing this, Mark, I just do a cool bath. Uh, and then if you've done that for a few days, just run only cold water, do a cold

Starting point is 00:17:22 bath. And then, uh, so now you're comfortable with the cold bath then you have a bucket of ice so you're in your bathtub uh with the cold bath you dump your ice in uh and then i i'll uh freeze solid uh um you know uh liter bottles of ice so i have because that keeps the ice longer when it's solid. Yeah. So do you use the Wim Hof breathing method? How do you get ready for going on the ice? Yeah. I'll do a cycle of the deep breathing and I just get in. After you do it for a while, it's really very comfortable. I step in, I let my feet get used to it. Then I settle down into the bath and grab my book and I start reading. Wow. Okay. I'm going to try that. Maybe I'm going to try.

Starting point is 00:18:15 I like the ice bath after the sauna. And 20 minutes is a long time. It's a long time. Well, you get comfortable really quite quickly. And I quit, but the quality of my sleep is so much better when I do the cold bath, the ice bath. So I end up going back to it. I want to switch topics a little bit because it's fascinating to hear all your conversation about hormesis and these various practices that help enhance your health. And I think there are a lot of those, whether it's hot and cold stresses, whether it's exercise, whether it's fasting, whether it's things like ozone or hyperbaric oxygen, these are all hormetic therapies. And there's, there's really cool machines in, in Europe, they use for mitochondrial resuscitation where they'll basically bring your oxygen level that to that would be, if you were climbing Mount Everest, keep you up at that

Starting point is 00:19:00 low oxygen level for a while, and then bring you back down to sea level. And that oxygen deprivation creates a stress that reboots traumatic conjures. There's a lot of ways to actually to do this. And it's really pretty, it's pretty amazing to see what happens to your body when you get a little stress, it actually does so much better. Now let's talk about the research because one of the arguments around functional medicine is that there's no evidence. It's lack of evidence. It's not evidence-based blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you know, I mean, you know, your case alone should be written up as a medical miracle that I understand, but like, it should be, it should be every neurologic society,

Starting point is 00:19:37 every neurologist, every, it should be, how did this happen? What's going on? The NIH should be spending billions of dollars funding research like this. And you're having to scrounge around from here and there. And, you know, even, you know, the MS Society first, you know, kind of shunned you and banned you. And now they ask you to speak and now they want your help. So you've done a lot of the hard work around the research. So let's talk about the clinical trials that you've done, what you've learned, what you found and what they've shown because, because your, your approach, and maybe for those who are just listening to this podcast first time, let's just sort of back up and go, what is the found and what they've shown because, because your, your approach, and maybe for those who are just listening to this podcast first time,

Starting point is 00:20:05 let's just sort of back up and go, what is the Walsh protocol? What is it? What is the concept of the diet? Why are the principles of the diet used in the way they are? And what are the key take homes around that? And let's get, then let's get into the research of, of, of how this works. So first we'll talk about the dietary approach. So the way you might think about it when I talk to the public is sort of a pre-Walls diet is a Mediterranean diet, which everyone agrees is a great diet, more vegetables,

Starting point is 00:20:33 legumes, more fish. So nice, healthy diet. And then the first level of my diet, we have people stress. And the goal is nine cups of vegetables, three cups of greens, three cups of sulfur-rich vegetables in the cabbage, onion, mushroom family, and three cups of deeply colored things like beets, carrots, berries. And then I want them to remove gluten, casein, and eggs because they're the three most common food antigens that can cause excessive immune response. No more waffles. No more waffles. You actually know, I make cashew waffles. I make all kinds of great things. You can kind of cheat. There are things you can do. So that's the first level. And you can do that as a vegetarian. And that is fairly close to a gluten-free, dairy-free version of a Mediterranean diet.

Starting point is 00:21:32 Then the next level becomes more paleolithic. So we reduce the gluten-free grains and legumes to no more than two servings a week. We add in and stress organ meats, seaweeds. If you're going to have nuts and seeds, we suggest that you have them soaked and sprouted. Why organ meats? Why organ meats? Because organ meats are something people avoid, right?

Starting point is 00:21:56 Liver, kidneys, thymus. Yeah, well, they don't know how to make them. They're actually delicious. It seems like the poor man's food, you know, steak and kidney pie. Yeah, yeah. And what's the rationale for the organ meats? Well, first off, our ancestors would have eaten those.

Starting point is 00:22:15 They're a third of the carcass when you harvest an animal. So it would have been an essential part of the diet. And interestingly enough, if there was plenty of meat, they left the muscle meat behind and took the organs. So the liver, great source of vitamin A in the fat soluble vitamins is so A, K, a moderate source of E, a great source of the B vitamins, a great source of minerals that are very easily absorbed as opposed to the minerals and plants which are a little more difficult for us to absorb uh and then great source of coenzyme q creatine carnitine so really really marvelous nutrition

Starting point is 00:23:01 for us and a lot of those are mitochondrial nutrients right they are mitochond are mitochondrial nutrients. And which is important for healthy aging and everything. You know, Terry, it's interesting because if you look at, I've done this before, you Google like liver nutrition facts, right? And then like, and then the nutrition facts for the most amazing vegetable you could possibly imagine or grain or bean. And it just, it's like, it's like Michael Jordan and high school basketball. It's like, it's that big of a difference. It's shocking. It's like, not just a little bit, it's like three, four, five, 10 orders of magnitude more nutrients in liver than in almost any other food. Correct. Correct. Absolutely. Which is shocking. Absolutely a super food. The one nutrient it does not have is vitamin C.

Starting point is 00:23:47 That's all right. So, so that's a good reason to eat your salads and your berries to get the vitamin C. Now the caveat I'll have is for my carnivore friends who eat only meat, I have to caution them to be careful about how much liver they have, because you don't want to overdose on vitamin A. So liver is really great for you, six to eight ounces a week. So that's, you know, up to a half pound of liver a week. You know, the first nation people up in Alaska, they actually would give it to the explorers because they wanted to kill them. So they give them polar bear liver and they literally die from vitamin A poisoning. So liver is really great. It is our family's favorite dish. So my family makes liver for me

Starting point is 00:24:39 on my birthday because they know it's, it's a special meal for us. We just really love that a lot. For me, it was a poor man's meal because we were very poor in New York City when I lived as a kid with my mom. And we lived in a tiny one bedroom apartment and we'd have liver and onions and rice. And I thought that was like a fancy meal, chicken liver. And you realize it was like, because we're poor. And it is actually quite handy because it is relatively inexpensive you can get organic liver uh very inexpensively uh because the market doesn't understand how valuable that nutrition is another really great uh organ meat of course is heart heart is sort of like filet mignon that is just uh so delicious incredibly delicious uh and then you know oysters uh clams

Starting point is 00:25:28 uh mussels uh those are all organ meats uh really quite quite uh quite delicious and what about the liver toxicity like of liver because people know why liver is number the wastebasket of the body where the toxins go isn't it bad to eat that so where the toxins go is really the fat of the animal so people like bacon so if you're worried about toxicities be sure that your bacon is organic uh if you're if you're concerned about um liver is fatty liver is fatty. I would certainly have it be organic. And I think that is prudent. My preference is, you know, have liver, get it from an organic animal. So Terry, just to summarize the dietary principles, it's getting rid of gluten, dairy, and eggs. It's getting rid of grains and beans. It's getting rid of, obviously I process food sugar alcohol sugars right more vegetables more

Starting point is 00:26:26 lots more vegetables and tell us about your like nine cups of vegetables and the different kinds of vegetable categories because i think it's really important to help you understand it's not just any vegetable that you need you need vegetables that contain certain compounds which are medicines correct so so we want to have lots of greens Greens are a great source of carotenoids, luteins, zeaxanthin, myozeaxanthin. These are essential nutrients for your retina and also for your brain because your eyes are really just extensions of brains. They'll reduce the risk of macular degeneration, of cataracts, and dementia. You're also going to get a great source of vitamin K. And in neuroimmune conditions, MS, and cognitive decline, there's a severe, in epidemiologic studies, the vitamin K

Starting point is 00:27:16 levels are extraordinarily low in those population groups. So lots of reasons to get your greens. Now we're going to go on to why I want you to have cabbage, onion, mushrooms. So the sulfur is a really great support for your detox, great support for making glutathione, intracellular antioxidants, great support for your mitochondria. That's the broccoli family. And the onion family. Yes. Also good for your blood vessel endothelial function. And then mushrooms. There are a wide

Starting point is 00:27:53 variety of mushrooms that stimulate your natural killer cells, priming your adaptive and innate immunity. They also are associated with better nerve growth factor production in animal models. And in human studies associated with much lower rates of cognitive decline and depression. Wow. Well, I feel good about taking my mushroom powders every morning. So take your mushrooms. I have mushrooms in my tea every day. So lots of reasons to have your mushrooms.

Starting point is 00:28:22 Okay. So that's the food part. Now you've taken this approach. No, no, no. You didn't get the colors yet. So then we're also have your mushrooms. Okay. So that's the food part. Now you've taken this approach. No, no, no. You didn't get the colors yet. So then we're also into three cups of colors. And I want to have a wide variety of colors. Okay, wait, wait.

Starting point is 00:28:31 Before you go on. So the government says five to nine servings. A serving is half a cup. So you're talking about not five to nine. You're talking about 18 cups, just so people get the idea. Well, no, nine cups. No, no, 18 servings. Nine cups, 18 servings. Right. And I'm not trying to have you eat more than what your appetite will allow you.

Starting point is 00:28:50 The point I'm trying to have you do is you eat some protein. And we have strategies for vegetarians or meat eaters. And you eat lots of vegetables. You don't need to be hungry, but you're not eating junk. When you're hungry, you're lots of vegetables. You don't need to be hungry, but you're not eating junk. When you're hungry, you're eating these vegetables. And we want to have sufficient protein and lots of vegetables. Now, when you do that, you're going to poop. And, of course, we have to make modifications for people who have inflammatory bowel disease,

Starting point is 00:29:23 who can't have as much fiber. So when we talk about this, Mark, this is for the public. This is for what you start. And then you assess your response. And if you're having loose stools, you're going to have less fiber. If you're still constipation, more fiber, more fermented foods, more sauerkraut and kimchi. Right. So that's the food part. And you've taken this along with the lifestyle aspects and the stress and the exercise and muscle stimulation and hot and cold therapies and all these other modalities. And you've studied them. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I always say I want it to be 120, but I really only want to do that

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Starting point is 00:30:50 mitochondria away from our cells and supports the growth of new healthy mitochondria. We can't directly get your Lithin A from foods because we need our gut bacteria to create it for us. And since most of us don't have a really healthy gut microbiome to actually get enough your luthen A out of food, MitoPure is a great solution. And right now, Timeline Nutrition is offering my community 10% off MitoPure, which you can get in a capsule powder or protein blend at TimelineNutrition.com. That's TimelineNutrition.com, T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E.com forward slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. and use the code Dr. Hyman 10 to get the discount. I've been using it for almost a year now, and at 61, I feel stronger and more energized

Starting point is 00:31:32 than ever. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. And one of the challenges for traditional medicine is that when we look at research, we like to study one thing. Let's study this drug for this disease in this patient. One molecular pathway at a time. Yeah. It's like I was talking to a doctor, a scientist about dementia and say, look, these patients, dementia is a syndrome. There's many causes for it. It could be the microbiome. It could be gluten. It could be toxins. It could be Lyme. It could be mold. It could be insulin resistance. And it could be a lot of them.

Starting point is 00:32:06 Right. And so it's all of them. It could be nutritional deficiencies or hormonal imbalances and all these things. And I said, you know, what's going on is that these patients need to support all these things in order to get better. And she says, well, let's just study one thing. I'm like, let's see if diet is important to eat, right? It's important to exercise.

Starting point is 00:32:20 It's important to sleep right. It's important to deal with stress. Are you saying we just study exercise, but not diet and the rest? It just doesn't make any sense. It's like, let's just see if we can grow a plant by just giving it nitrogen. We won't give phosphorus, potassium. We won't give water.

Starting point is 00:32:33 We won't give sunlight. We won't have healthy soil, but we're just going to give it potassium and see if the plant can grow. Like it just doesn't make any sense. So you've been so pioneering in creating these multimodal interventions somehow, where you look at multiple interventions and then they pass by the review

Starting point is 00:32:50 boards for the research. And they're actually clinically far more effective than anything we've seen for MS and these chronic autoimmune neurologic issues. I have a really unique reason I'm able to do this, Mark. So I was on the Institutional Review Board for the University of Iowa for years before I became disabled. So they watched me become profoundly disabled and then recover, you know, walk and bike. I'm still on the Institutional Review Board. And so when I came with my first protocol, you know, actually the review board declined. What? Rejected the protocol.

Starting point is 00:33:32 But the reason ultimately I got to, this all got to happen. The dean of the College of Medicine called the head of the institutional review board and said, I really want Terry's study to get approved. So work with her to meet whatever concerns you have so she can do her little study because I want her to do that little single arm safety and feasibility study. So then the head of the IRB called me, arranged for me to meet with the pharmacy and therapeutics committee because they were worried about the supplements. And then I, so we addressed the supplements. We had a pretty strict exclusionary criteria. We had to do a bunch of safety labs. So we got that part worked out.

Starting point is 00:34:21 Then they were worried about the diet. It's crazy diet because it's, you know, excluding food groups and nobody could follow this diet. So then I had to do a pre-study and fortunately we had someone following the diet. That was me. So they analyzed my diet. And when the dietician analyzed my diet, she said, and she had done dietary analyses research for about 30 years. She goes, you know, I have never analyzed a diet that was this nutrient dense in all of my years of research. So we got approval and we're able to do our little study. And now the people we, we enrolled had a progressive MS, secondary progressive, prime progressive. They were using canes and walkers.

Starting point is 00:35:12 They had severe fatigue. Nobody with cognitive decline got in because we excluded those folks. We asked them to abandon, and they were having like five servings of gluten, dairy, and eggs every day, one and a half servings of vegetables a day. So really a standard American diet, no exercise, they're exhausted. At the end of 12 months, they were having on average eight cups of vegetables a day. Wow. So dramatic change. And they were fully compliant with their

Starting point is 00:35:50 diet 90% of the days. And then on the exercise, doing the exercise and the e-stem every day, 75% of the days they had done their exercise in Easton. Wow. The average meditation minutes, I think, was 7.6 minutes per day. And the self-massage was 3.6 minutes per day. So these exhausted people did remarkably well with this complicated multimodal intervention. It's impressive. Now, the other reason I'm able to do my crazy research, Mark, is I'm not getting funded by the NIH. You mean they won't fund you?

Starting point is 00:36:40 They won't fund you. We write grants. We get scathing reviews. We just got another grant back, scathing reviews. And we'll- Negative. Negative. Negative.

Starting point is 00:36:49 Yeah. Negative reviews. What are they saying? Well, you know, the reviewers clearly have a pharmaceutical point of view. They didn't think people could do the diets. The Swank and the Walsh diets were too unpalatable. People wouldn't follow the diet. They thought it was unrealistic that we're going to follow people for two years.

Starting point is 00:37:14 Why are we doing MRIs? Because you need drugs to have a favorable impact. Oh, my God. Crazy. Okay. So we have that challenge. Now, the benefit I have, Marcus, because my work has been actually effective at transforming people's lives.

Starting point is 00:37:36 We've transformed the lives of people who are cold calling the university saying, I believe in what Dr. Walls is doing. I'd like to support her research. It's fun to fund you. They say fund our research. And so that's how I, that's how I funded the first study, the safety and feasibility study.

Starting point is 00:37:58 It was a group out of Canada founded by Ashton Embry and his wife, Joan. They gave us the funds for that first small pilot study. And we had a PhD student that helped me run that study. And the university and the VA gave me time, which of course is hard to get, to run the study. So what did the study find? Well, that was that very first study, which

Starting point is 00:38:26 we showed that people could radically change their diet. They could do the meditation, the exercise, and the fatigue severity. And our fatigue severity scale score goes from seven to one, seven total fatigue in every aspect of your life, one no fatigue, dropped 2.38 points, and 0.45 is clinically meaningful. So that's a huge drop. And the anxiety remarkably went down, depression remarkably went down, verbal memory, non-verbal memory and performance went remarkably up. And half of our folks had improvements in their 25-foot walking time. For progressive MS, when you anticipate a 20% decline per year, as a group, we held them flat.

Starting point is 00:39:23 So as a group, that was remarkably. They didn't get worse, which normally they do. That's why it's called progressive, right? Yeah, that's why they call it progressive. Right. So that's very exciting stuff. So that was the first study that people could tolerate it. They would do it and then they didn't get worse

Starting point is 00:39:38 and they often got better and had a reduction of fatigue. What were the next follow-up studies you did and what did they show? So the next study was a small study, again, funded by our donors. And now we just did the diet. And it was randomized, a relapsing-remitting study. And in 12 weeks, so shorter duration,

Starting point is 00:40:01 so it's less costly to run, people again could radically change their diet. Fatigue went down, quality of life went remarkably up, and the speed at which you could do a 25-foot walk remarkably improved. And the hand function also improved compared to the control group. So, Tara you went from like reclining wheelchair to riding your bike 20 miles a day. How many people see that level of change? You know, in terms of the whole population,

Starting point is 00:40:35 I don't know, Mark. Are you seeing cases like yours where people are recovering or? Yeah, yeah, I am. So one of the individuals in our study, Dawn, she was using a cane for short distances, walker for long distances. She had severe fatigue. She was making arrangements to sell her home, move to assisted living because her son was finishing grad school and she knew she couldn't manage once he moved out and she enrolled in our study wow and she was struggling driving 15 minutes to work

Starting point is 00:41:13 okay so by the time the study ended her son graduate uh moves out and we followed people for three years by the way so at that, she's taking her dog hiking for miles. She's doing Pilates and weightlifting. She doesn't really like jogging, so she didn't take up jogging, although she can run. And her son's moved six hours away, and she's comfortable driving to see him. I saw Dawn before the pandemic when I was out giving some lectures in the community. So it was 2019. And, you know, she looks great.

Starting point is 00:41:49 That's incredible. And, you know, so she's still working. She would have been disabled and unemployed. Another patient from our study, again, that I saw in 2019 with primary progressive MS. Again, primary progressive MS, when she enrolled with us, she needed bilateral support to walking six. She had profound fatigue. Her score was 6.7 on a seven-point scale.

Starting point is 00:42:19 Wow, that's pretty bad. So profoundly bad. So she's walking comfortably now and uh you know so we enrolled her in 2010 so now it's 10 9 years later when i saw her she's she's walking uh doing well uh she is in a band a geriatric band that she plays in and so it fun. At my talk, she'll see stands up like a revival. And she's telling everyone in the audience about her experience in the study and how transformative he in the study is. And then here's the other interesting thing that she also noted, Mark, is that she's telling the audience that if I stop the WALS protocol,

Starting point is 00:43:07 I'm exhausted and I can't walk. It's worse again. It's worse. So she can tell within 24 hours if she's backing off on the diet. So basically this approach seems to, it puts it in remission, but it doesn't cure it. Is that it? Well, you know, I don't think anyone with a chronic disease has ever cured. We, we, we control it. We restore physiology. We can improve our health. But if I, if I came to your house and had gluten, dairy, and eggs, my trigeminal neurology would turn on within 24 hours. So I would have incapacitating pain. But technically you're cured if you don't eat that stuff. It's like if you're diabetes, your A1C is perfect. But if you eat sugar, it goes up.

Starting point is 00:43:49 Well, yeah, I guess maybe somebody else wouldn't. So you always have the tendency toward it. So I'm very careful to not claim cure, but I'm careful to say I'm very well managed. As long as I take care of myself, following the W protocol, you know, I can bike, I can hike, uh, I'm pain free and I do really very well. That's that is true for all of us who have, whether it's anxiety, depression, um, uh, diabetes, insulin resistance, as long as we are managing our diet and lifestyle,

Starting point is 00:44:22 we can have a rich, full life, relatively normal physiology, no evidence of disease and do great. But if I think I can go back to that previous diet and lifestyle and not get sick, that's incorrect. Right. I agree. It's like I had this patient once who was diabetic and I told him what to do and he used a blood sugar going to normal.

Starting point is 00:44:46 He says, Dr. Hyman, now my blood sugar is normal. Can I go back to eating my carbohydrates? I'm like, no, you can't. So you just got a $2 million gift to support your study of the sort of clinically isolated syndrome and relapsing remitting MS. So talk about that. Yeah, that was a very exciting study. We're about to launch that just before the pandemic. We're going to have newly diagnosed MS clinically isolated syndrome folks,

Starting point is 00:45:17 baseline assessments, baseline MRIs, basically give them the WALS protocol and have monthly support calls, bring them back in a year, repeat all the assessments, including the MRI. And then the pandemic happened. And fortunately, we had not started our study. So we had to redesign everything and reimagine the study so the study is now a virtual study and it has three arms once again newly diagnosed folks who have been offered drugs and declined drugs and we basically put them on the walls diet, a stress reduction program, and an exercise program. And we do virtual assessments every three months, a monthly

Starting point is 00:46:13 support calls. Then the control arm are folks who are, again, newly diagnosed, and are taking disease modifying therapy, and they can have whatever diet and lifestyle interventions that they want. And then the third arm, we said that we needed a third arm now because we can't get the MRIs the way we hoped. What we're doing is we're abstracting the medical records here at the University of Iowa of newly diagnosed folks with MS and clinically isolated syndrome. And we are counting in everyone from their medical records, their number of lesions, the number of relapses, and the progression of symptoms or remission of symptoms during that time period. So we will probably have, it'll probably be another eight months of data collection,

Starting point is 00:47:12 and then we will analyze our data. So, you know, with MS, there's often white matter changes in the brain. In other words, there's scarring in the brain that you can see on an MRI. Do you see changes in that as well? We're going to find out. I do know that in our intervention arm, we do have some folks who are having more relapses who have elected to go on drugs.

Starting point is 00:47:37 We are also having some folks who have had their follow-up MRIs and lesions have disappeared, and they're not having relapses. And their neurologists are like, wow, this is really amazing. And so we'll see what happens at the end. Certainly the vast majority of folks in our intervention arm are reporting symptoms are going down. Their motor problems are reduced. Their sensory problems are reduced.

Starting point is 00:48:14 Vision is improving. Impressive. Impressive. So how is this research being received now? What's different about it? Because it seems like you hit a lot of resistance at the beginning. MS Society wouldn't even talk to you like you're a quack. And now they're wanting to talk to you, work with you.

Starting point is 00:48:29 What are you seeing? Why all this is happening? I think the TED Talk went viral. I got a book deal. The book was a bestseller. The MS Society monitors social media. And they saw that when my book came out, all of the attention, which led them to prioritize and create a wellness conference. And they actually tracked me down

Starting point is 00:48:53 and got me to the wellness conference. I was one of the scientists there. That's amazing. And then they made a priority to fund dietary and lifestyle research and funded the WAVE study. So that one was funded by the MS Society. So great, Terry. And the work you're doing is so important and putting the foundation of research behind it and showing the efficacy. And I think, have you seen your neurological colleagues who specialize in MS start to change at all what they're doing, have a different view. Are they still stuck in diet? Doesn't matter. Like where are we at? Well, we're still making a lot more progress. There's more research that

Starting point is 00:49:33 the microbiome is altered. There are more people doing dietary intervention studies. You know, now we have some small studies about calorie restriction, fasting, ketogenic diets, the Paleolithic diet, Mediterranean diet, Swank diet, McDougall diet. So all these small studies. Our WAVE study is the largest study to date. We have a protocol in front of the IRB for a couple more studies that I'm really excited about. One is a study of the online program that I run. So we're going to evaluate the dietary intake and whether or not that is associated with changes in quality of life and fatigue. So that's going to be very, very exciting because if an online program can do those things, then that makes this available to everyone. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:35 And then we have plans for another study, a big study, Wall's diet, ketogenic diet, dietary guidelines that will include MRIs at baseline and at two years. And that will be a study funded by a, again, a very generous donor. It's amazing, though. You think this should be something funded by the NIH, right? This should be funding by the government. And now we're having private donors doing it, which is fine, but it's unfortunate that you can get millions and billions of dollars to study drugs, but you can't get five cents to study lifestyle or nutrition.

Starting point is 00:51:15 And that's because there's this dedication to thinking we can understand biology, molecular pathway by molecular pathway, but biology is a network of balancing and counterbalancing pathways. Absolutely. If we're going to create health, we have to study complex systems and you have to support the entire system. That's right. I mean, that's what functional medicine is. It's treating the system, not the individual symptoms or diseases.

Starting point is 00:51:46 And then when you do that- It's the only way to create health. I mean, you're not actually treating MS. You're just creating a healthy person by getting them off crappy food, getting a real diet, getting exercise, reducing stress, sleep better, take a few supplements, optimize your pathways, metabolic pathways. I mean, you're not really treating MS specifically, right? Correct, correct. And that's what people don't realize. This is not an MS treatment. This is a health treatment. metabolic pathways. I mean, you're not really treating MS specifically, right? Correct.

Starting point is 00:52:09 And that's what people don't realize. This is not an MS treatment. This is a health treatment. And for anybody with an autoimmune disease, this can be a very powerful model. You know, when I first had my recovery, my partner started complaining about what I was doing. And I got called in. they had to speak with the chief of staff and the chief of medicine at the university. And then I got sent to the complementary alternative medicine clinic and my chief of medicine sat me down and said, Terry, you got to talk about it differently because you're making people upset. And what I learned, the way I shifted my conversation, Mark, was that I told my patients that we're going to monitor your drugs and your disease, but we're going to focus on supporting how your cells run the chemistry of life. And we'll just watch, see if I have to adjust your

Starting point is 00:53:03 medicines, if you run the chemistry of life a little bit better. And so we're going to do it through diet and lifestyle. And that's why I documented in the chart that I'm supporting their health. And then we will watch for side effects on their medicines. So I had to learn how to talk about in a way that was more comfortable for people and to make sure that people did not think I was treating disease, that I was working on creating better health. That's why we say, you know, functional medicine is the science of creating health and disease goes away as a side effect. That is exactly right. And what we're simply doing is monitoring the drugs to be sure people are not overmedicated.

Starting point is 00:53:45 Oh, exactly. Right. You know, I had a huge problem when I wrote my book, Blood Sugar Solution, because people started following the book and it was a number one bestseller and people were following the program and we're getting all these calls. My blood pressure is too low. My blood sugar is too low. I'm like, yeah, you don't need your medication.

Starting point is 00:54:00 So I had to put in a big warning. It says, if you're on medication, this program can be dangerous because it will prevent you from needing those medications. And if you're taking them, your blood sugar and your blood pressure are going to go too low. So you need to taper off them with your doctor. Yeah. Yeah. So we did that as well. We put all these warnings in my, in my reprints in the book to say, you got to, if you're on meds, you have to work closely with your doc because you may need to read steadily. Exactly. So let's switch topics a little bit. I want to talk about the microbiome. You mentioned it briefly, but I remember years ago, even 20 years ago, I had an MS patient

Starting point is 00:54:33 and she said to me, Dr. Hyman, well, I have irritable bowel. And whenever my irritable bowel gets bad, my MS gets better. My irritable bowel is better. My MS is better. And I was like, oh, noted, noted. Like when patients say that stuff to me, MS is better. And I was like, Oh, noted, noted. Like I, when patients say that stuff to me, I pay attention. And that was before even the word microbiome was in the culture at all. And in functional medicine, we always address the gut. We always address the gut as a way of dealing with inflammation and MS is an inflammatory disease. So what, what is the story of the microbiome andMS? And why is there such a link? And how does it all connect?

Starting point is 00:55:07 And what do we do about it? How does the Walsh Protocol affect the microbiome? Well, we have a greater appreciation that your microbiome is talking to your T cells, your T regulatory cells, it affects your immune tone of how many pro-inflammation molecules you're going to make and which immune cells are going to be active. We also know if you have a leaky, you probably also have a leaky brain and these immune cells and these inflammatory molecules are getting into your brain and activating the immune cells in your brain called glia and your microglia are continually sensing

Starting point is 00:55:52 the environment and either making it very inflammatory, which is causing a relapse or very reparative, which is rebuilding the myelin that's been damaged. And that is going to depend on what you're eating and what you're doing. And so it's part of why I talk to my patients, are you pooping rocks, logs, snakes, pudding, or tea? Pudding or tea, you need less fiber. If it's rocks or dry logs logs you need more fiber and more sauerkraut and kimchi if you've got snakes and they're getting into your pants then you probably

Starting point is 00:56:32 still need to have less fiber snakes are ideal but only if they don't get into your pants okay it's not it's not way easier than you know the the Bristol chart one to seven? That's the best description of poop I've ever heard. A little graphic and visual, but I think we all get the point. Yeah, everyone laughs and they all get it. They all understand it. And they understand snakes in the pants are a problem. So a lot of times in functional medicine, we treat the gut directly.

Starting point is 00:57:07 Like we really focus on gut reparative therapies, the five-hour program in functional medicine. Do you need to do that with the WALS protocol or do you just do the general approach and it works? Or do you need to dive in there and see, oh, this person has extra gut inflammation or they have leucomancy or they have this and that parasite? You know what is interesting, Mark, is when I went through my personal transformation, my only clinic practice was at the VA. At the VA, you really can't do any functional medicine labs, zero. And the supplements I could get were B vitamins and fish oil. And that was it. And what I discovered is,

Starting point is 00:57:41 by basically doing the Walsh protocol, protocol man i was reversing disease left and right uh and so what i learned was uh behavior change uh group uh clinics uh group visits and the power of starting with the wall's protocol listening closely to how people responded and making adjustments based on their response. But if someone had a parasite or really bad gut, don't need probiotics, don't need other things to help heal. They may,

Starting point is 00:58:11 they may. And there's no doubt if I could have done functional medicine testing, it would have, I could have recovered people more quickly. And there are people who I couldn't recover as well as I would have liked that had I been able to do functional medicine testing, I could have probably done better. Yeah, incredible. So the microbiome is a huge role in our immune system and across the spectrum of diseases and the spectrum of inflammation. We've talked about that a lot on the podcast.

Starting point is 00:58:41 I do think that the work you're doing is so radical because it does affect everything. It affects your nutrient levels. It affects your microbiome. It reduces inflammation. It helps to optimize the function of all the systems in your body that you were talking about. Let's shift a little bit because we've been talking about a multiple sclerosis. And your latest book is really about the autoimmune spectrum, not just MS, which is part of that. So why is this effective for that? And what are the things that people can do

Starting point is 00:59:14 if they have an autoimmune disease? You know, I want to get back to, so why do we develop an autoimmune process? Why does my innate immune system get overly activated? Why do I begin to develop autoantibodies against specific structures in my body? And so there's only a few basic reasons why that's going to happen. If I have an autoimmune disease and I take disease-modifying drugs, but I don't address the root causes that led to the autoimmune process, people will develop another autoimmune diagnosis about every five to 10 years. And I certainly see that in my tribe. People come in, they see me, and they've had several autoimmune diagnoses.

Starting point is 01:00:06 And as I work with them, they get better control of all of their conditions. So because the Walsh Protocol, while I designed it, obviously, for myself, and it's focused a lot on the brain, it addresses the root causes of why these autoimmune processes are developing. So it helps psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, allergies, asthma, myasthenia gravis,s you know and frankly people reach out to me uh tell me that they have you know a disease that i have to look up because i've never heard of it i and their physicians had given up hope and they had stumbled on my work implemented implemented my work, and are steadily improving. Yeah. And I've also had people with genetic disorders, muscular dystrophy, for example.

Starting point is 01:01:10 Yeah, tell us about that. Who found my work. It actually has been coming to my seminar since the very first one. And he talks about, yep, he still has muscular dystrophy, but he's far more functional since implementing the WALLS protocol, and he's not getting worse. I think it's important to understand for people that people can get better from all sorts of things when they change their diet. And I've seen this across the spectrum in my practice.

Starting point is 01:01:39 So what you're speaking to is such an important fundamental principle. People with cystic fibrosis, people with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense that if you have the standard American diet, standard American lifestyle, you will have the best quality of life and best function given your genetic circumstances. I think that's right. I mean, Terry, I think we think of Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy as these intractable, progressive conditions, which are autosomal dominant inherited conditions that you can't really modify or change.

Starting point is 01:02:26 If you have a gene that's a effects folate metabolism or vitamin D metabolism, you can modify. These are called mild, you know, single nucleotide polymorphisms are just slight variations in our genes. They're not mutations. These are mutations and they profoundly change your biology. But what I found again, like you just observationally, my practice is I've had many patients like this. So I don't know. Let's see if we can help you. Let's do this. Let's look and see under the hood what's going on. What's often amazing is they have the worst metabolic health you can imagine.

Starting point is 01:02:52 Their metabolic and biochemical pathways are all messed up and haywire. That there are certain sort of, you know, functional things that go wrong that you can modify through understanding the biology of the disease and whether it's a mask, whether it's, or whether, I mean, sorry, whether it's a muscular dystrophy, whether it's mitochondrial issues or whether there's, you know, whether there's, you know, down syndrome, whether it's huge in some existence and inflammatory pathways and methylation problems, you can really impact them by changing their diet, by certain types of supplementation. And it was striking to me to see that, you know, where people can have really dramatically improved quality of life. You're not curing Down syndrome or muscular dystrophy, but you are modifying the course of the disease and you're actually improving their overall health and quality of life. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:35 I spent a lot of time trying to tell people the goal is to have the best function that we can for you. And the way to do that is nutrition, sleep, stress management, and consistent, gentle hormesis. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, you know, in terms of the autoimmune in general issue for people, do you suggest they just try the Walsh protocol? Is there another strategy you have for them? So I want to figure out where they're at. I want them to know what they want their health for. So we deal with the mental, emotional, spiritual. And then we have them start with the Walsh protocol.

Starting point is 01:04:17 And I stress this is a family intervention. So it's a negotiation. What is the family willing to do and to do all of this together and you know depending on the circumstance i might put them on the walls elimination diet i might run them through food sensitivity testing so we can be very precise or they may need to start at the mediterranean diet because that's all the family is willing to do. So there's a clear negotiation as to what are you willing to do? Because whatever the intervention is, I want it to be 100%. Doing the Walsh diet at 50% is not very helpful.

Starting point is 01:04:56 Yeah, I'll cut down from six sidecokes to three a day, right? Doing the Mediterranean diet at 100% is better than doing the Walsh diet at 50%. So I want to have a negotiation what can we do a hundred percent and you know and in my va practice sometimes what we had to start was meditation because people had to start we had to find a lifestyle intervention that they could do 100 and when when they mastered that, then we could begin adding the next layer and the next layer and the next layer. Amazing. So Terry, your work is so important. You've touched so many millions of people and you're bringing hope where there was none,

Starting point is 01:05:38 especially in the field of MS. It's one of those horrible conditions that I've treated so many patients. And it's remarkable when you follow these principles and I followed similar principles over the years, treating these patients with great success. And hopefully this will get more into the mainstream, but what you've done is you've created access points. You've got your books, you've got your cookbook, and also now you have these online programs. So tell us a little bit about the online programs that people are listening and they want to join. Where would they go? How do they find it? What is the program? Several times a year, we have a free five-day challenge. And that is five days of lessons that people get from me, two lessons a day to help you on your journey of adapting diet and lifestyle. And then we have the autoimmune intervention mastery course, again, which is

Starting point is 01:06:25 online. So we have people from all over the globe. There are five modules, lots of lessons within each module to take you through the emotional aspect, the food aspect, the exercise movement aspect, and the supplements and supplemental, what are the additional things that you can do? And in the online course, you also get access to seven calls, group calls, where I come in, provide more information, answer questions, and provide a lot more clarity. And we'll be having our five-day challenge starting August 15th. And the autoimmune mastery course starts August 30th. And then the seven weeks, we have put literally thousands and thousands and thousands of people through those.

Starting point is 01:07:17 Where can people find that? Yeah. Terry Walls, T-E-R-R-Y, Walls, W-A-H-L-S.com. And you'll see links to the five-day challenge and to the autoimmune course there. Well, I know how tough it is to put that stuff together. And I really appreciate you doing the work so everybody can get the benefit

Starting point is 01:07:35 because it's not easy, I know, to run those things. And I encourage people who are listening, if they have an autoimmune disease, if they have MS or they know somebody, please share this podcast with them. Let them know about this program. Let them know about Terry's work. It's game changing.

Starting point is 01:07:48 And I can't thank you enough for showing up and figuring out for yourself sort of what I did. I was so sick from so many different things. My job in the world was getting sick and then getting better and figuring out how to tell everybody how to get better. So I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, but for both of us, it's led to some pretty remarkable findings and good things in the end. So if you've listened to this podcast, you loved it, go to terrywalls.com, learn more

Starting point is 01:08:13 about her work, get her books, join her course. And if you loved it, please share with your friends and family on social media, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. What's worked for you? How have you struggled with disease and autoimmunity and how have you helped yourself? And of course, 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. I hope you're loving

Starting point is 01:08:41 this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health.

Starting point is 01:09:00 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.

Starting point is 01:09:33 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.

Starting point is 01:09:59 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.

The Dr. Hyman Show - Reversing Multiple Sclerosis And Autoimmune Disease With Functional Medicine with Dr. Terry Wahls

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