The Dr. Hyman Show - Using Diet And Lifestyle To Reverse Symptoms Of MS

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Paleovalley, and InsideTracker.   The most profound cases of healing are in people who refuse to give up. Even if they’ve found some things that improve their condition, they continue searching for new ways to feel better and better. This is how we break down walls in medicine. The Functional Medicine methodology is the same; there is no end to searching for what is underneath the symptoms. Functional Medicine healing protocols can ultimately help change the prognosis of so many conditions, including the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis.    In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Terry Wahls and Dr. Todd LePine about using diet, meditation, and much more to reverse devastating autoimmune disease symptoms.   Dr. Terry Wahls is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa. Her secondary progressive multiple sclerosis confined her to a tilt-recline wheelchair for four years, but she restored her health using a diet and lifestyle program she designed specifically for mitochondrial health and now pedals her bike to work each day. She is the author of The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine, The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles, and the cookbook, The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life: The Revolutionary Modern Paleo Plan to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions.   Dr. Todd 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.   This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Paleovalley, and InsideTracker.   Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.   Paleovalley is offering my listeners 15% off their entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hyman to check out all their clean Paleo products and take advantage of this deal.   Right now InsideTracker is offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman.   Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Dr. Terry Wahls Dr. Todd LePine  Dr. Terry Wahls 

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. You took all these drugs, they didn't work. But when you use food as a drug, as medicine, it actually worked faster and better. Very fast. Food is the most powerful medicine. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now, I know there are a lot of functional medicine practitioners out there like I am, and we're all trying to get

the best data we can to help our patients optimize their health. And that means we're often looking at things like hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and more to help us find the most effective path to health and healing. But it usually means having to order multiple tests from multiple different labs, which makes the whole process of ordering, tracking, and compounding lab results really difficult and time-consuming. And that is where Rupa Health can help. Rupa Health is a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty tests from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. They make the process of ordering labs simple and fast, allowing you to

cut down on the paperwork and giving you more time to spend with your patients. This is a much-needed option in the functional medicine space. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A-H-E-A-L-T-H.com. Some days it seems like I'm on the go from the time I get up to the time I go to bed. Sometimes it feels like every day, but it's not just me feeling like I'm busy. My patients notice it too, because they often ask me how I juggle multiple jobs, frequent travel, spending time with my family while still focusing on my health. To be honest, it's hard. I have to put a lot of planning and systems in place to ensure that I don't really sacrifice my health for my schedule and eating well is no

exception. That is what makes Paleo Valley Beef Sticks so great. I keep a stash of them at the house and in the office so that whenever I find myself in a food emergency, I have a healthy and delicious option to keep me on track and get to my goals. They're a great protein snack that's Whole30, keto, and paleo approved. Plus, they're individually wrapped in 100% recyclable plastic, making them portable and good for the environment. Paleo Valley beef sticks last a long time too, so you don't have to worry about them going bad in your emergency stash. Most companies promote a long shelf life by using GMO corn-based citric acid encapsulated in hydrogenated oils to process their products. But Paleo Valley uses natural fermentation without the use of chemicals or questionable ingredients. Thanks to this process,

each beef sticks contains naturally occurring probiotics, making them a perfect gut-friendly snack. So if you're looking for a delicious protein option to add to your list of healthy snacks, check out Paleo Valley Beef Sticks. And right now, Paleo Valley is offering my listeners 15% off your entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com slash hyman to check out their clean paleo products to take advantage of this deal. That's paleovalley.com forward slash hyman. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Functional medicine approaches disease by taking a deep dive into the root cause of illness. In health and medicine, we must always be willing to look deeper. We can't give up on looking for healing solutions

just because we've been told that disease is progressive or incurable. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on using functional medicine to reverse multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Terry Walls about her personal experience overcoming multiple sclerosis symptoms by increasing her vegetable intake, with Dr. Tad Lapine about a case study of a patient who healed her gut and changed her life, and again with Dr. Terry Walls on taking a holistic approach to healing that includes cold water therapy and meditation. Let's jump in. In 2000, I was diagnosed with MS.

18 years ago. 18 years ago. But you know, in retrospect, my symptoms began during medical school in 1980 with episodes of electrical face pain, which I stoically put up with. I could figure out that they were worse with stress and gradually more frequent, more severe. In 2000, I had a weakness in my left leg, got a big workup, including MRIs of my brain, spinal cord, spinal tap, and they said, well, this is relapsing remitting MS. And being like... Which is a very bad diagnosis. A bad diagnosis and I looked at the literature

and saw that within 10 years half have difficulty walking, needing a cane, walker, or wheelchair. And half won't be able to work due to severe fatigue. So I wanted to treat my disease aggressively. I sought out the best center doing research here in the Midwest. That was the Cleveland Clinic. Saw the best people, took the newest drugs. And within three years, I needed a tilt-reclined wheelchair. Well, that's good progress.

Yeah. So I definitely was not going the right direction. And that's when I started researching. I started reading PubMed. I would begin experimenting myself, I adopted the paleo diet, on the recommendation of my Cleveland Clinic physicians. So that was pretty interesting. I continued to go downhill. I took Tysabri, continued to go downhill. I switched to Celcept, I continued to go downhill. These are powerful immune suppressing drugs. Very powerful, but I was happy to take them because I knew I was headed towards becoming bedridden, possibly demented, I was having more and more trouble with severe pain that was very difficult to control.

So I was thrilled to take these drugs and attempt to stave all of that off. As I read PubMed, I started experimenting with supplements and would eventually figure out that supplements targeting my mitochondria helped my fatigue somewhat. And I was slowing the speed of my decline. So I'm thrilled, I'm grateful, and I'm really excited about reading PubMed. Grateful from a wheelchair. Very grateful from a wheelchair. Very, very grateful.

And then, you know, by the summer of 07... You're a glass half full person, clearly. Clearly, clearly. You know, by the summer of 07, I was so weak I could not sit up in a regular chair. I had a zero-gravity chair. I'm fully reclined or I'm in bed. I'm struggling to walk 10 feet using two walking sticks. My boss calls me in and tells me he's assigned me to the traumatic brain injury clinic in six months.

I'll be seeing patients without residents. And I know that, of course, that means, what he's really saying is, Terry, we are done redesigning your job for you, and I'll be forced to take medical disability, finally at that time. So that's a difficult summer. But two months later I discover, on one of my Google searches,

the Institute for Functional Medicine, and I took the course on neuroprotection. In the midst of my Google searches the Institute for Functional Medicine and I took the course on neuroprotection in the midst of my brain fog so this was it was a bit challenging but I got through it had a longer list of supplements a little deeper understanding of the things I could be doing for my mitochondria and for my brain and I added that. And then I had another really, really big aha moment, like I should take this list of supplements and redesign my paleo diet to maximize the nutritional intake. So, I redesigned my diet... You're going to be eating paleo cookies all day and that's not exactly...

And that's not the right thing. So, I restructured my diet and within a month my fatigue was markedly reduced, my mental clarity was clearly improving. In three months I get up and I'm walking with a cane. You got out of your wheelchair. I'm out of my wheelchair, walking around with a cane. And in nine months, I'm on my bike and I pedal around the block for the first time in six years. And in 12 months, I do a 20-mile bike ride with my family. Unbelievable.

So it was a year. A year. Now, take us a little bit slower through what you did because you... I did a lot. You did the paleo diet, then you did the drugs, but then you went to this neuroprotection... Plan. Module from IFM and you learned from there what you could do to optimize your systems. So I optimized my system.

I also added in there, I added in electrical stimulation of my muscles. That was a technique that athletes have been doing for decades to speed the recovery from athletic injuries. So my physical therapist had agreed to let me add that, so I was doing that. I had gone back to adding meditation at night, so I added that back. And then I had this very intensive nutrition. So I ramped up my vegetables to like nine cups of vegetables a day. Which is 18 servings. Not the five to nine.

Yeah, 18 servings. And so a small amount of meat, lots and lots of vegetables. And very specific groups of vegetables. Very specific groups. Very specific medicinal effects that you talked about. Exactly. It's all designed very intentionally around my mitochondria, around detox, around myelin production, around brain structures, neurotransmitters, you know, based on science in a very methodical

way. And I did all this, Mark, not to get better, because I had completely accepted what my neurologist, primary care docs had told me for years. It's a one-way street. Functions once lost with progressive MS are permanently gone. So I was doing all this so I could have the limited function that I had a little bit longer. And not get worse. So I was thrilled to do all of that to not get worse. And then the other thing that's really interesting, Mark,

is as I was getting remarkably better, as part of having a progressive neurodegenerative disease is you get to a point where you take every day as it comes, one day at a time, no expectations about what it means. So I'm remarkably better. I'm thinking more clearly. My pain is gone, which is a huge deal for me. Pain is a big symptom in MS.

Pain is a huge symptom. It was a huge problem for me as well. So my pain is gone. I'm walking. I'm thinking. I'm biking. Actually, it wasn't until I biked that I realized, you know, I think I'm getting better.

Because until then, I was just taking it one day at a time. Amazing. The day that I biked, it was on Mother's Day, and I'm crying, my wife's crying, my kids are crying. And that's when I understood that who knew what the future would hold. That clearly neurology has it wrong. Clearly neurology has it wrong. And who knew how much recovery might be possible.

It's a very hopeful story. And I think I'd love to know what exactly you're eating. People are probably listening, but what are the 19 or 18 servings of vegetables you ate? And what groups were they? And what do they do? Okay. So first, and I think the most powerful one is all these greens. So I was having tons and tons of green leafy vegetables.

So I was probably having six to, actually six to nine cups measured raw. Collards, kale. Collards, kale, a little bit of spinach. I was very, I really craved kale in a huge way, but I'd have collards, I would have Swiss chard, I had lots and lots of salads, I would have Swiss chard, I had lots and lots of salads, I would have some cooked greens.

I was very big into cabbage family vegetables. So cabbage, broccoli, turnips, rutabagas, lots of it raw, some cooked, but I was also very, very big into raw. Garlics, lots of garlic, shallots, onions. Because they have sulfur, they boost the thiol. Boost the detox, boost your ability to make gamma-aminobutyric acid, intracellular glutathione, and then very much into mushrooms. Mushrooms stimulate and prime adaptive and innate immune cells,

they also stimulate your ability to make nerve growth factors. And additional mushrooms are powerful. Very powerful. They have all kinds of amazing ingredients that are in other foods. And garlic and mushrooms are medicinal foods across many, many cultures across all the continents. So these are medicinal foods with a lot of ancient cultural wisdom. So greens, brassicas, garlic and onions and mushrooms.

And then color. So the polyphenols are a marker for color. And the polyphenols, again, in study after study, the more color you have, the lower the rates of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancers, so you want color. And furthermore, blue, purple, black, a lot of studies showing you can have measurable improvement in cognition

in as little as 16 weeks using just a cup of blueberries in placebo double-blind crossover trials. That's hardly any time at all. No, that's amazing. Not Skittles though. Not Skittles. Those are colorful. Those are the wrong kind of color, my friend. So again, three cups of deeply pigmented stuff.

And then fats. You know, fats have a critical role. All of our cells are wrapped in fat. They're fat wrappers, the cell membranes. And our brain is 60% to 70% fat. Your nerve coverings, which get destroyed in MS are also fat. And they need arachidonic acid, they need acosapentaenoic acid, they need the cosexanoic acid, they need omega-6 and omega-3 fats. And so I needed to have more fat in the diet.

Did you use saturated fat? No, actually I did. So I used lots of fat. So we'd have flax oil, hemp oil in the dressings that I'd use. And then we would cook in saturated fat. I'd use coconut oil. I'd use bacon fat, duck fat. My vets, because for years I worked at the vet, so I would teach the vets. My favorite recipe was bacon and greens.

You cook up some bacon, take the bacon out, leave the bacon fat, dump in the greens, stir them around until they're wilted, add the bacon back. If you didn't like it, just double the bacon the next time you make it. And my vets would go like, oh my God, you mean I can eat bacon? That actually sounds like it would taste wonderful. And we have lots of avocados as well, get into nuts and seeds. And so what is remarkable was the speed at which I could see the difference in 30 days.

So think about it. You took all these drugs. They didn't work. But when you use food as a drug, as medicine, it actually worked faster and better. Very fast. And that's exactly what I saw in clinic. I was able to teach my residents in clinic as well, that food is the most powerful medicine. And it works amazingly fast. It's better and cheaper than most drugs.

Yes. It's an amazing substance. And when people understand it's not just calories, as we learn in functional medicine, it's information, then they can go, wait a minute, I can upgrade my biology by putting better information in. Into your body, absolutely. So besides the food, that's powerful powerful and the stimulation and the meditation you also probably did other things

were there diagnostic tests that you did on yourself but you discovered anything that was off or out of balance you know so into my recovery so two years into my recovery I thought, well, I'm sure toxic load was a big issue in all of this. So keep in mind I've been walking around, hiking now, I've been biking, very little pain. So I'm in great shape. And I finally did a 24-hour heavy metals challenge test and I was diffusely toxic in everything. Everything.

All your metals were high. All my metals were high. I think there were only four that were not high. I was even high in uranium, thorium, thallium. Thallium is, you know, kale is now in California. The ground has thallium in it. So we have so poisoned our soils with many of our fertilizers are relatively toxic. So yes, unfortunately many of our foods are toxic.

And now the other thing that I should tell you, I repeated all of that four years later and everything is gone. Amazing. So, who knows like how incredibly toxic I was in the very beginning. Before, right. In the very beginning. How did you get rid of them all? Well, when I designed my protocol,

I designed it around boosting the detox enzymes. So that's why I stress the greens, the sulfur, the color. I added in there some inositol cysteine and some algae as well. Some binders to get the metals out as well. Things to regulate your glutathione. And then the other thing, six months into my recovery, I was able to overcome my heat intolerance. Yeah.

And so I got a sauna and I've been sauna-ing ever since. Amazing. So it's basically food, supplements, electrical stimulation. And very basic supplements. I mean, B vitamins, N-acetylcysteine and algae. That's it. That's it. That's it. No vitamin D? Well, yes, there is vitamin D in there, of course.

Because there's evidence around vitamin D. Yeah, plenty of vitamin D. And I also use sunlight. Sunlight. Sunlight is more effective than vitamin D. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Mark. Something I get more and more excited about every year is personalized medicine. When I began practicing functional medicine over 20 years ago, it was clear to me that we may have to look at how unique each body is. Now with technology advancing in so many amazing ways, we can truly take that concept to the

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Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. I had one patient in particular who I saw who came in. It was a great story. She came in and she was having MS as her diagnosis. She also had autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis. And she also had infertility. And I did a complete workup on her. She had dysbiosis, had bacterial and yeast overgrowth, also had sensitivity to gluten, and had also some, not a heavy, not a big level, but some level of mercury in the body.

So I worked on a diet, worked on, you know, both prebiotics and probiotics to clean up the gut, got her completely off of gluten. And lo and behold, guess what? Her multiple sclerosis went away. Amazing. Disappeared. All right. Not to say that. And you got her metals out too. Yeah. Not to say that all cases of multiple sclerosis are due to that, but there are many pathways to multiple sclerosis, just that there are many pathways to Alzheimer's disease. Or any disease. Or any disease, exactly. Because the body will manifest it in only certain inflammatory pathways. So ultimately, she got off of her medications. Her MS to this day is in complete remission.

She has no symptoms, on no meds. And as a side effect, she got pregnant. Wow, that's a good side effect. Yeah. And she was happy. So that's an amazing story. And I think, you know, for people who are listening, functional medicine is a new way of thinking about disease. It's not based on the label, MS. It's based on the cause. And you can have one disease that has many causes like MS, which can be caused by heavy metals, by Lyme disease, by Epstein-Barr, by the gut microbiome, by gluten, you know, like B12 deficiency, right?

You can have so many things that are driving this same syndrome. And the personalization of medicine is what functional medicine's all about. And that's really what's different here about how we practice medicine at the Ultra Wellness Center, because we're looking at each person as an individual,

we're creating a personalized medicine and personalized health, which is a radically new way of thinking. And we just lump everybody with the same symptoms in the same categories, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cause. And I always say, just because you know the name of your disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you, right? Absolutely. And that's what we do through very detailed histories here, through very advanced diagnostic

testing, the look, some of these things. Oh, absolutely. And I think the, the, the enjoyable thing that I'm sure that you experience yourself is that every patient is unique.

Yeah. You know, I've never treated two patients the same way from a functional approach. No. It completely different, even in the same family. It's everyone is. And that's actually the fun part about it is the, I call it, you know, the person comes in with their own genetic uniqueness,

their own, you know, uh, personality makeup, their own story, all of these things that you can paint the picture of, you know, where were they when they got sick? Where are they now? And what are the things that, you know, uh, that we can remove, you remove, like the four R's? It's sort of like being Dr. House, right? It's like medical detectives. Yeah, like medical detectives, exactly. And I think one of the most important things that I always tell people who are training in medicine is to listen to the patient.

Yeah, they'll tell you what's wrong. Absolutely. And when and why. Exactly. And sometimes I just have to sort of bite my mouth because you want to always interrupt patients and say, oh, what about this and what about that? I just sort of let patients talk more and I just sort of listen and then I'll ask the questions later. And when you really do that and let the patients tell their story in their own way, in their own terms and get that out, you really find out all the little details and you can play house and play detect and try to piece the pieces of the puzzle together. Yeah. In regular medicine, we are trained to create an exclusive history.

In other words, someone comes in with a symptom, let's say they have heartburn or reflux or chest pain. We don't want to know anything else about them except about that. We want all the details about that. We don't know if they have a rash, are their fingernails cracked uh do they have eczema is there butt itch like don't talk to me about any of that because that's not relevant and in functional medicine all of it's relevant because it's a clue that could give you a clue to what's actually happening for that patient and that's what's so beautiful about this process you know i i think i used to work in the emergency room i think you did too it's boring it's boring because someone comes in and he's like okay it's the heart attack treatment it's the asthma treatment it's a kidney stone it's a protocol it's like it's like you just look

at the nurse you go heart attack okay they don't they know what the orders are they know what to do you just barely write it down and it's like it's like rote and boring it's it's it's a it's a formula like a recipe right in functional medicine there there is no recipe. There's actually having to think every time you see a patient. Right, right. And being trained in traditional medicine and also in a functional medicine approach, there's definitely, if you're having a heart attack, I want a thrombolytic. Absolutely. I want you to follow the protocol that has been shown to work. But for chronic conditions, acute care medicine, which is basically the scalpel or the prescription pad, are probably some of the more toxic things

that you can have. A lot of what I see in my patients here is iatrogenica imperfecta. Translate that, doctor. Translate that, which basically means the doctor did it, right? So the patient comes in and they're on a whole laundry list of medications. And are interacting you know they're on proton pump inhibitors are causing calcium yeah the acid blockers they're they're causing uh uh calcium deficiency mineral deficiency b12 deficiency so there's you know there's these these drugs have their their risk benefit and the the less drugs you use in medicine, the better off the patient is. Yeah. It's hard because that's what we know how to do. It's what we're trained to do.

It's like, we don't know how to treat people with food as medicine. We don't know how to restore a gut from a messed up gut to a healthy gut. And that's really what we do in functional medicine. Yeah. And I also, another important thing that it's important for physicians out there who are new to functional medicine, also for patients, is to realize these don't happen overnight it can take time but usually sometimes you can see a difference in in you know days to weeks sometimes it takes months and sometimes it takes years it depends depends on what's going on so true i mean i sometimes it's like it's almost miraculous and you go like it's hard to believe i remember when i first started practicing i would like go okay do these things take this eat this and then they'd call back a few weeks later or,

you know, a month later, I'm like, how are you doing? Well, I'm all better. I'm like, what? You're better from that? Because it was so, it was such a contradiction to everything I learned, but then I started to trust it and I started to expect it. And I just remember this one patient, she had psoriatic arthritis, which is a horrible condition where you're, you've got psoriasis, but your joints are being deformed and destroyed. You're in pain all the time. But she had a bunch of other stuff, which quote was unrelated. She had depression. She had insomnia. She was overweight. She had terrible reflux and heartburn. And she was having bloating and SIBO and irritable bowel. And I'm like, okay, well, let's see. She's inflamed. Everything that she's got is inflamed. The weight is inflamed.

Depression's an inflammation in the brain. Her gut symptoms are about inflammation in the gut. You know, everything's related to inflammation. So why don't we sort of just start simple and clear out things that are causing potential inflammation. So we got rid of gluten and dairy in your diet and sugar and starch and all processed food. We got her gut cleaned up.

I gave her an antibiotic and antifungal and a little gut program and a couple of nutrients to help her fight some inflammation that she was suffering from. And six weeks later, she came back. Her psoriasis was gone. Her arthritis was gone. Her reflux and irritable bowel was gone. Her depression was gone. She lost 20 pounds. I'm like, and she got off of her medications, even the one that was costing 50 grand a year to suppress her immune system from the psoriasis and it seems like a you know, it seems like a miracle but it really isn't when you follow this methodology and That's what we've been doing here for decades practicing functional medicine up in the Berkshires in the middle of nowhere

But yeah, it's pretty amazing Well, it's really interesting because most of the patients who have psoriasis are going to see dermatologists and most dermatologists Do not have a clue about the gut microbiome, nor are they tested for thinking about it. And then if they get psoriasis and they develop psoriatic arthritis, which is arthritis in addition to the skin condition, because I always tell patients is the skin is contiguous with the gut. So if I draw a line on the skin and I keep drawing a line and go down my tongue and I go into my esophagus, down to my stomach and my intestine, I'm still on the same surface. So oftentimes, and you know this, Mark. That's true. I never thought of that. It's none of a cool thought.

That's how I explain it to patients. So the skin is contiguous with the gut. It's an ectodermal tissue. And when there's skin issues, think gut. It's really a tube. It's outside your body here's your gut yeah it's true i mean when i'm a patient with psoriasis eczema uh acne rosacea yep i treat their gut yeah and i don't put stuff all over their face or on their body exactly to suppress the inflammation i get rid of that and it's like a it's like really a miracle i mean it is i mean dermatology is not uh something that i'm an expert in although i was trained as a family doctor in dermatology but uh i feel like it's we get the most amazing results just for something as simple as fixing the gut and changing the diet absolutely yeah exactly yeah the body's this interconnected complex self-healing uh organism

i mean we're that's the big thing is I often ask patients, I mean, do you think you're going to get better? And if I have a patient who thinks they're going to get better, then together we're going to get better. But if I have a patient who doesn't think they're going to get better, then I try to get them to change their mindset. Because even though somebody comes to me, they really almost believe I'm not going to get better. Well, that's what they've been taught. Exactly. You have to live with this. Exactly. You have to manage your disease. Right.

And I don't want to manage it. I want to get rid of it. And the body's ability to self-heal is amazing. As you know, it's really amazing. There's an intelligence in the body that we, you know, as much as we know about the body, there's a lot more that we don't know. And the more I practice medicine, I think the more humble I become because I realize how little I know. It's how complex it is. It's really, really complex. But there's so much that we can do for patients that, you know, they've gone to, you know, the Mayo Clinic. They've gone to Mass General. They've gone to, you know, X, Y, and Z everywhere else.

And they, you know, as you say, the resort medicine, we come here for last resort. I mean, I literally just walked from my office to here after seeing a patient who went to the Mayo Clinic, who had chronic dizziness, chronic constipation, fatigue, insomnia, all these different symptoms that they couldn't find quote anything wrong with him. And I'm like, well, I know what's wrong with you. You've got this, this, and this, and this based on looking at it through the functional medicine lens. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is, is, you know, I think, I think it was a Sid Baker, I think who made the analogy or it was in, or maybe it was Jeff Glenn is that, you know, if you have a dime and you, it's a, it's on,

you're on a dark street and you lose your dime over there and the street lights over here and you're looking under the street light, which is where you're testing. So most of the testing is basically looking where the dime isn't. Yeah. All right. So the type of testing that we do here, which is nutritional, metabolic, toxic genomic testing is, is spreading out the searchlight to find that. Absolutely. That's such a key point because, you know, you go to the doctor and they say, well, we've tested everything and all your results are normal. And the implication is it's all in your head. But I would say I don't agree with that because, you know, either two things are true.

One, the patient's crazy or the doctor's missing something. And I'm going to bet on the doctor's missing something. Because when we start to look, we find all sorts of stuff in places that nobody's looked before because they're looking under the street lamp instead of actually where the problem really is. Exactly. That's exactly right. 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 don't, 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 ten years and so um and i certainly see that you know in my tribe uh people come in they they see me and they've had several autoimmune diagnoses and as i work with them they they get better control of all of their conditions. So because the WALS protocol, well, 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, MS. And frankly, people reach out to me, tell me that they have a disease that I have to look up because I've never heard of it. And their physicians had given up hope, and they had stumbled on my work, implemented my work, and are steadily improving. Yeah. And I've also had people with genetic disorders, muscular dystrophy, for example.

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. 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're going to accelerate the damage from those genetic diseases. If we help you address diet and lifestyle, gentle hormesis, 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. 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. They're 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. 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 MS, 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 insulin resistance 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. I spent a lot of time trying to tell people the goal is to have the best function that we can for you. And, and the way to do that is nutrition, sleep, stress management, and consistent gentle hormesis. Absolutely. Absolutely. 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 autoimmunities together, it's 80 million people, which is more than people almost that have cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined. There's a lot of people. And the question for you today, Terry, to start with is, you know, how has your thinking changed since we last talked? How has your regimen changed? 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, Mark, the walls behavior change model that actually has 15, 16 steps to help 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, and Terry, what have you noticed about your own health? You know, 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.

Yeah. 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 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, a relaxing way to go to bed, just jump in an ice bath. You know, 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 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. I get it.

But 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 sleep with a hot bath so you need to uh very gradually increase your temperature stress so many people with serious autoimmune conditions conditions have difficulty with um autonomic dysfunction and they'll have a lot of difficulty with temperature hormesis.

So they'll have to come at this very, very slowly. And as they heal and recover, lower their inflammation, 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 in 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. 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, 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. And for years when I was an athlete, because 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? 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 recovery before they can go back to that stress again. So many of my patients, 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. Interesting. Now, Terry, you know, 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? Well, you know, my trigeminal neuralgia began during medical school. And yet looking back, you know, I grew up on a farm, physically very active, lots of vitamin D, probably really a very good diet. 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, you know, that was during my clinical practice. 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 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 mess? It's interesting during college, I've learned how to do transcendental

meditation and during medical school, I quit that. 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. It was not until, you know, I was as in the wheelchair i went back to reading the basic science as working on my diet again discovered functional medicine uh and then it's like you know i gotta do everything and that's when i went back to meditation i thoughtfully redesigned my paleo diet um 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. Then I'll do my exercise. Then I do my sauna. Then I do my cold shower. And that routine. In the morning. 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. And then in the evening, most evenings, I will, again, do a round of meditation uh and a uh ice bath oh really and you know sometimes you don't do a hot bath first you do the ice bath i just do an ice bath and that's brave i like to do a sauna first yeah and sometimes saunas uh they're really very nice but you know the reason i 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 set my timer and I read for 20

minutes. 20 minutes, but not like ice bath. So when you 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 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 so do you do you use the wim hop breathing method how do you get ready for going yeah yeah i'll do yeah a cycle of uh the deep breathing and I just get in it 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, then I'm going to try that. Maybe I'm going to try. 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, you know, I quit, but, you know, the quality of my sleep is so much better when I do the cold bath, the ice bath.

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