The Highwire with Del Bigtree - ENVIRONMENTAL MEDICINE WITH BARRY SMELTZER

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

Holistic practitioner, Barry Smeltzer, MPAS, PA-C, FAAEM, discusses his journey from conventional medicine after healing his son from autism with the help of his wife using alternative treatments. Hear about his Holistic Medical Clinic, Healing Provisions, and the upcoming annual conference with the American Academy of Environmental Medicine in San Antonio.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

I've always had a real need to help people. I thrive being in that position of making people feel better. I was drawn to medicine and that set the course for the rest of my life. I graduated from what was called Finch University Chicago Medical School back in 2002. I ended up finishing and getting my degree in athletic training but had no urge to actually do that work because I was falling in love with the medicine side. I worked with one of the top surgeons in Chicago at the top orthopedic practice doing hip and knee replacements. I was treating it very conventionally, had no real understanding of any other way to address health. I'm also the

father of six, my proudest accomplishment. When we had our third son, Nick, he just started out beautifully. We were very mainstream at the time, so we were very mainstream at the time, so we We followed doctors orders. And as Nick started getting more of the mainstream interventions, like his on-scheduled vaccines, my wife started to delay them because he was having more and more reactions with each one. Until at, I want to say, between 18 to 20 months, he had a vaccine injury and started losing all of his skills, all of his development. I always feel like when I talk about that, though I should have my wife sitting here.

because it was truly her passion that healed him. I can't deny it. I don't even tell my patients. I'm like, no, I didn't heal my son. My wife healed my son. I was there to explain to her why I was working. That was the light bulb for me. Everything I had learned in medicine

now is becoming into question. I had to change not only our lifestyle, I had to change my career, I had to figure out what was going on. And as we continued and as we started getting him better, then yeah, I caught up. And that set the course for the rest of my life. I ended up interviewing in San Antonio with a Dr. Donald Sprague. And he was the medical director of a hyperbaric facility.

He and I had multiple conversations about not only my own family's health, but health of the children of this generation. and how it was one of the sickest generations that has ever been. It really came to me that I need to start up a new practice. I needed to do something in this field. At first, we just started seeing kids on the spectrum and helping them both from a immune, from a gut perspective, helping them get their toxicity out, trying to heal things, especially if they were vaccine injured,

really focusing on the immune dysregulation, But what ended up evolving was a lot of the children we were seeing, especially the parents, started waving their hands saying, you know, do you see adults? Environmental medicine, or as now it's popularly called functional medicine, has evolved. It has now become something where, in my opinion, it is the cutting edge of medicine. Forever, we have been waiting for people to get sick to the point where now it's literally sick care. And we really don't do a whole lot to keep people well in medicine. My goal for all of my patients and my families is to educate them to such a degree they graduate out.

I tell them this is the college of your family. This is the college of your health. It's not about me giving you the pill and you just going and taking it and be on your merry way. This is interactive. And if you truly believe that you can manage and you can live your life in a way, that prevents disease, then we can be partners. Environmental medicine truly is the way forward. Well, as the co-executive director of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine,

it's my honor and pleasure to be joined by Dr. Berry right now. Yes, it's nice to see you, Del. It's good to see you too, and, you know, I've known you for some time when I was traveling around with VACS is when we sort of first got involved, and I've watched you just get deeper and deeper into the exploration of dealing with autoimmune disease and issues and environmental toxicity. Some of them were doing to ourselves on vaccines. One of the biggest questions we get is, what do I do now? Right?

So we have millions of people that are now watching the high wire. And one of the issues is we lay out all the problems with mainstream medicine. You woke up to it. But where do they go? Where do we go now? It's a great question. that was the question that I had. Yeah.

When we were trying to figure out what was going on with our son was, what do we do? How do we get this addressed more than just a symptomatic treatment? And that's where I started investigating and started looking into different types of medicine and had some amazing mentors. And that's when I got introduced to this environmental medicine model and saw the American Academy of Environmental Medicine was actually teaching these things, talking about all the stuff that you've been talking about, toxicity, the different types of autoimmune reactivity, the actual exposure side of this, it was actually showing, okay, well, what do we do about

it? This academy, which I became a fellow in, has been addressing this since 1965. They've been doing this for such a long time. They've been at this type of finding that root cause. And as a lot of us say, they were kind of the original functional medicine. What does that term mean? I hear this term, right? First there's alternative medicine, alternative healing practices.

we think about like chiropractors and homeopathy, naturopathy, things like that. But this term, then there's environmentalism, but functional medicine. Like, I'm hearing it a lot. What does that actually mean? It's a, it's a kind of a catch-all term. Okay. What, you started off, you were right, it started off as alternative. And then it kind of became integrative. Okay, right, integrated medicine.

And then it started to become more, this. There was an academy called the Institute of Functional Medicine, and that kind of encompassed a lot of what the alternative practitioners were doing. So into trying to create some type of conformity, I think a lot of practitioners just started to state like, what are you? And they say, well, I'm a functional medicine practitioner. I actually like stating my specialty as environmental medicine. Okay.

Because environmental medicine takes functional medicine to another level. I always call it functional medicine 2.0. Because instead of just saying, you know, we want to make sure we're eating the right foods, we're drinking, you know, good clean water, we want to detoxify from chronic inflammation, we want to make sure that our hormones are balanced. What environmental medicine does is actually look at what exposures have you had, not now, not yesterday, but over the span of your lifetime that has built up, built up over time, we call the total bucket theory.

Okay. And all of those exposures, not just environmental though. Right. You have to think about it. We have stress. We have infection. We have allergens. We have sensitivities.

Well, they all go into that same bucket. And all of that then lends to that bucket filling up. When that bucket hits its top, the next thing that goes in spills the bucket. That's symptoms. Symptoms then is where mainstream medicine starts. It just says it just looks at that last thing that hit you. Correct. It tries to make that all the reason with what's going on with you.

Okay. And that is where the last three years has turned this into this nightmare of autoimmune inflammation. Right. Because what else has happened over these last three years? Well, we had the panic. Right. We had the fear mongering. We had the virus that we don't know where that, you know, we don't know where that origin really was.

We know it's not natural. Right. So all of that increased. And I think about it, I mean, you make such a good point because even though, you know, I think a lot of people watching this show probably are, you know, a little bit further down the road and using natural remedies, but how much rage were we all carrying every time we had to put on it? I know I did. Like I put on that mask on the plane just so I could get out to speak to the people out there and meet them and talk about what I want to talk to.

But the internal, like, rage over the fact that I'm doing something, I absolutely know it doesn't work. And then to have someone condescending towards you as you're an idiot when you're not wearing it. Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, that stress was real. It was real. It was real. And it was unhealthy, I'm sure.

But it was different than people that were believing in the masks. Right. They were scared because of the invisible invader that was anybody could spread to them. Right. So they were coming in with all sorts of levels of anxiety. And that's something that shifted, even my practice, which, sees a lot of kids. Okay.

And kids, think of the lockdowns. They weren't in school. They weren't, you know, able to. What are you seeing? I mean, you know, we don't get to talk to a lot of practitioners that deal with children. I see we've reported on a lot of these studies. Education is down. Huge reports coming out just this week on drop in math scores and not even proficient now in

reading in math in cities and counties all across America. but in your practice, and honestly, it's in Texas. So, I mean, I would say probably less hit by this thing than most states. Are you seeing, what are you seeing the children? I'm seeing everything from kids that were perfectly normal in 2019 to after the lockdown and they ended up having to go to school, now so riddled with anxiety that they can't make it through a day of school. Wow.

I'm also seeing kids that either got infected with the virus or got the vaccine and getting an autoimmune inflammatory reaction to it to where not only are they having you know adequate spike protein antibodies but instead of it being in the hundreds or two hundreds we were seeing it in the tens and 20 thousands so the body is just way over way overreacting to it when this is for that that population was they were the front line Yeah. Their innate immune system was taking care of it before it even needed to get to the antibody level. Right.

But I also was seeing a lot of autoimmune allergy type of reactivity. In other words, the term is molecular mimicry. Okay. And what that is, is the body then, once it starts to get the inability to regulate its immune response because of all the things that are coming in that are so foreign. Yeah. Remember, we just talked about Florida. Yeah.

I can tell you about 15 other chemicals like MTBE, ETBE, we can talk about perchlorate, we can talk about glyphosate, all of that getting into your system, everyone is, well, it's not a big deal. It is to your immune system. These are all the little hits that when you have a big hit like the stress of coronavirus, the different viruses that are not natural, that then turns their immune system again. against them. And what happens then is even their own metabolites from like their bacteria in their gut starts triggering inflammatory responses that not only goes to their body but in

their brain. I was seeing a spike, incredible spike in Pans and PANDAS cases, which is pediatric, autoimmune, neuropsychiatric syndrome. Let's talk about that. That's not, that's something that we've only touched on a little bit. So what is PANS? How is it triggered? PANS is a neuropsychiatric disorder. Okay? That's what the official diagnosis of.

The caveat to it is it's one of the few neuropsychiatric disorders that they actually connect to an infection or something that triggers a, should be a fever response. Okay. It used to be called PANDAS because it was associated with strep. Okay. So people would have strep throat. And then all sudden, they would have massive OCD.

They would have... So having had an infection starts causing... Neuropsychiatric syndrome. Neuro psychiatric. Okay, got it. So they were having all of these different psychiatric symptoms from an infection. Well, what they weren't having was a fever. Got it. That's the molecular mimicry.

What should have triggered a fever ended up triggering neuroinflammation. So the body didn't go through the natural process. of burning it out, getting it out, it sort of harbored it and it finds itself in all sorts of other issues. So then, even after the exon infection, just really quickly, one of the things I find shocking is how often this is something my mom was always really against. My mom told me, when I started having kids, I never gave you guys aspirin or Tylenol or anything like that. Let the fever ride. It's your body working out. Do you think any of this is when parents just stop that fever and then keep it from happening? It contributes.

Okay. I don't think it's the primary cause. I think the primary cause is the bucket theory. That is, there's so many exposures now. I mean, think about it when we were kids. You know? What? Organic food was called what?

Food. Right. Our water wasn't fluoridated. Our bodies were able to handle the exposures that we had because it wasn't so many. Right. You know, we were able to drink from water hoses. We were able to make... mud pies and our bodies were fine. Now these kids go outside they can't even they

can't go to school with a peanuts and they can't be given anything at the schools because some kids are gonna have an anaphylactic allergy to it. That didn't happen when we were kids. So there is, I wonder that too even in this vaccine space. I mean I will always think vaccines ended up didn't they didn't live up to what I think that everyone had hoped but certainly if you gave several 72 vaccines are someone that lived 200 years ago that's working on a farm was breathing perfectly clean air and drinking in a spring water and just had this healthy lifestyle in that case it'd be an empty bucket with those 72 toxic vaccines not be causing autism or all the I mean certainly I would imagine a lot less but what we're doing is we're already as we see it

babies being born mothers have umbilical cords with over I think two hundred and seventy eight chemicals before even on this planet high in mercury high in aluminum when they're tested. What happens if you just give them one more hit in the, you know. And so, all right, let's get to what do you do then, all right? So we get that there's a problem. What is a functional medicine doctor, environmental doctor like yourself? What is the approach that's different? Obviously, I know that mainstream medicine is just going to treat that symptom.

Probably give you a drug to just suppress that symptom and say, you'll be fine, get back on the field. In many ways, people describe Western medicine to me. One of the best descriptions I heard is it's war medicine, it's triage medicine. And it's designed to get you out to fight another day. It's not actually designed to help you. We don't care, we just need you back on your gun and firing away. That's a great analogy.

The biggest difference is the bucket theory, okay? Once that bucket's full and you spill over and you have symptoms, whether you're ill or you have chronic inflammation or you have brain fog or you have joint pain or anything like that, when you go to that mainstream doctor, they're gonna treat that one specific spillover. They're not even touching the bucket.

Right. Okay. Environmental medicine, functional medicine, what we're doing is saying, why is the bucket so damnful? Right. So we're going backwards and we're taking a thorough history saying, you know, where are you living? You know, what kind of exposures could you have had there? Could you have had mold in your home? Could you have, you know, was your neighbor spraying gobs of pesticides or were you spraying pesticides because you didn't know?

Right. Were you drinking water that was horribly polluted? You know, are you eating food that really isn't food? Those are all things that fill that bucket. Plus, in that history, we talk about past exposures. You know, a lot of people don't realize that someplace that they were at, whether it was stressful or it was, you know, toxic that they didn't know or they were you know under trauma. Trauma's a very underrated cause of chronic illness. Any of those factors fill that bucket. Well that's just the history.

Right. Then we say okay it seems like you may have gut issues because you're just not even eating real food. You poop once a you know every three days and it's you know you're distended. So we have all these signs. So instead of just saying, let's give you a laxative to fix the symptom, we say, why are you not digesting your food appropriately? What's going on with that? So then we start to say, let's ask better questions. Better questions would be what in the process, in the system that God made perfectly is not going right. So let's start looking at that.

Is it the 80% that's our body? Is it, are we not chewing well? Is it stomach acid? Is it the pancreas and liver enzymes not doing their thing? Is it going to go through all that? But 90% of the time, probably 95% of the time, it's not us. It's the last 20% of digestion. That's not us.

It's all bacteria. Well, microbiome medicine is in its infancy. But we are seeing tons of correlations to chronic illness simply because we don't have the right balance, the right abundance of different flora that actually allows us to absorb the food that we're eating. Right. You know, we think we eat 2,500 calories. We're absorbing 2,500 calories. No. You don't know what you're absorbing because it's an open tube from here all the way to the other end.

So if that's the case, we get into this. economics of energy, which is how much energy are you making to match your demand? And if you can't match that demand, you drop them below, you're not repairing anything. In fact, you're using your adrenals to actually get the body to get through its day. So how many people are dealing with stress, they just feel stressed every day? And then once your adrenals are burnt out. You're on your stress, as you're saying, you're running on adrenaline, you're staying stressed because it's the only way you have energy because otherwise you're going to fall asleep. But they don't know that.

Right. They don't know that because they don't realize their efficiency of absorption has gone to crap. Why? Because they think they're eating 2,500 calories or 3,000 calories, and they're only absorbing 2,000 or 1,500, and they're wondering why they're tired. Right. Their battery life is 50%. So you're looking at all these things. We asked you to sort of bring in sort of a top five, you know, list.

Let's take a look at this and you can sort of talk us through it. Barry's top five health tips for those of you out there that maybe this be new to thinking. Know what's in your water. Perfect for today. I don't know if you were going to be talking about fluoride. Know what's in your food. Get a nature therapy, increase vitamin D. I do a lot more time in the sun after COVID, realizing how important that was.

Decreased inflammation. Get nature therapy. What do you mean by that? It's a great thought. process. It's actually a philosophy. What it is is we are beings that should be in nature. We are beings that should be connecting to the earth. You know, you've talked a lot about grounding. Yeah. Well, what we also don't realize is that there's a, there's a higher percentage of oxygen in a forest. Why? Because you have all the plants. You have all the trees. Right. But also,

the noise. The being in that environment, also gets you off your phone, as my wife might call the dumbbox. Yeah. You know, it starts to slow down, which actually turns on your parasympathetic nervous system. So many of us are stuck in that fight or flight that we don't slow down and actually reconnect to nature. Yeah. You don't have to go to a forest.

You can just get to a place where you can be in a, like a path or a hiking trail, or if you don't have any of that, even just take a walk. Yeah. get out. It's also exercise, which is also very important. But it's a catch-all term. Yeah. That really means reconnect with the earth, reconnect with nature. But that also then gives you an appreciation of all things that aren't natural. Right. Like our plastics, you know, preservatives, dyes, MSG, all those things that you're like,

well, I don't see an MSG tree. Right. see red dye number 40 in this plant that's beautiful. Yeah, that's one of the things. I mean, I have been walking more. My wife and I are trying to get out more, because one of the things, you know, when I talk to friends, I'm lucky I know a lot of berry smelters and they're like,

hell, are you walking? Like, you look like you could just like, you know, we see all the work you're doing out there. It's really awesome, but you're, if you're stressed all the time, best thing take your shoes off or at least get out. And it really is amazing how therapeutic that is. Yeah. is something that I'm really focused on now.

Lately, I'm sort of obsessed with this idea of seed oils all over everything. And that's even like the gluten-free crackers. I'm like, man, I can't even eat those. So you have the crackers at things out the door. Look, you have a conference coming up to really help people understand all the different things that they can do. This is a conference that is by the American Academy of Environmental Medicine? Correct.

And normally this is a conference that would be just for other practitioners. You guys are telling me about you're opening it up to regular people now. One of the things we've learned over the last three years is that we only have so many practitioners that are doing environmental medicine and the demand is way outstripping our supply. And one of the things that we see all the time is we have patients, we have public, people that are dying for this information and they just don't feel like they have any access to going to a place that they can have community. Right. They can talk to people who get it. They can listen to speakers that not only are educational but inspirational. And so what we focused on in this conference, it's going to be November 3rd through the 5th.

Good. Here we go, folks. New Challenge of Environmental Medicine. There it is AEEM online.org. You got the rest of that. Again, this will also be, if you're on our newsletter, we're going to make sure you have this. this November 2nd to the 5th in San Antonio, Texas. Here's the thing.

Yeah. So wanted to announce on the high wire today that we want this to be like a three-day retreat for your listeners, for the public, because these people need a break. Yeah. The conference itself is at the number one resort in Texas. It's San Antonio. All right. Okay.

What we did with that code that they are choose, if they register with that code, if they stay at the actual resort, their registration is covered. Wow. It's included. So that's our gift to the public that we want you to join us. Fantastic. So we want them to come and experience not only the most beautiful resort in Texas, but also the community. amazing speakers like Dr. Peter McCullough who we've had on. Great. We have Dr. Neil Nathan, we have Dr. Joe Lodipo, the Florida Surgeon General.

Yeah. We have some of the superstars of the hot wire. Absolutely. And so they're gonna be there and these are people that not only are going to be there to speak but they're gonna be there to chat with these people because they're passionate. Yeah. I mean I've had multiple conversations with Dr. McCullough. He is not a person that he won't talk to. Yeah. And so just having that kind of community is so inspirational to so many. And we wanted to bring that to not just our practitioners. We felt that the biggest change that we've seen in these last three years is we're all in this together. Absolutely. Finding community is such a huge part of that, getting some tools,

realizing how easy it is to start making shifts in your life. Yeah. But you've got to know you're doing. Barry, I really love the work that you're doing. We've worked some together. We have. Appreciate for some of the things that you've done for me and now you're offering to the world. So thank you for taking the time. Yes, sir. Telling us all about it. Thank you for your chance to put me on and allowing me to talk about what we do because it really does fit this program specifically because you've had the legal side of toxicity. You had the research side of toxicity. Now you get the treatment side. Yeah. And actually being in a place where people can get better. You know, like I said, sick care is the old school method. I agree. Well care prevention is the

key to health. And if we don't understand specifically what our bodies are doing, we'll never be able to stay ahead of all the exposures that are going to fill that bucket and spill us over. We're going to find ourselves going into these death centers now of hospitals and all that is sick and corrupt about them because we didn't take care of ourselves. So it's really a huge benefit that you're talking about there.