The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Our Neglected Lymph System Is A Key To Optimal Health with Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Gerald Lemole

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, BiOptimizers, and InsideTracker. The lymphatic system is a critically foundational system in helping us feel well and age better. It’s actually part of both our circulatory and immune systems, responsible for fluid regulation, cellular clean-up, detoxification, and more.  I’m excited to talk more about this with Drs. Mehmet Oz and Gerald Lemole. Dr. Oz has won ten Daytime Emmy® Awards for The Dr. Oz Show and is an Attending Physician at NY Presbyterian-Columbia Medical Center. He is also the proud author of eight New York Times bestsellers including his most recent, Food Can Fix It.   Dr. Gerald Lemole is a board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon and integrative physician. He served as chief of cardiovascular surgery at Christiana Care Health Services from 1986 to 2006 and subsequently served as the Medical Director for the Center of Integrative Health at the Preventive Medicine and Rehabilitation Institute. His latest book Lymph & Longevity: The Untapped Secret to Health was just released. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, BiOptimizers, and InsideTracker. Rupa Health is a place for Functional Medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. You can check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account here.  You can try BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough for 10% off with the code HYMAN10 here. For a limited time, BiOptimizers is also giving away free bottles of their bestselling products P3OM and Masszymes with select purchases.    If you’re curious about getting your own health program dialed-in to your unique needs, check out InsideTracker and get 25% off here.   Here are more of the details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version):  Discovering the importance of the lymphatic system (6:11 / 2:47) The role of the lymphatic system and how you can support it (11:43 / 8:29) Scientific research on the lymph system (16:34 / 13:11) Puffiness, inflammation, and poor function of the lymph system (20:31 / 17:04) Understanding the lymph system through a Traditional Chinese Medicine perspective (29:11 / 23:56) Creating health using the wisdom of Traditional Chinese Medicine (34:36 / 29:39) Foods and lifestyle practices to optimize and enhance the lymphatic system (42:07 / 36:54) The connection between fatigue and lymph flow (50:50 / 45:36) Supplements to support the lymphatic system (58:57 / 53:44) What your tongue can reveal about your overall health and other learnings from Traditional Chinese Medicine (1:00:48 / 56:32)   Get Dr. Lemole’s book, Lymph & Longevity: The Untapped Secret to Health here. Get Dr. Oz’s book, Yin Yang You: Biohacking With Ancient Codes here.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. There are clearly connections within parts of our body that we don't understand with the traditional Western model that you and I, all three of us, participated in. Doesn't mean they're not right. We haven't discovered them yet. We will one day, but why wait? Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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slash Hyman 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, and that's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And we're going to have a very interesting conversation today with two renowned cardiovascular surgeons, both friends of mine, people I've admired a long time and have been part of my larger medical and social family, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who almost needs no introduction, and Dr. Gerald Lemuel, who's actually his father-in-law, but also an incredible doctor. And actually, you know, it was part of the

reason Dr. Oz is Dr. Oz, I just have to say, because he originally was interested in functional and integrative medicine and got Mehmet thinking about it, right? 100%. So for those of you who don't know Dr. Oz, he's Dr. Oz. He won 10 Emmy Awards for his Dr. Oz show. I've been on many times, and he's an attending physician at New York Presbyterian Columbia Medical Center. He went to Harvard, got his MBA and MD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Wharton. He was obviously on the Oprah Winfrey Show, has won innumerable awards.

His last book, Food Can Fix It, was an amazing New York Times bestseller, and he's got a new one out we're going to talk about in a minute. He has been listed as one of the 100 most influential people by Time Magazine, and Esquire Magazine named him 75 most influential people of the 21st century. He's just an awesome dude. And I love him. And he's helped me and really inspired me in so many ways. And Dr. Gerald Amol is also a cardiovascular surgeon and integrated physician.

He was the chief of cardiovascular surgery at Christiana Healthcare Services from 1986 to 2006 and medical director for the Center for Integrative Health and Preventive Medicine and Rehabilitation Institute. And he's just done so many amazing things, including being a member of the surgical team that performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States. That's a big deal. He's a professor of surgery and just written hundreds of articles and written many books. In his latest book, Lymph and Longevity, The Untapped Secret to Health was just released. We're going to talk

about that. So welcome, Dr. Doctor. Thank you. Thanks. Well, welcome, doctor. This is such a treat. This is such a treat for me because, you know, you've had me on your show so many times and helped me so much. And I'm just so grateful to have you on my show. And thank you. So let's start with lymph and longevity. First of all, lymph is something that people barely understand, including most doctors. We don't really have a lymphologist as a specialty. And you have come upon the lymph system as one of those critically foundational systems that has to function in order for us to be healthy. And when it's not, we age quickly. So, Dr. Lamont, tell us about how you came to understand that this is true, that it's not just about our cardiovascular system or neurologic system or musculoskeletal system,

that there's this whole other system in there that's pretty much ignored and we don't really have a lot of treatments for, but that actually responds to a lot of things that you talk about in your book that are available to everybody. So tell us, you know, how did we sort of miss this and why were you interested in the lymph system and how it impacts every aspect of our health? I mean, you've called it the secret river of health. What do you mean? Well, you know, when we were doing the heart transplants back, way back when then, I was involved in the first five and they became very personal friends because we stayed with them for months. We didn't know what the heck was going to, what to expect, what what was going on so within a short period

of time we had given these people good healthy hearts with wonderful blood vessels and within a short period a year or two year and a half they developed all died from galloping atherosclerosis their vessels had turned to to 90 year old vessels. And it was not only a professional failure, but a personal loss. And so it always stayed in the back of my mind. And when I left Houston, I was chief at Temple University School of Medicine. And we had a professor of pathology there, Betty Lausch, who was interested in foam cells. So we got together and did a project on rhesus monkeys. We ligated their lymphatics from their heart.

And sure enough, they developed early atherosclerosis. So I always kept this in the back of my mind. And I'd observe when we did coronary bypasses, we'd have sclerotic little white vessels following along the veins. And so I'd biopsy them, and they were sclerotic little white vessels following along the veins. And so I biopsied them and they were sclerotic lymph vessels and they were not there in the aortic valve or the mitral valve with no coronary disease. So, but it's so hard to measure the lymphatics. You can't measure a level of something or it's a low pressure system. You can't, it's very difficult. So consequently,

for many years, you know, nobody really did a whole lot. And up until the last 10 years or so, there was nothing really said about the lymphatics. But we – in 1981, I wrote a paper. I figured the best paper I knew was the sciatothoracic surgeons. I should have been in some other journal because the surgeons weren't too interested. But we showed that there was reverse cholesterol transport, the relationship with the lymphatics was important. And that's how the actual cholesterol got out of the arterial wall into the venous system to the liver by way of the lymphatics. And that was 40 years ago. So your blood circulation and your lymph circulation are connected

and they're interacting and moving things around like cholesterol all the time. And if one's not working, the whole system kind of breaks down. The whole beauty of the lymphatic system is that it is responsible for re-regulating our fluids because we lose about 10 or 15% of our fluid outside our vascular system into our interstitial or this tissue between the cells. So we have to get that back in. The lymphatics are responsible for getting it back in. The lymphatics are responsible for getting every fat molecule back into the system. They're responsible for getting large proteins. Things like, you know, when you have a leaky gut

and you have, say, casein or gliadin, the only way it can get away from the sampling mucosa is to go through the lymphatics and get tested by a dendritic cell to see if it's good, bad, or ugly, you know? And that's what it's all about. And if we don't have the lymphatic system, it just doesn't happen. Well, so essentially what you're saying is when you have all these molecules that run around your blood and then they go out in your tissues and your body has to clean it up and then it has to check that if it's okay or not. Exactly. And it gets back into your lymph system and your blood system, then you can kind of regulate it. So it's very difficult to measure anything

because it's a very low-pressure system. So we can't measure like the arterial wall pressure or the lymphatic pressure. The flow depends completely on the motion of exercise, what your muscles are doing, squeezing them, the arterial pulsation, and its own innate pulsations. It has its own pulsation, it has smooth muscle in it, it has sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves. So it sends signals all throughout the body to have a general inflammatory response. And then the important thing, it has to shut off that inflammatory response. And if it doesn't shut it off, you get autoimmune or chronic inflammation.

And that's what we're facing in a pandemic now. Yeah, I want to get more into its functions. But for those of you who don't know what it is, I'd love, Jerry, for you to explain, you know, what is actually the lymph system? Where is it? How do we find it? What does it look like? What does it do? Give us sort of a background, because I think most people understand it. It's, you know, you have a liver and a kidney and a brain, but like, where is the lymph system that's exactly that was the problem in the in fact that it really deserves it's a system that deserves but it's always used as an appendage to something it says oh the lymphatics are with cancer they think a lot of people that it gets attracts attention because of the cancer but it's it's a system of its own that usually lies between the artery and the vein. The lymph channel does. But when we were in medical school, we didn't talk about the lymphatic.

We talked about nerve artery vein. That was the neurovascular bundle. But the lymphatics are in there, and if they go into spasm, they are not clearing the toxins. They're not sending the messages of the immune system. They're not getting the signals of protein and fat that will send messages out to the body. And then the messages aren't going back that shut off, you know, that shut off the inflammatory response, the beginning of the response you want, it's an acute inflammation is a good thing. It kills everything inside. It also attacks, you know, the normal tissue as it's getting rid of the toxins. But at some point, we have to send

in cells and proteins to come in and stop that inflammation. And if it's delayed, there's more damage in the area. So everything that causes it to delay is caused by the lymphatic system not either being stagnant, not getting good water supply, not being pulsatile, being dilated or being constricted. For example, if you smoke cigarettes, you will get sclerosis of the lymphatic systems and cortisol release does it and adrenal release does it. So over the long haul, that's why stress creates problems. And what's interesting to me is we always say when we do these studies, you say, oh, look, people do better if they exercise.

They do better if they have stress management. They do better if they eat a lot of vegetables and fruits. Point of fact is all those three things increase lymphatic flow. The exercise goes through the thoracic duct, and you breathe, the diaphragm sweeps it up. It's got one-way valves, and it makes the fluid go into the venous system and to the liver. Polyphenols and flavonoids are strong lymphogobes.

I mean, they suppress inflammatory markers. They do wonderful things, and that's why we know that vegetarian type plant-based diet is helpful. And the same way with stress modification. If you're relaxing your body, you're not secreting the hormones that will cause sclerosis of the lymphatic vessels. So it's interesting to me that all the three things that increase lymphatic flow are things that will help every chronic degenerative disease. Yeah. But it gives you an understanding. And if you get that understanding, you'll be more apt to do what you're supposed to do.

Because it's not a mystery then why does this happen when because you can explain what happens with lymphatic flow when you do these things well so what you're saying is really striking that there's this system in the body that's been mostly neglected by medicine that is incredibly important for almost every function of the body that's our waste disposal system. That's our part of our immune system. That's part of our cholesterol transport system that samples everything from the environment that we need to manage and determine if it's us or something else. And that there's no way to measure easily. There's no test really we can do to see

how it's working. But from the science, we know how much it can be damaged by our lifestyle and by our diet and by smoking and by stress and all these things that we don't really think about are related to our lymph system. I mean, we know if someone gets cancer and they have surgery and their lymph is taken out, they get the swelling and the big edema and it's kind of nasty or there's this thing called lymphedema where you can't clear all that. But most of us really never really thought much about the lymph system other than, okay, well, we have one, and maybe we should be getting a massage once in a while.

But what have you seen directly from the science that says that the lymph system is actually helping to prevent all these chronic diseases? Because it's not something that I think most people know. This book is really radical because nobody's really written a book about this before. And I've looked for this information because I've been really interested in how, I mean, I was working on a book on food

and trying to see how foods influence the lymph system. And it was really hard to kind of come up with a lot of information. So you're really uncovering a treasure trove of wisdom about how to care for our bodies in a new way that allows us to actually activate and heal our lymph system to create health and longevity. Well, what I did was, you know, I recognized that the chronic degenerative diseases that we're most fearful of,

for example, cardiac or cancer or neurologic diseases, all had a basis in the lymphatics. And going through the researching the literature, I'm talking about the PubMed and the medical literature is very clear, at least in the research areas in the arenas, that you can create lymphatic spasm by oxidative stress. There's a paper like in 2014 by Taggart and New England Journal that showed that what happens to the macrophage can actually carry cholesterol through the arterial wall. And when they get stressed with oxidative stress, the cytoskeleton of the macrophage actually freezes. And the way you can, so the way it used to sneak through was being very plastic and could work its way through the wall. But when it gets its cytoskeleton frozen by oxidative stress,

it can't go anywhere and it just causes more inflammation in that tissue. What can obviate that is NAC. And it gets rid of that and they show, at least in the research, that these macrophages start moving again. And the literature, the research literature is replete with not, these are researchers, not clinicians. And so consequently, the next move has to be to move it from the research area into the clinical world. And the same thing with inflammatory bowel disease. They've shown, the University of Washington has shown that actually there's lymphatic obstruction of the lymph channels coming from the colon or the gut that are blocked. And they actually can see that on the studies.

And so it's getting into, you know, our world, but it's still not there yet because it's hard to measure. It's a low-pressure system, and you can change it with many things. Same way with the lymphatics and the fat cells. And the adipose tissue is now an endocrine tissue, and it works very, very closely in relation to the fat tissue, to the lymphatic tissue. And in the research labs, they found that a diabetic mice, for example, you can get 130 times the amount of leakage in

the lymphatic system. And how do you get a big gut and a big belly? You get porous lymphatics and the triglycerides and the IgA and all the fat and stuff, instead of going where it should be processed, goes into the fat and stays there and compresses the lymphatics and compresses it and creates a situation where you have bad hormones come out of the fat because they're in a chronic stage. So what you're saying is super interesting because, you know, clinically we see people who are puffy, right? They feel them. They're like puffy and they have fluid retention and they have puffy faces and it's inflammation. But what we're really seeing is an example of

how the limb system isn't properly working to clear all the fluid in the tissues. Is that right? That's exactly right. And once you get that concept, once you think about that in that way, you can't go back to the other way and say, well, what is it causing it? It becomes clear then you say, well, it's just not enough clearance of these toxins from the tissue and then not enough response. For example, what looks like in the research is these resolving and protecting the fat that's articles that show the relationship between the inflammasome and the lymphatic clearance and the resolving and protecting. That's, you know, there's articles already written on that in the medical scientific literature. So basically the system that turns on inflammation, turns off inflammation is all regulated by the lymph system. And if that's dysregulated, you get puffy and swollen

and you look in the mirror and you're like, why am I so puffy and swollen? Well, that's a big part of it. You know, I want to get into how we can help our lymph system, which nobody talks about. I'm sure you've done, Mehmet, on your show a little bit about this, but it's really a really obtuse area. What do we eat? What are the nutrients? What are the supplements? What are the lifestyle factors? I want to get into that. But before we do, I want to talk about why this is so important for longevity and why it's in the title of your book, because I want to live to be 120. I don't know what you guys are shooting for. I'm maybe going to go a little longer if I can, but if anything's working, why is the lymph system so important to longevity? Well, as you know, the longevity is related to

how much damage you do in your local tissues. I mean, basically you measure the tips of the chromosomes and you say, well, if they're short, then I've had it. And so everybody's trying to extend the chromosomes. And the point is that the best way you can avoid trauma to the tissue and like, you know, autophagy and the idea of cleaning up the tissue. We now know, and it's been shown in a lot of the journals that the dead cells don't go away. They just cause an inflammatory response. Yeah. It's up to the monocytes to come in and pick those dead cells up and take that away by way of the lymphatics. Now, if the lymphatics don't have a signal and don't present that signal to the immune system, it's not going to be able to send anything

in there. And the way they come in and out of it is through the lymphatic system. So if you keep your tissue in good shape and avoid the damaging that occurs over the years through chronic inflammation, you're going to be in good shape when it comes to 125. All right. So basically it affects everything. And so you mapped out how it affects the gut, how it affects the brain, how it affects their immune system and cancer, how it affects your heart disease risks. All of these things are things that we don't really include the lymphatic system as part of our framework for thinking about it.

But you're introducing this idea and saying we have to, right? Well, we didn't know 10 years ago that the brain had a lymphatic system. We thought we were taught all in medical school there was no lymphatic for the brain. We know now that there is a lymphatic system. It goes through the, it's called glymphatics because it includes the microglial cells. Those are the immune cells in the brain.

The immune cells in the brain. The immune cells in the brain. And they actually shrink along with the neuron cells so they can get more fluid into the interstitium. And they sweep away the beta amyloid. And it goes on the other side. It's picked up by the dural lymphatics down the deep cervical lymph channels and cleared that way. Now, if you sleep on your side, it clears better than if you sleep on your back, by the way, if you're a mouse. But there are ways, you know, there are ways that this can be ameliorated. And these are things we're just learning, you know, year by year. And the whole thing is changing. So I think that people are going to get interested in the lymph system.

But all these are interrelated. Yeah. So, you know, it reminds me when I was in Hawaii last year and I had I had moved to this house and the local garbage collectors had a rule, which they wouldn't collect your garbage unless the lid was off the garbage can. And so I had all these people over and I had so much garbage, and I put it out with the lids on, and they didn't come week after week. And it was just what happened was terrible. All the maggots came and everything started rotting and smelling.

And basically your lymph system is like the garbage man. It cleans up all the waste that's happening in your body. All the metabolic waste. Autophagy is this important idea that we self clean and we take all the old parts, we recycle them, we renew ourselves and we get rid of all the garbage. But without your functioning lymph system, you can't do that. Right? Hey everyone, 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 we have to look at how unique each body is.

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If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed into your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker. Right now they're offering my community 25% off at InsideTracker.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's Dr. Hyman. InsideTracker.com. That's I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. And you'll see the discount code in your cart. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So we're going to get into a little bit of the specifics of how do we create a healthy limb system. But Dr. Oz, I want to ask you about your book for a minute because it connects to this. And you wrote a book called Yin Yang and You, which I love the title.

Or it should be Yin Yang and You. But anyway, Yin Yang and You, if we use the right Chinese tones. And by the way, Dr. Oz once had me do a Chinese speech in Chinese to a group of Chinese doctors. It was a lot of work, but I did it because I love you. They were very impressed. I was impressed. Everyone was.

He'd broken the Mandarin by mistake. He lost himself for a moment. Well, I was pretty fluent, and then I forgot it a lot. I mean, I forgot a lot of it, but I still remember the sound of it and how to speak it and the tone. So if I can read it, it sounds like I know what I'm talking about. But then people come up to me afterwards and start being fluently talking to me, and I don't know what they're talking about.

Anyway, so Chinese medicine is a system of healing that I've studied in college, not from an academic, I mean, not from a clinical point of view, but an academic point of view. And it really has a framework for understanding all the dynamic systems of the body and how they interrelate and how they connect. And essentially what you're talking about, Dr. Lamola, is that the lymph system is this network that connects all the networks in the body. And we have to have those systems in balance and function to be healthy. So what was your insight in writing Yin Yang and You that helped you understand lymph from a Chinese medicine perspective, because you also have the sort of Western biomedical perspective and you bring

those together. I'm curious about what you thought about as you sort of learned your father-in-law's work and what you're doing. Well, the big epiphany is that we give lots of health advice and we try to explain why these bits of advice make sense using whatever biomechanical models we have, like the heart's connected to the lungs, you know, connected to your mouth and the air moves. You know, all this stuff people who are listening to this podcast know well. But they're often bits of advice that are really important where we don't truly have that depth of insight. And it turns out that the lymph system, which is a forgotten system that's vitally important to the body, is a way of explaining it. But the Chinese had their own way of explaining it, a 5,000-year-old model developed by farmers long before we had deep insights into some of the mechanical structures that we have today.

But it still seemed to work. I mean, after all, something works for 5,000 years. You weed out the bad stuff. And so in traditional Chinese medicine, they based it on five elements, basically five of everything, five seasons, you know, and the chakras would move around and end up with this wisdom. And again, just the seasons were important because they had, you know, the four seasons we know of, right? But they also had an early summer, late summer, because in the central Chinese plains where a lot of traditional Chinese medicine, the philosophy arose, there was an early dry summer and a late wet summer.

So they had five seasons. Then they had five elements, the wood, type of activity, why deep breathing or Tai Chi or any of these actions that you're recommended to do were all based on these five elements. So it's another way of envisioning the body. And I've always believed, and Mark, you've been a great guest on the show, and my goodness, you've moved a lot of books, Educating America on Basic Advice. But I believe that a lot of the advice that you and other experts give can be explained in ways that go beyond what our traditional understanding is. So actually, it gives them more credibility. And the reason we wrote the book now was based on a couple of insights. First off, 17% of Americans in Iran report, 17% of the listeners right now report excellent health. One-seventh. So 83% of us aren't really feeling like we're getting an A in the

game of life. And when you look around for reasons for that, part of it is because Western medicine is really good at some things like gunshots to the chest, right? Or, you know, doing a bypass operation, but we're not so good at some of the more chronic issues that plague people, right? Libido problems, sleep, GI problems, depression. And traditional Chinese medicine approaches actually do offer solutions because of 5,000 years of experience with those very issues. I understand the lymphatic system as part of that also opens up doors of potential treatments that might get us to where we need to be. Now, I was blessed to have an opportunity to work with the dean of the major traditional Chinese medicine institute in the world, which is Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. He's my co-author.

So that's his name is Anzhang Zhu. And Dr. Zhu, who's actually has a PhD from the United States. He trained at the University of Illinois. So he actually speaks, his English is great, but he also bridges the gap well, because he was trained in both East and the West. And I'll share an epiphany that he told me early on that I didn't think I was allowed to say, but I've gotten permission. Okay. The big question I had is where the heck is traditional Chinese medicine we've been for the last six seven decades why didn't we know more about it why is this yin yang you book the first real effort to translate it into western approaches it's not the first book of traditional Chinese medicine there were many of those but they're always written only thinking about traditional Chinese medicine and not translating it to the Western

mind in a way that could be accessible. And the reason was Mao detested traditional Chinese medicine. Mao felt it was a throwback to colonialist China. It was a remnant from the imperial age. It needed to be expunged from the history books. He wanted China being a modern country without the burden of its history. And so the Chinese went underground. Traditional Chinese medicine continued, but it was actually not endorsed in any capacity. There were no universities that were big and growing. There were no resource programs, et cetera. And China, as part of its discussions with other countries, would never bring it up. The new Premier Xi, the current leadership of China has said, you know what, we can't erase our history. We're going to embrace it. And they've allowed

traditional Chinese medicine practitioners to speak more openly, which is why this book could be written in the first place. So now we're able to go into China, provide scholarships to learn more about these approaches, do research on which ones work or not. There's a whole thing, for example, around preventive Xi, which is the this is the energy force that gives you more resistance to infections. Well, you know, we all know people get sick all the time. People never get sick. These kinds of approaches explain that. And, you know, as a student of Chinese culture, you understand why these ideas resonate. But I love the fact that it takes us into a deeper understanding that might help the 83% of Americans who want to feel better about their health. Well, that's so interesting because I

am so glad you said that. It's really about how do we create health as opposed to just treat disease? How do we create balance in all these systems? Yin-yang is a dynamic balance. That's the concept. It's not about whether you have a disease or you're not, but what's in balance or out of balance in your system. And the lymphatic system is one of those systems that's in balance or out of balance, like every other system. And I think it's such an important concept. And I actually wrote an article a bunch of years ago about how functional medicine was mirroring a lot of the ancient concepts of traditional Chinese medicine, which is systems thinking. How is everything connected? How do everything interact together? It's not just a bunch of separate organs. It's all connected.

Let me just underline that, Mark. Interestingly, traditional Chinese medicine, because it was created by farmers, is based on ecosystems, a more holistic approach. Western medicine is more of a hunter-gatherer approach. It's more like sniper shots. I'm going to shoot that cancer, right? And I'll kill it. If I miss, then I don't kill it. But in traditional Chinese medicine, you've never even talked that way. And that's actually, I think, goes back to what dad was saying about the facts. My father-in-law, I just bragged on it for one second, because one of our earliest interactions, we were playing Trivial Pursuit. You ever play that game? Yeah, yeah. All right. So I was playing Trivial Pursuit. There was a question. It was which famous interactions we were playing trivial pursuit you ever play that game yeah yeah all right so i was

playing true little pursuit there was a question it was which famous heart surgeon was called rock doc by rolling stone magazine because he was the first to play rolling rock music in the operating room uh jerry lamont jerry the mole my father loved his chip he knew the answer because he was the answer but he was always thinking out of the box. And so often in medicine, you're barely keeping up. You're trying to memorize and learn and just stay up with the professor. Dad was always willing to challenge orthodoxy and say there's something more there we're not seeing. As example, by the fact that he was failing at heart transplantation, not because of anything he did technically wrong, but because there was some unexplained

process that was closing down arteries, which by the way, if it closes down arteries and people who've had transplants with 22-year-old hearts, what's it doing to 80-year-olds? And why do the conductors never die of heart disease? It seems to me they're milking their lymphatics with their arms. That's right, the thoracic duct, right? Exactly. So all these insights start to pile up and you begin to think, well, there's more wisdom here. And this is where I'll give you just a completely out-of-the-box idea. So people are getting piercings all over the place, right? Yes.

Well, it turns out that piercings might not be the wisest thing to do in some parts of the body. So as an example, traditional Chinese medicine, you would never pierce the pinna because the pinna has very – that's the outer part of the ear. That has very specific purposes. So if you pierce the wrong part of your ear you might actually create some issues for yourself now this is again based on traditional chinese medicine if you already got the pierce don't take it out but it's a you know think about maybe maybe the the lobe of your ear is the best place to get pierced because that's okay with traditional chinese medicine and these are the kinds of insights you want to at least know about before you start doing stuff. Yeah, it's so true. I mean, I just got my anticos. I traveled to China in 1984 when it was still mouse suits and bicycles and donkey carts. And I was way in the north and

my girlfriend I was traveling with at the time had a terrible migraine. She had some really bad migraines. So I ran to find a local doctor, the Chinese doctor. I grabbed him. We rode back to the hotel in a donkey cart. He comes in. He feels her pulse. And it was extraordinary. I mean, he literally told her.

He didn't ask her any questions. He just told her everything about her, about her period, about her symptoms, about where it was, about how. I was like, whoa, like that was really mind-blowing. And then he gave her a prescription, which was a bunch of herbs. And we went to the local herbal pharmacy, we filled it all. It was, you know, roots and bark and who knows animal parts. I don't know what it was. And it tasted disgusting, but she drank it and got better. And then 10 years later, I went to, and I was like, oh, there's something here. And then I went to China after I worked in Idaho. And I had back surgery.

And I had a really bad disc problem. I had severe pain. I had constant pain for two years. And it just was miserable. And nothing really worked. And I had physical therapy. I had everything. And I was sitting in the hot tub in

the international hotel with some other foreigner. And he was talking about this Chinese doctor that he saw from the Sino-Japanese hospital who fixed his shoulder. And I'm like, oh, what's her name? And I wrote it down. I called her immediately. I went to see her. And I went three times a week to her apartment, which was in Beijing at the time. It was winter. It was cold. And, you know, she had me, it was kind of illegal to see her as a foreigner. But I kind of paid her under the table and I would lay on the floor of her Chinese apartment in my underwear, which was basically concrete with her family watching Chinese soap operas. with these glass things with hot fire in it to suck out whatever. And then she used Gua Sha, which is a scraping thing, which is scrape all of a sudden. And then she put acupuncture needles everywhere, like the ends of my toes. I mean, it was so intense.

And literally within a week, my pain after tears was gone. And within six weeks, my calf, which it was shrunken because the nerve damage, grew back. And I was like, oh, there's something here. There's definitely something here. And I think, you know, she wasn't treating a disease. She was enhancing probably lymphatic flow and blood flow and nerve conduction and all these different modalities that we don't take advantage of in traditional medicine. So it's just such a beautiful model for complementing what we do mark which the things you're describing that you had done to recover from back pain are what world-class athletes like like mike phelps did in the olympics last cycle around in order to get cupping marks lowers back

the forward to the book is written by lindsey vaughn yes i read that the best u.s female skier ever and she uses traditional chinese medicine for some of the pain from her multiple, tons of knee operations. So I think when world-class athletes are trying out new techniques, when they're using lymphatic massage, it's because they find they can run faster or jump higher or shoot better, whatever it is.

So the way we learn in Western medicine is we take a thousand per people and put them into a trial and figure out, but there's not a thousand similar people. There are all kinds of different kinds of people. Maybe that's not the right way to always figure out subtle changes when you're looking at it more of an ecosystem of, because what the Chinese traditional medicine folks are doing is preparing the

soil so you can plant the seeds. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So that, that's exactly right. And that's the whole concept of, of health creation,

which is what functional medicine is. It's not the science of diagnosing and treating disease. It's the science of creating health. And what both of you are talking about are systems of thinking, whether it's lymphatic science or whether it's traditional Chinese medicine, that aren't about treating a specific condition, but about optimizing the function of your own healing mechanisms. And that's really what has the biggest impact on creating health for people. So now I sort of want to switch to you, Jerry, because can I call you

Jerry? Yeah, please do. I mean, you're in trivial pursuit, so maybe I should call you Dr. Lamont. I never get to call him Jerry. Well, you get to call him dad, which is, you know, that's better. So tell us about what you've learned about how do we optimize our lymph system? Because it really is the key to optimal health, longevity, and feeling good. Because, by the way, when your lymph system is full of crap, you feel like crap, right? So how have you found that we can enhance our limb system? What are the dietary, nutrient, lifestyle factors and other factors that you've discovered make a big difference? Well, exercise is a big thing and it's not necessarily, you know, extreme exercise, but deep breathing, for example, walking, lifting light weights are all good exercise that will contract the muscles and pulse forward the lymphatics.

So in the exercise realm, I think it's very important with your deep breathing and with your movement of the muscles will increase lymphatic flow. The other thing is plenty of good pure water because you need, you know, there's a sal-gel system there. The lymph can turn kind of sticky like a gel, and you want to keep it pure and flowing. So plenty of good clean water as far as foods the the plants and the and the fruits i'm not saying that you have to be a vegetarian but you should have the majority thinking about plant-based you know a diet like you know i call it plant rich yeah plant rich we want to call it plant-rich. Yeah, plant-rich we want to call it. And green leafy vegetables, ginger, turmeric, spices, things like that, we'll always make.

We have a recipe guide we had made there that is all lymphatic stimulating. So you keep the polyphenols for example in olive oil polyphenols of olive oil are very important and that's one of the things that we look for in pure virgin olive oil is the polyphenols so you you have green green leafy vegetables you have herbs and spices you have onions garlic things like that will all increase lymphatic flow. And then certainly the idea of stress modification to suppress the epinephrine and things and ACTH and stuff like that, which constricts the flow. So these things in spirituality, doing yoga and meditation and things like that,

get, get the lymphatic flow going. Yoga is called like an internal massage. Yeah. The, the plans of the yoga are to increase the, the, the massage of the internal organs.

So those are the things you can do. And there's a whole, you know, we have a chapter on meditation and yoga. We have a chapter on exercise and a whole bunch of recipes that you can use. And we tasted some of them, and they're pretty good aren't they we we try yeah so i think those things that those epigenetic those are things you can do to change your gene you know change what the genes produce and and it's important to do that when things we have control of because and once we understand why we're doing it, I think we will apply it more fervently and we'll have better control of our health. Yeah. You mentioned yoga. And I think yoga is

one of those things that's sort of underappreciated for its effect on lymph flow. And I created a detox program years ago. And I work with a yoga teacher to create a lymph yoga program to actually help move lymph through the body. There's twisting, there's bending, and all the massaging you do. It's really one of the most powerful tools, I think, aside from just walking and regular exercise, but it really can be a powerful factor. And you mentioned the spices and the polyphenols. We don't use them much in this country.

It's just amazing to me. Most of our food is so awful and bland. It's flavored with salt, sugar, fat, additives, and chemicals. I just got back from Turkey, where you're from, Mehmet, and I went to the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul. It was just like an incredible kaleidoscopic bonanza of colors and spices, and I brought some of them back with me that are just used every day as part of their cuisine, and we brought some of them back with me that are just used every day as part

of their cuisine and and we don't we don't do that here but those cultures really have understood the role of these things in in our diet as as health promoting factors uh and the olive oil you mentioned you know uh i i was where your dad i guess memmet uh had an olive oil orchard and and and and i was being i was being schooleded on the ways in which you have to actually maximize the polyphenol content because most, most people, when they pick olives, they shake the tree and then it like falls to the ground and they pick them up and then they smoosh them and they get olive oil. They have them handpicked. Every olive is handpicked.

So it doesn't hit the ground and start to become acidic and loses polyphenol content. So, I mean, we have, we have such an amazing world we live in with all these tools, with all these foods, with all these spices, with all these potential therapies that we don't take advantage of that help enhance our health. And I think that if people just pay a little attention to what does mess up their limb system and what enhances their limb function,

their health and their life will be a lot better, right? Yeah. Yeah. So do you have a daily limb practice? Or how do you think about incorporating it into your life? I mean, there are so many things you have to do, right? Eat right, meditate, exercise. But how do you start to make simple changes that could help people say,

okay, I'm going to do this? Well, at my age, I'm limited to walking three miles an hour for a mile or two in the mornings, and then I lift five-pound weights just to get them so I can play golf with this guy. Otherwise, he tries to embarrass me. What do you mean? He's not competitive. Hold on a second. Let me just be clear here.

Dad is 84 years old, and for any golfers out there, he shot his age two weeks ago. Oh, wow. And that was the warm-up. The next weekend, we played, Dad and I, against my two brothers-in-law, and we beat them, which is unheard of. And Dad, as he hit the winning putt, winked at them with great joy in his eyes. So I knew that was the win.

I might achieve hitting my age when I'm maybe 140. Exactly, like most of us. I'm not very good at golf. Well, that's what I mean. Mark, can I offer, the thing is that these common ailments that you're talking about, that Dad was listening through, I mean, they exist because we don't have good solutions for them, right? So if we had a great solution for libido, and there are some pharmaceuticals, obviously, that we can start using now, especially for women, but the Chinese say, you know, goji berries, nuts, Siberian ginseng. You know, they have their game plan.

Lyche berries, which, you know, lyche, that fruit sort of reminds you of something. It looks like testicles. But things like sleep, the Chinese use congee. They use a lot of congee, which is a grain. But they also use massage. And the main tip for massage is it stimulates lymphatic flow, which dad showed and others have proven. You massage your feet, you stimulate thoracic duct lymph flow. So that's very hard to even connect those two structures. How does your feet affect lymphatic flow in your

chest? On the other hand, the Chinese do acupressure and acupuncture in the feet, and they can stimulate parts of the brain that coincide with that spot. So there are clearly connections between parts of our body that we don't understand with the traditional Western model that you and I, all three of us participated in. It doesn't mean they're not right. We haven't discovered them yet. We will one day, but why wait? No, it's so true. It's so true. I think the ways in which these ancient systems have developed models for maintaining health and optimizing health and creating health is so foreign to how the three of us were trained in medical school, which was find the disease, kill the disease, and then move on. That was it. And it's exciting that you both sort of are coming at this in a different way that help us sort of

understand a new way of dealing with some of the challenging conditions that we suffer from. And I think, you know, fatigue is another one that people have. And I think fatigue is probably really connected to limb flow because fatigue is connected to the toxic burden and to inflammation and oxidative stress. And if your lymph is not working, it's hard to function with that. And a hot bath a hot bath will also stimulate lymphatic flow most likely it also happens to be the foundation of of traditional Chinese medicine treatment of depression and fatigue so if you google right if everyone's seeing now to buy a computer google why am I it will auto complete so tired it will do it

I mean that's amazing the. The first, right. But why am I sounding a philosophical, a spiritual quest? You know, why am I will auto complete on Google? So tired. You know, because that's the one thing we search.

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, you mentioned a lot of things, Jerry, that were good, but there are a few things you didn't really talk about.

Like nutritional Chinese medicine has Tai Chi, which I think is an interesting form of exercise that I imagine because of the kinds of motions in there does move lymph around quite a bit. Well, I believe, you know, the problem is once you start thinking this way, everything is expressed in the lymphatic clearance, you know, and the fact of the matter is there's no question that Tai Chi can get us into positions like yoga does, sort of. It doesn't look like you're going to anywhere, but internally the lymphatics are being massaged and milked, and there's no obstruction to them. The other important thing is the spasm of the lymphatics is significant because with cortisol and epinephrine and stress, they go into spasm.

So consequently, nothing's going anywhere. So relaxing like in Tai Chi or yoga, it will increase the flow. Now, that's something I didn't know, that your actually lymph vessels have muscles, smooth muscles. I thought they were just passively massaged by your own muscles, by regular muscles, to get the flow back. But that's fascinating. So they're basically listening to your thoughts. They have a pair of stools. Your lymph vessels are listening to your thoughts. And if you're stressed, they're not happy.

Exactly. I mean, they have their own peristalsis. They have nerves ending sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves going into the brain and sending signals out, both protein signals and nerve signals, to instruct the of the body, whether they want to release complement or general inflammatory response from the liver. So they're in touch with all these organs. That's the beauty of the lymphatics. It's not just doing one thing and having the brain respond. And the other thing you were talking about was the skin.

There's a lot of lymphatics right in the skin and also right in the other skin we have, which is the GI epithelium, because there's more lymphatics in the GI tract than there is anywhere else in the body. There's more endocrine than there is in any other endocrine organ. There's more neural than there is in the spinal cord. So these are things that we don't recognize, but the lymph integrates that. It's leading the symphony because it does communicate with every other system, you see. That's amazing.

So you've talked about a lot of things that can really help when you eat polyphenols, a plant-rich diet, walking and exercise, yoga, stress reduction, meditation, you know, phytochemicals, all these great things. Massage. Now, I'm pretty lazy, so I actually want to ask you about a few things that I do that I think might be good.

And so what I do is I basically like to take a steam and an ice bath and I get really, really hot and then ice cold. Is that good? Yeah. Evidently the BDNF and things like that get increased, you know, when you do that. And the fact is that using a sauna, for example, will draw out toxins through your sweat. So there is, and that all comes from, you know, lymphatic cooperation with the cells to get the extra fluid to get you sweating on your skin. So it all has to be in accordance with a systematic approach to it. And massage is my other favorite thing. Oh, yeah.

I should just lay there. Tell us about the difference between regular massage and lymphatic massage. Does regular massage work, or do you have to do special lymphatic massage? What is lymphatic massage? Lymphatic massage is very light. You don't press hard like we usually do with them. And so, but it's always directed towards the heart. It's always directed upwards towards that. And, you know, when we were doing experiments years ago, we would cannulate the animal. I don't, you know, it was dog animals.

We don't do that anymore, but we used to cannulate the lymphatic duct to measure the flow. And when things slowed down, all we had to do was massage the back of the neck of the dog, and it would just increase multiple. Yeah. So we know, in fact, there are papers that show lymphatic flow with massage in animal lab scientific paper. So it's very, very productive. Now, if you just get a regular massage, does that work? Regular massage works great.

I mean, lymphatic massage, people are specialists in that. They do that, for example, things like macroglossia. When some of these kids, unfortunate kids, have enlarged tongues and stuff, they say they can help their speech by lymphatic massage, reducing the size of the tongue that is interfering with the normal speech. That's really, really impressive. So we have a whole new thing to think about. But the good news is that the things we have to do for our lymphatic system are the same things we have to do to, uh, basically treat everything else to keep our heart healthy and our brain healthy and our, our, our prevent cancer and deal with the energy and fatigue and stress. So it's really,

it's beautiful. You don't have to add a whole bunch of new things, but there are new things. What are the, what are the surprising new things in your book that people maybe haven't heard of that will, will help them to enhance the function of their limb system? Well, I think, you know, and I, Ted Spiker, the professional writer who helped, he, he kind of dumbed this down for me. I, I kind of put in words that may not be the easiest thing to read and he wrote it out nicely but yeah so the idea is that that it's important to get to get for example these inflammatory setups that that by leaving a toxin on your tissue too long not only does it it delay the healing of that, but it also prevents

the cells coming in that reparative ones too. So that what's interesting to me is that we have this inflammatory situation that can be changed by things like NAC, N-acetylcysteine, can be changed by anti-oxidative stress. So what impressed me with the research is that in fact, certain, that oxidative stress causes bad bad problems in our tissue and that certain certain supplements i want to say can help obviate that and get our tissue back to health that's great so there's things you can take also that would be helpful what are the besides n-acetylcysteine which is actually one think, one of the most important things we can do, both for just general health, for detoxification, for inflammation, oxidative stress, and even helping with COVID. What else have you found? Well, let me give you an example. Tyrostilbene.

Tyrostilbene is like resveratrol, but it's about four or five times more absorbable, and it's the stuff in the blueberries that you get, the pterostilbene. And so you can take the pterostilbene and get an antioxidative effect. You take resveratrol, quercetin, things like that. Those are all in that same polyphenols family. And then what's interesting is one of the reasons I got interested in this,

there's a chemical called daflon. It's 40 years old. It's made in France. It's made in France. It's sold for varicose veins and hemorrhoids. If you look at what it does, it does the same thing in the venous system that we need to do in the arterial system. And what is it?

This miracle drug has got diosamine and hesperidin, two flavonoids. That's all it is. They're plant compounds. They're plant compounds. Exactly. Amazing. Miracle, miracle. Well, this is incredible.

I think everybody needs to get a copy of your book, Lymph and Longevity, The Untapped Secret to Health. It's available now everywhere you get your books. And I think you will not be sorry. And I think, Mehmet, I just want to spend the last few minutes of the podcast talking about Yin, Yang, and You. Because for me, the origin of my thinking about health and disease was from studying ancient Chinese texts, the Yellow Emperor's classic, you know, internal medicine textbook of Chinese medicine that was written thousands of years ago that I read in college. And it helped me to sort of think about how diseases begin, how the body's organized in a different way. And it really, in a way, was the foundation of me leading towards functional medicine. It allowed me to actually be in Western medical school without being too brainwashed. And

I understood there was a bigger framework. So how have you sort of gotten more into this as you sort of learned about it? And what are the sort of take-homes that you want to share with people about how traditional Chinese medicine can intersect with traditional Western medicine? Well, one very visual response, and I'll show it on the screen for anyone who's watching this, but I'll send you a picture of this, but this is from a page early in the book. And you can see it's a picture of the tongue and an ear. And it's designed to show you that there's a reflection of every part of your body on the tongue and likewise on the ear. So if you go into a Chinese facility, they will have you stick your tongue out, and then they will diagnose you based on that.

And my first exposure to this, Mark, it was 1993. I was just finishing my training. No, 1992. I wasn't even done yet. I remember this because I was uncertain what I was doing. And Dad took me to China with him. Now, Dr. Lamont was an iconic figure over there because early on, he was operating at a major center in the U.S. that some of the Chinese leading physicians were allowed to go train in. And remember, this is back in the

80s when you couldn't get out of the country. So they'd all come and trained under him. So they all admired him. He treated them with respect. And they weren't doing bypass surgery at the time in China because no one had bypass disease. They were eating Chinese food that that year was free of saturated fats, not a lot of sugar. They were eating healthy meals and they were all, as you mentioned, their mouth suits, riding their bikes to work, right? Everything that you experienced in 1984, I experienced, you know, six, seven years later. And so I was sitting there and I went to a hospital that was a traditional Western hospital, but it also had an Eastern hospital element to it. And if you went in and went to the west you went to the

operating suite where i was doing teaching them bypass surgery ostensibly if you went to the eastern wing of the hospital they had thousands of people waiting in lines i mean there's more billion and a half people so everything's big but they're waiting in line you step up to the front you stick your tongue out they look at all the subtleties of your tongue is there a coating what kind of a coating is it beefy red things? Things that in the West, we look at. Is there a crack? What's the shape? Is there scalloping?

Right, all of that. All that matters. And you think about it. If everyone sticks their tongue out now and looks in the rearview mirror or the bathroom mirror, wherever you happen to be, don't stare if you're driving. But the tongue shapes are all different. And why would we ignore that as a clue? Why would you not want to take that into account when you're figuring out? So they would look at the tongue, then they'd check

your pulse. And as you know, the pulse is much different. In America, we check the pulse to see if it's regular. But we don't get into the subtleties of it too often. Sometimes in a crisis, you might look for a thready pulse or some other subtlety. But most doctors don't know anything about pulses. We're not taught it. So in China, they put three fingers on the pulse. They look at subtleties, like how fast it goes up, how fast it goes down. Is it a flat top or a pointy top? You know, all these things like a mountain range might be described by someone who knew about mountains. And so all this subtlety would come together and they'd start diagnosing how those five elements that I described to you earlier, and we walk you through this in the book in a non-intimidating way so you actually understand the philosophy of traditional chinese medicine taught by the world leaders

so that people know things really well can make can make them accessible right if you if you don't know it that well it gets confusing and that's when when people tell me oh it's confusing what you really are saying you don't really understand it all the way you know einstein didn't think physics was confusing and they're not the einste, I get it. But this stuff, if you understand it well, it becomes come alive. And so that experience, it steeled me for a lifelong interest in how the Chinese people treat their ailments amongst themselves. And I think that as we learn more about the parts of traditional Chinese medicine that can be added to Western medicine. So, again, it's not alternative, it's complementary. Use them together. You know, depending on what your problem is, you want both. I mentioned libido earlier. You know, there are medications that

can help with erectile dysfunction. There are medications that can help the female brain with libido. But a lot of times it's more subtle than that, right? And sometimes you're better off taking Tiberian ginseng and lychee nuts. And it's even richer in the GI system because there's so many unknowns in our intestinal system where there are more bacteria, there are 10 times more bacteria than cells in our body, that it makes sense that a holistic approach where you don't say, I'm going to say, pursue those 2 trillion bacteria doesn't work so well. Maybe we're better off saying the bamboo shoots or bergamot and our congee is a better sort of gentle nudge. If you need something more urgent because you have ulcerative colitis or celiac disease, well, then obviously we have more aggressive

approaches that can be used, but shouldn't we nudge first before we push? Absolutely. And, you know, there's a lot of techniques in traditional Chinese medicine from qigong and tai chi to acupuncture to gua sha to cupping to massage and obviously the herbal medicines. But, you know, what really struck me when I went there was that they really in the culture understand that food is medicine. And actually in the Chinese language to say, you know, we say I'm going to take my medicine. They don't say that. They say I'm going to take my medicine. They don't say that. They say, I'm going to eat my medicine. Chur yao. Chur yao. Chur like, chur fa means eat rice. Chur yao means eat your medicine. That's literally how they talk about it. They learn a lot from language, right? Eskimos have similar words for white. That's right. And I think what you're describing is that, you know, it's easy to dismiss, oh, this is just, you know,

a bunch of sort of pagan traditional stuff that may, you know, just may not really be that scientific. But, you know, when you see it in action and when you see the results and the outcomes, and I personally have experienced it over and over again, you can't ignore it just because we don't have, you know, a billion dollars of randomized trials on it doesn't mean it's not worth incorporating because one, it's low risk, two, it's relatively inexpensive, and three, it makes sense now given a lot of our scientific understanding about how the body is truly organized. So I'm really glad you did this and bring it to light. Your voice on this is going to be important because, you know, I think we need all the tools we can get. We are a very sick society. Like you said,

you know, what is it? 83% of Americans don't feel good. 88% of metabolic, they're unhealthy. I mean, we're 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the COVID cases and deaths. Why is that? It's because we don't know how to take care of ourselves. And both of your books are essentially roadmaps for how we engage in self-care and help create a better foundation for health, a better soil, as you said. And that's really the whole work of my life, which is functional medicine. It's clearly what you've been doing. And I think it's awesome. It's really awesome. I thank you both so much for the work you do. Any final thoughts you want to share about lymph or Chinese medicine? Well, let me commend you for stretching our brains. I appreciate you

hosting that. And I love having you on the show. And a lot of the wisdom that you've taught America, I think, has been on the cutting edge. So thanks for all that service. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And it's really good seeing you again and speaking with you. And we appreciate the time we spent. Thank you, Mark. Okay, well, absolutely. Everybody right now,

go to Amazon or your bookstore or wherever you get your books and make sure you get both of these books, Limp and Longevity, The Untapped Secret to Health, and Yin Yang and You, Biohacking with Asian Codes. They're available now. And I love the title, Biohacking with Asian Codes. That sounds so fun. I'm going to check it out. And share this podcast with everybody, because everybody needs to hear about things that they probably don't know that are going to make

their lives better. Let us know how you benefited from fixing your lymph system or Chinese medicine. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we will see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. 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. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up

for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics,

P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.

Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search

their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.