Best of: Are EMFs Making You Sick? – Environmental Sensitivities Explained with Dr. Neil Nathan

Of all the podcasts we've had so far, this has been the most listened to podcast with Dr. Neal Nathan. Some of you know him, but he is literally one of the OGs in the integrative functional medicine world. He's been practicing this kind of medicine for 50 years. He was doing Lyme disease before it was a thing 30 years ago. He's been doing, for the last 20 years, dealing with sensitive patients, which is now just getting to public consciousness. We have a great conversation about the sensitive patients, complicated patients, Why is it so hard to deal with these individuals, especially in today's healthcare system? He's a great expert. I've been going to his provider conferences for the last several years. He's a great resource, and he is probably one of the, if not the original physician in this world. When the experts get sick, they see him. So I really hope you enjoy this session, this podcast today, talking with Dr. Nathan.

Many people think there's not much difference from 4G or 5G. It's just one. You're talking about a thousandfold increase in EMF exposure from 4G to 5G, and now they're rolling out 10G. When that occurred, there was a huge upsurge of EMF sensitivity. Many of these patients were being accused of being psychological, but what they were experiencing was they're sitting at their computer like you and I are both doing right now. But if it went on for a period of time, They became brain fogged, fatigued, or developed neurological conditions like pseudo seizures or tics or a variety of things.

Welcome back once again, everybody. I'm super excited to be here today with Dr. Neal Nathan. He is a pioneer in integrative functional medicine in the world. He's been practicing for 50-plus years. And he's got a new book out, Sensitive Patients Healing Guide, which we'll be kind of diving into a little bit here. Many of you may or may not know who he is, and we'll do a brief overview of kind of who he is, where he's from, and we'll just dive into it. So Dr. Nathan's a seasoned physician with over 50 years of experience. He's board certified in family medicine, pain management, and he's a founding diplomat for the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine and the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illnesses. He's authored several influential books on chronic illnesses and mold toxicity, including Healing Is Possible, Healing Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, and Multiple Chemical Sensitivities. He also wrote the book Toxic, and his most recent book is The Sensitive Patient's Healing Guide. He's also, he's done lectures. He's been on Wellness Today. He actually, The Cutting Edge of Health and Wellness Today is a radio international program that he, he is on host as well. And this actually, your book came out this past January. So it's been, it was a great read. So I just want to hop into it. A lot of our, a lot of my people that watch me, follow me, patients, some know who you are, some of you don't. So I want to just kind of start with your story. You know, because you've been in this field for, you know, in medicine 50 years, and you've seen the progression of functional medicine, integrative medicine from, you know, little autoimmune stuff to these more complex multi-system, multi-symptom illnesses. Could you kind of walk us through your journey from family medicine, pain medicine, to what you're doing today?

Okay. How much time do you have? I'll give you the Cliff Notes version of it. When I went to medical school, I wanted to be a healer. And was more than a bit disappointed when I got to medical school and I realized they were gonna teach me to be a medical technician, a good one, but their vision of healing wasn't mine. And to be honest, this was over 50 years ago. I didn't have language to explain what did I think was missing in my education here. But over the years, I realized it was really pretty simple. There was no integration of the emotional and spiritual and energetic components to health into the model that we were being shown. And so I've spent 50-plus years trying to figure out a model that works for me and works for my patients. So I've spent, especially in the early years, I spent every cent I made going to study with any who even offered an idea that might have a healing quality to it. And I had some fabulous experiences with some really wonderful people, and I wasted some money. Oops. Of those weekends where I'm in the wrong place. This person doesn't— isn't teaching what he thinks he's teaching. So to be specific to your question, so throughout my career, I have been interested in The outliers that my colleagues didn't know what to do with. I found that a terrific place to grow from, as they challenged me. They made me dig deeper. They made me do research. They made me study harder. And so over the years, I've attracted the more complicated patients, and my colleagues were all too happy to send me their really complicated cases. And I didn't view it the way they did. For them, they were a problem, and for me, they were an opportunity to dig deeper. So as those came in through me, I began to see back in my pain clinic days, I began to see this thing called fibromyalgia that nobody knew what it was or how to understand it. And it's what medicine does with something that's new is it's in your head until we prove it otherwise. So. Those folks were referred to psychiatrists for treatment and it didn't work. It didn't do anything for them. So it was obvious to me that something else was causing that. We needed to study it. So that was in the mid-'80s. By the early '90s, we had begun to learn about things like intestinal dysbiosis and magnesium deficiencies and more complex ways of understanding hormones than most endocrinologists get into. We began to understand Lyme disease was emerging as something that was important. And as such, we were able to identify very specific causes of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and help a lot of those folks. I worked pretty closely with Jacob Teitelbaum back in those days.

Mm-hmm.

And we identified literally hundreds of specific biochemical imbalances that could trigger Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. Over time, it became clear that Lyme disease and its co-infections was a bigger piece than people realized. And mold toxicity then emerged back around 2005 when Richie Shoemaker published his, his first book, Mold Warriors. Richie was onto something. And so I, as I do, I flew down to Pocomoke, Maryland, and hung out with him for a week to study with him and figure out what he was doing. And it was obvious to me that he was identifying a big piece of the puzzle for us all.

Yep.

Historically, that's kind of how I got to where I am. And over the years, the patients that I was seeing began to be more and more sensitive. So more and more patients couldn't take the antibiotics they needed for Lyme. They couldn't take the supplements they needed to treat mold toxicity. And they'd become so sensitive that even some homeopathics couldn't be taken. They, their diet became extremely limited. They went to being able to eat a dozen fruits and couldn't do anything else. So again, I was fascinated by that and again, just wrote this book that we're gonna be talking about today, which is simply called The Sensitive Patient's Hearing Guard. Because in the last 20 years, we've learned a great deal about what makes people sensitive, and equally important, how to treat it effectively. So, that's the Cliff Notes version of how I got where I am.

Yeah. That's kind of interesting because I have had a similar journey. I've spent— I actually calculated, I've spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on my education through different organizations, and A4M, and IFM, and a bunch of stuff, and traveling places. And, you know, You really have to be dedicated. I mean, you've been doing this for decades to really be dedicated to do that over years and years and years. One thing that when I talk with people, and I want your insight on this, like when I talk with certain people, they're like, you know, 30 years ago, 20 years ago when I was seeing these autoimmune complicated patients, it would be something simple like change a diet, you know, antimicrobial herbs, something, and people would get better. And now it just seems like the complicated patients are getting more complicated. Have you seen that phenomena where the patient who you— the fibromyalgia patient who you'd see 20 years ago would get better with some diflucan or get better if you got out of the moldy building, and now you're seeing these people getting— being more complicated?

Absolutely. I don't think there's any question about it, is that we call them the canaries in the coal mine, these very sensitive folks. But I think it's becoming global. It's an epidemic, right? Not just an occasional one. I almost never saw anybody this sensitive 20 years ago, 30 years ago, definitely not 40 years ago. And so your observation, I think, is spot on that this is increasing actually fairly dramatically. And I think most of our colleagues are baffled by this. Honestly, I don't know that it's baffling. I think that we know what's causing it. It's just nobody wants to address it. I mean, what's causing it is the extreme toxicity of the world we live in. We've added over the 50 years that I've been doing this, we've added, it's now estimated 350,000 new chemicals into our environment that weren't there before. And the vast majority have never been tested for, for safety in human beings. The numbers that have been tested, about 500. So it's just a teeny, teeny drop in the bucket. And then we add in electromagnetic exposures never before seen in the history of the planet, what we call EMFs, where we're bombarded. I don't care if you live in the remote areas of Alaska, you're bombarded by electromagnetic exposures where our bodies are not designed. So I think we know why it's happening, but I'm afraid that, you know, the powers that be go, oh no, we need 10G now. We don't need 5G. We need more, faster, better, without really looking at the toxicity of what we're exposing every human being on this planet to.

Yeah. I want to just reiterate what you said that we are truly seeing. And, you've been doing this for a long, long time. You were a referral center decades ago for these complicated patients. You have been seeing patients becoming more and more complicated, more and more sensitive. Even as a person who's getting people sent to you from around around the country. And that's, I think, an important point because a lot of times, you know, people say, oh no, we're just better at diagnosing things these days. There's more cancer because we're better at diagnosing it, or there's more fibro, we're better at diagnosing autism. I mean, I remember I read the statistic recently that if you're an individual in your 60s, the incidence of autism in your population is like 1 in 40,000, which is an astronomical number. When I was doing my training, it was 1 in 600 to 700. Now it's 1 in like 54.

Well, In some areas, 1 in 35.

Which area is that?

Oh, several. I mean, it's continuing. The autism is increasing exponentially and everyone goes, oh, this is terrible. What could that possibly be from? Without really looking at what's kind of obvious. Sorry, but it is kind of obvious. So that means, I mean, that autism was extremely rare. I went to medical school at the University of Chicago, which had at the time, Burroughs-Beddelheim's orthogenic treatment program. He was the only one doing it. And it was considered a genetic problem. And these were rare. These were genetically rare. And now, by these statistics, which you're talking about, 2 or 3 of every 1,000 that are born in this country is autistic. So, this is serious.

That's crazy. So, chemicals, EMF. I don't think you mentioned mold in that. What would you say, like, the big 5 or 6 things you'd say are contributing to this epidemic of chronic health issues, sensitivities, things like that?

Well, I didn't mention mold or Lyme, which are also epidemic. And again, some people don't know that. The CDC keeps increasing its admission of how many cases we have a year. Back in 2013, for the first time, they admitted There were 300 new cases of Lyme a year. Last year, it was jacked up to 625,000 new cases of mold a year. And so, and that's underreported. So we have an epidemic. Nobody's reporting mold, but some conservative estimates are that 10 million Americans right now have mold toxicity to some extent. But that's linked to this toxicity, which is— Our immune systems are being so bombarded that they've gotten weaker. So we are far more vulnerable to infections of every type. So although mold is a toxicity, it starts growing, we get reacting to it. And again, it's our immune system that if it, if our immune system is not robust, being exposed will make us sick.

Yeah.

If our immune system is robust, we may be in it, but not React to it.

Yeah.

Until we take a hit, whether it be COVID or a surgical procedure or an emotional experience, death of a loved one, feelings of abandonment, a severe infection of any type. Once that immune system takes a hit, it loses containment. And what we have been exposed to in the past now jumps in and goes, yippee, the coast is clear. Now I can take over this body.

So really, you have to become an expert at not just one thing, like a cardiologist, or rheumatologist, or endocrinologist. You have to become an expert, environmental health expert, a toxicity expert, a developmental pediatric expert, an immune expert. You really have to have this, what I call, an uber generalist. You have to know literally a little bit about everything, but not just a little, a pretty deep knowledge of all these things and how they contribute to people's health.

It is. But that sounds kind of overwhelming. I don't know too many docs who can do that. I think on a doable level, it's, you just need to understand that these are very real illnesses. They're not rare. Start looking for it in your chronically ill patients, 'cause you're gonna see it and you don't have to be an expert at it to at least be able to do treatment for mold and Lyme.

Yeah.

You might, we don't have the tools yet to be able to measure these environmental chemicals. They're coming, but we don't have it yet. So, if we think about a need for detoxification as something probably every human being on this planet needs to do, I think we could make a dent in that.

Yeah. Now, one thing we're going to talk about here is the sensitive patient. I mean, you wrote your book, The Sensitive Patient's Healing Guide. Could you just define for us, like, when you say a sensitive patient, like, what does that mean? Is it someone who just reacts with chemicals? Is it someone with Mold? Like, what does it mean?

Well, I first want to make it clear that I don't mean sensitive to being told, oh, look, I look, I look, do my thighs look fat in this outfit? That's not what we're talking about. The nervous system. The word sensitive comes from the word sense. So let's look at our sense organs: sight, hearing, touch, taste, Smell. Those are our senses. So sensitive patients are sensitive neurologically in those areas. So they become sensitive to light. They need to— they can't be outside without wearing sunglasses. If extreme, they have to wear sunglasses indoors. And you might think, well, that's rare. It's not as rare as you think it is. Sound sensitive. Our sound sensitive patients jump when they're exposed to a sound That other people in their environment don't even barely notice. They can't be around loud noises or in certain environments. Touch. These folks get very sensitive to the clothes that they wear, their skin, to people touching them. Smell chemicals. These folks become exquisitely sensitive to chemicals so that they can't go down the fragrance aisle in the grocery store without having a severe reaction to it. We have EMF sensitivity. Where people can no longer spend endless hours on their computer or phone without having cognitive impairment or headaches or extreme fatigue or even some neurological events. So that's what we mean about sensitivity. Where food sensitivity, where you can't eat the foods you used to use because they make you sick in a variety of ways.

Now, this is a silly question. Is this common or rare? I think, you know, when you first hear about it, you sound, you know, when you describe it, it's, you know, oh, it's not that common. But then you start asking people, Do they have food allergies? Do they react with food supplements? You know, do they have problems with capsules or things? You know, as you start diving into it, you realize there's a lot of people that are sensitive to a lot of different things. Do you have any numbers? Like, what's the estimate that how many people are dealing with this?

It's going to stun you, but it's in the ballpark of 35 million Americans. I'll give you a study not done here in this country, but in England. Where they did an elaborate study and found that almost 1% of people in England were on disability because they were so handicapped by their sensitivity. And then to some extent, 35% of the English population had become sensitive and were able to quantitate that. There's a researcher named Claudia Miller who's been research in chemical sensitivity in great detail in this country. And she has found the numbers to be pretty much astronomical. Again, we're not talking occasional.

Yeah, I think it was actually in your book. I was reading the number, you know, I was talking about that. But what fascinated me was that there are countries and governments where they actually recognize and will give people disability for these sensitivities. I've not heard anywhere in our country where people have actually gotten disability for Environmental sensitivities, chemical sensitivities. Have you heard of that happening here? Have your patients been able to get that here? Is that something that's only being discussed overseas at different countries?

I think that people can get disability, but it wouldn't be because of their sensitivity. It would be because of their fatigue, or joint pain, or cognitive impairment that are symptoms that accompany the same things, the inflammation. that is the underlying principle of sensitivity will cause those other symptoms. And you can get disability for that. At least some states will recognize that. Some states you have to hire a high-powered attorney to get what you really are entitled to because you really are disabled.

Now, we were actually talking about this briefly before we started recording about, you know, both of our experiences. And, you know, I've probably, you know, when I deal with patients, you know, I can get Some individuals, I'll get them, you know, I'll work with them, they'll get 50%, 60% better, but they just get stuck. Like, you get to a point and you've, you know, dealt with their Lyme, you dealt with their mold, you dealt with their gut issues, autoimmune, gluten, whatever it is, you know, and they just— their body's not healing. Could you talk about that? Like, what keeps people stuck? What have you found, like, as far as where in a person's healing process that the stuckness kind of sits?

Well, I think the word stuck is really accurate, and it's one that I've used for a long time myself. I think stuck implies there's some kind of a blockage somewhere. And so you can be stuck physically, but you're saying we've already addressed that for some of these people. So the stuck place could be emotional, energetic, or spiritual, or combinations of all of those. And at a certain point, I found with my stuck patients, we've had to come to a place where we're We have a serious conversation and I'll actually use these words. I'll say, we're stuck. We're not moving any. If there was a place in you that was stuck, could it be spiritual or emotional or energetic? And almost all of them say, yeah, I feel like that's the case for me. I feel stuck. And then we can begin to really get into where is that coming from? Is that some experiences in your life that never got worked through somewhere along the line, some trauma that never really got dealt with. And again, one thing that doesn't get looked at much is the energetic, which is, I mean, some of these folks will respond to acupuncture because it moves energy around the body in stuck places so that then we need to talk about ways of moving energy through the body in ways we didn't. And just as a, by the way, I don't mean to be a shameless promotion of this. I did write a book before this one called Energetic Diagnosis, which talks about the energy pieces of that, meaning there are devices that are now on the market that can measure energy, that could help move energy through the body in different ways. And for some people, that's their start place. I think the biggest place is some type of emotional blockage from some type of trauma. Now, that can start when you're tiny and young, or it can any time along life where basically the message that you take from your life is, this is a dangerous world that I'm living in and I have to become hypervigilant in order to deal with it. Because, and then Basically, you shut down different systems so that you can go, okay, am I safe? How can I deal with that safety? And I think it might be helpful for us to talk about how that evolves in people because I think that's very important.

Every fall, the schedule tightens and most of our attention goes to getting the kids ready. Almost none of it goes to the person holding the whole thing together, So I put together these 3 things just for that. A daily multivitamin in the active forms your body can actually use, quercetin and nettles to support your immune and respiratory health without the drowsiness, and NAC, N-acetylcysteine, to help your body rebuild its own antioxidant reserve. This is what I take every fall. That's aaronhartmanmd.com/backtoschool. Well, it's actually, I'm gonna transition to that there 'cause one of the things, you know, that, you know, the limbic system versus the vagal system, And how like the vagal system has 2 systems as a dorsal and ventral vagal, and how from either Stephen Porges' work, some of Annie Hopper's work, and even talking about, you know, my experience has been, you know, you got the big T trauma and the little t trauma. You know, we acknowledge the physical, sexual, emotional abuse, big T trauma, but the little t, whether it's a chronic illness, whether it's being married to a narcissistic individual, you know, there's a lot of different microtraumas that over time can build up. And then you basically get this dysfunction in your body's neurological integrative part, you know, which is in your brainstem, your midbrain. So, could you kind of delve into like how you kind of differentiate, you know, looking at someone's vagal stuff, limbic system, like help us kind of walk through what these scientific words mean as far as, you know, it's kind of marrying the, like what you mentioned, like the science with the expression of the people's stuckness.

Sure. So we're gonna talk about 3 main systems here, the limbic system, the vagal system, and mast cell activation. Those are the 3 biggest systems. They're not the only ones that are the underpinning of almost everyone who's become sensitive. Let's start with the limbic system. The limbic system is the part of our brain that is trying to keep us safe by, again, scrutinizing the stimuli that we're being Exposed to from the perspective of safety. Now, our limbic system has been doing that since we were in our mother's uterus. So even in utero, if your mother is going through some sort of extreme difficulty, be it emotional or physical, you in that uterus are being exposed to those neurochemicals of stress constantly. So you can even get stressed out before you're born. I know we all think— Being in the uterus, floating in this amniotic fluid, and life is wonderful. But, not if your mom is going through great upheaval. So, it could start then, or anytime. None of us have had perfect childhoods. I don't know. I haven't seen it. Doesn't exist. So, depending on what you had, or, as a child, say, recurrent ear infections, or throat infections, or tons of antibiotics, or... More problematic parents who weren't there for you. They were so busy working that you were just kind of, you know, fend for yourself. Or even worse, abuse of any type, emotional, sexual, physical abuse, surgeries that you may have had. Any or all of these particular stressors get the attention of our limbic system, which some from an early age, our limbic system is literally getting wired neurologically to be protective, which is I've got to really pay attention to what's happening in my world so that I can protect myself from something happening to me. You know, a simple example would be if you had an alcoholic parent and you knew that they were coming home and walking in the door, it's like, okay, I don't know what shape they're going to be in, so I got to protect myself. And then that goes through the rest of your life. Surgeries, childbirth, infections, COVID, huge stress to the body. So at any given point in time, no matter how old you are, your limbic system is the sum result of the various stresses you've had. Now, if you're lucky, some people are, they were minor. And so your limbic system can go, okay, this is a cool world. I like it out here. But for the most of us, at some point it was, I've gotta pay attention. So the limbic system becomes hypervigilant. And when it becomes hypervigilant, it— the neurological functions of the limbic system are basically 2: emotion and sensitivity. So let's take it from a practical point of view. How do you know if your limbic system is messed up? Well, if you have any increase in sensitivity, Light, sound, touch, food, EMF, smells, chemicals. That's limbic. If you have any emotional upheaval, it could be chronic or it could be an exacerbated one. Anxiety, depression, OCD, depersonalization, derealization, mood swings. That's limbic. So one or all of those symptoms tells us that, okay, there's a limbic piece here that we need to pay attention to. Now, the limbic system is completely physiologically interwoven with another system, different part of the brain, which we call the vagal system. Although the word vagus is in it and it refers to the vagus nerve, which is the 10th cranial nerve, it's not just that. It's a whole system of cranial nerves that are interwoven. And the 2 systems basically, they're trying to keep you safe, not trying to hurt you. But the vagus system gives us different symptoms. So, for example, the vagus nerve controls intestinal motility and controls most of intestinal functioning. So any GI symptoms that you have— constipation, reflux, diarrhea, abdominal pain and cramping— lead to have a vagal component to it. The vagus nerve controls the autonomic nervous system. So if you developed POTS, Or blood pressure fluctuations or palpitations. Again, that's vagus. So those are the symptoms that tell us, okay, we have some vagal dysfunction, we have some limbic dysfunction. And if you have that, and all my sensitive patients do, we know we need to work on both concurrently. Because if you have a vagal system and limbic system that is hypervigilant, And you only work on the limbic system, you're going to stay hypervigilant. So you kind of have to do both.

Okay. And you mentioned the mast cell help. Could you mention how it plays into mast cell activation syndrome, which is pretty common as well?

Okay. So now we're dealing with the trifecta of hypervigilance, which is limbic, vagal, and mast cell. So all 3 systems are completely interwoven and we're seeing a profound increase in And mast cell activation. Now, until 2016, when Larry Afrin's book came out, Never Bet Against Occam, we thought that mast cell activation was a rare genetic disorder. Didn't see it. And his book was a light for us all in going, oh wait, this is not rare at all. So mast— Now, the limbic and vagal piece is a neurological piece. And so, we have to think about it neurologically. It's not psychological. It's neurological. Unfortunately, our very sensitive patients often get accused of it being psychological, which is, buck up. You know, I can take the stimulus, then you should be able to take it also. And, it's completely ignoring the fact that that other person's nervous system is going, no, I can't take it. I'm trying to tell you, you're not wired to be able to do that. Back to mast cell activation. Mast cells are a cellular way of protecting ourselves, and mast cells connect to the nervous system. They're a bridge between the nervous system and the immune system, and they look— they're present in every tissue of the body, especially in the tissues of the body that interface with the outside world because they're an immune cell that try to protect us. So lining of the sinuses, the throat, The gut, the vaginal tissues. That's where they are most present. And once activated, they release hundreds of biochemical materials that have loads of symptoms and make us inflamed. So all 3 systems work together, and we've learned that we need to treat all 3 systems if someone becomes sensitive. Just as a comment, Patients who have mold toxicity almost always over time will develop limbic, vagal, and mast cell issues. Patients with Lyme disease, co-infections, will develop that. In fact, many, many chronic conditions will ultimately reflect itself in that way. So, this is not rare. And I'm hoping that people will understand that this is a treatable, fixable thing once you realize what it is that's setting you off. Yeah.

It's really interesting. One of the things that kind of intrigued me when I first started studying this was Dr. Mouldering's work over in Germany that said maybe 19% of the population had mast cell activation syndrome. Then, from Dr. Shoemaker's work, 23% of the population has the gene for mold-related toxicity. And, you start hearing over and over these statistics and they're all about the same ballpark. Hypermobility, which is a part of the PENTAD super syndrome, probably 20% of the population has some degree of hypermobility. And then, you look at some of the data with dysautonomia. Again, you look in the 15% to 20% ballpark. I just wonder if we're all looking at something similar, but from a different vantage point as a rheumatologist, neurologist, immunologist, but we're all actually seeing different expressions of this similar complexity.

I think we are. So, for example, Andy Maxwell, who's written extensively about this, believes that the hypermobility is directly related to these biochemical mediators that are being produced by mast cells. Those mediators weaken the ligaments, making us more hypermobile, and that they're directly connected. Because we do find, when we treat mast cell activation, that hypermobility can get much better, if not completely go away. So for a long time, this hypermobility, which people call Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, has been looked at as, again, genetic, rare. And now we're looking at, no, it's not rare, it's more common. But I think that those numbers that you're quoting are all connected. So mold toxicity produces mast cell activation, mast cell activation produces hypermobility syndrome. So I think we can start to look at this as being an interconnected—

Yeah. Now, trauma, you know, you kind of alluded to that before. Can we get into trauma a little bit? Because one of the things, you know, you get in people's story and you might have, A story of a bad relationship, family abuse, alcoholism. Because we adopted all of our kids, and one of the things we had to go through was training, and we had to read the book The Body Keeps the Score. And just the act of adopting a child, moving from one house to another, instability when you're developing all of a sudden. You know, my wife is a pediatric occupational therapist. And so early on, I learned, wait a second, you can have trauma from being in the ICU the first 4 weeks of your life just from, you know, bad birthing situations. So all of a sudden, this trauma. I think we overlook a lot of trauma because we're so focused on the big T. We forget there's all these little smaller, not less significant ones. How do you help people kind of realize that maybe part of their underlying health issue is trauma? Because that's one of the hardest things I run into trying to walk people through because they're like, well, no, no, no, it wasn't that big of a deal, or it wasn't that bad, or it was such a long time ago.

I usually don't bring it up at my first visit.

Well, yeah, of course.

I'm just, just saying that I first have to develop enough rapport with my patient that they perceive my office and me to be a safe space for them to talk about whatever it is they need to talk about. 'Cause this is often things they haven't talked to anybody about or very few people about. And we bring it up in, in this same context, which is Again, we started with you're stuck. So let's take it. Let's take a deeper look at your life in terms of are there events that you have gone through that may have contributed to where you are right now? And I found that the vast majority of patients, once we've developed that rapport, are much more open to talking about it. And honestly, given my own. way of practicing medicine, one of the first tools that I embraced was hypnosis. So I would actually, with a patient's permission, regress them to a point, to the various points of trauma that they had experienced in their life so that they could get a quick feel for what were the key events in their life that are contributing to their stuck place. And I found that to be a fabulous tool for helping people get there because they would go there on their own. I would never say, well, that happened to you, so that must have done blah, blah, blah. Patients have to come to that realization on their own when they're ready for that perception. One of the things I'm doing more and more now is Stephen Porges, who put our understanding of the vagus nerve on the map. has a new book out. It's called Our Polyvagal World. Have you seen that, Aaron?

I've not seen that book, no.

Okay. Now, I love Stephen, and in fact, I wrote the chapter in my book on the vagus with him. I mean, we've been friends for a while now, but he's an academic. And so if you read Stephen's writing, it's really designed for medical professionals who can understand some of the depth of Of brain chemistry that's required to get it. Now, Stephen knows that he's a bright guy. Yeah. So we got his son Seth to write the book with him, Seth being a world-class journalist. And so with Seth's help, this is a fabulous book for patients to understand what the vagal system is and how it impacts all of us. And it becomes really clear that, example, COVID, Profoundly affected the vagal system of every human being on this planet. It added another layer of fear and threat to all of us. And we've all dealt with that differently. There are some people who are still wearing masks thinking that it helps them. And it's like they, they've been taught or told that they need to do that in order to protect themselves and they're going to protect themselves. In point of fact, I mean, the CDC just announced that we should be looking at COVID as no different than any viral infection. There's no reason to view it, but we have 4 years of trauma there on which we— so to take this to another, another, another place, I think that our education should start in primary school with learning relaxation techniques and how to deal with this. From— that would be way more useful than, I don't know, learning the capital of Czechoslovakia and memorizing that. Because our children are being exposed to incredible amounts of stress. I think more than they have in the past. But not just children. All of us are being exposed to tremendous amount of stress. So, am I answering your question, Aaron?

Yeah. It's, I guess, to round it off, like, you developed rapport, which, you know, I've had patients who it's taken a year and a half, 2, 3 years sometimes before we kind of get to a point where it's like this event was a traumatic event or they have an aha moment. And sometimes it's even longer. I've been, my wife and I've been married for 20 years and we're 15 years into it when I had the realization that when she started with a lot of her anxiety and other issues was actually during grad school in anatomy lab when she had a massive formaldehyde exposure. And that was on top of her having some other trauma related to some family health issues and stuff. And Sometimes it takes time. In order to have time, you have to have a relationship. And people can't like jump in and, you know, have a one-off with you and see you 3 years later. They have to, you have to actually develop a relationship with the patient and have that time. Because sometimes some of these things just take lots of time.

Absolutely. I'll give you an example. One that jumps to mind. One of my favorite patients, delightful young woman, had chronic fatigue syndrome. And I was treating that. She was improving from that, not completely getting better until we realized she had mold toxicity. We started looking at mold, and then when we treated mold, she got a bit better, but she was just stuck. She would get to a level of functioning and just not go. And this was 7 years later. She casually mentioned a visit. Gotta worry about things that are casually mentioned at visits. They're not always casual.

Yeah.

She casually mentioned that she'd been recently thinking about the time that she was jilted and left at the altar by a fellow that she was going to marry. And in all our time together, this is not something she had ever mentioned. It's one of those, oh, that's interesting. Do we, do we think that this might be important? And then she was then for the first time able to be comfortable enough to talk about something that had been absolutely catastrophic for her. And then, then she got well. But—

Interesting.

People aren't ready till they're ready. And sometimes, as you're saying, takes us way more time than we would like or our patients would like. But patients come to a state of readiness where, okay, I'm willing to deal with that now. Yeah. Yeah.

Maybe the summary of that, this kind of medicine is not just required technical expertise of the the doctor or the desire to get better from the patient. It's a discovery. And discovery just takes time many times. And that time, who knows how long it can take sometimes.

I've taken some of my patients 10 years, but if I see a spark in them, I just know that deep down, I think that being can heal. And I have always been willing to stay with people until they get To the point that they're really ready to deal with. It's usually an experience that they defined as catastrophic. You might look from the outside and go, well, that's not such a bad experience.

Yeah.

But I don't make that decision. That's their choice. From their perspective, this was catastrophic. This changed how I viewed the world. At this point in time, I decided this is not a safe world and I've got to really Armor myself in order to deal with it. And then we have to help people take that armor off.

I want to transition a little bit to some of the details in the book. Obviously, we're not going to talk about your whole entire book. It's a great book. It's actually, it's really one of the things I really liked about was you basically found experts in different fields instead of you doing it all. You actually brought people in to like dive into that, which I thought was really a great, great way to do it. So I want to just kind of go through some of those sections and hit some things I think people aren't quite as familiar with. And we actually already mentioned EMF a little bit. So, I actually want to start there because I feel like that's something where people— it's like, even like, I was not— when I did my training, no one even hardly mentioned EMF. You know, whether it was A4M, I4M, whether it was other things, it was just like, well, there's, you know, fields or whatever. So, what, you know, what is or what are electromagnetic fields? What are they? Where do they come from? And how do they negatively impact our body?

Okay. It's a whole long subject.

I know. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. That's a book, right?

There are several kinds of EMF so that although we talk about EMF, we should specify what kind we're talking about. So, there's the EMF, the electromagnetic waves that we get from cell towers in our environment. There's electromagnetic exposure we get from every electrical device in our house. Electrical devices put out an electrical and a magnetic field. And that's just what they do. And then there's the EMF exposure, which is a different frequency. It's not the same thing that we get from our computers, cell phones, all of our computer-type devices that are so near and dear to all of us. And then there's one more type, which is called dirty electricity.

Hmm.

If on the outlets of your home, if it wasn't done properly, it can radiate a fairly strong electrical field there. If you don't look at that. So again, this is an epidemic proportion now. It's, it's grown as our exposure has grown. You know, 100 years ago we weren't exposed. And now, so for example, many people think there's not much difference from 4G or 5G. It's just one. It's one, right? 4 and 5. You're talking about a thousandfold increase in EMF exposure from 4G to 5G. And now they're rolling out 10G. When that occurred, there was a huge upsurge of EMF sensitivity and, or people call it electrohypersensitivity. EHS is the technical name for that. So again, many of these patients were being accused of being psychological, but what they were experiencing was they're sitting at their computer like you and I are both doing right now. But if it went on for a period of time, They became brain fogged, fatigued, or developed neurological conditions like pseudo seizures or tics or a variety of things. Headaches, extremely common. And it was reproducible for them. They, if they did the same thing regularly, yep, I get this every time that happens to me. And then if they would tell their friends about it, they'd say, well, that's crazy. I spend 8 hours a day on computer and I'm fine. Well, some people are more electrically sensitive than others, just like some people have a better sense of taste than others and they become chefs or different perception of wine and they become wine connoisseurs or whatever. But we all have our own sensitivity. So this is very real and it adds a whole level of inflammation to what is already an inflamed system for most of our chronic conditions. So I urge anyone who has any chronic illness or has even a hint of this to get what we call an electrosmog meter, which is simply a little meter. You can hold it in your hand and it tells you what you're being exposed to. So I can hold it in my hand and see how close can I get to my computer without it going off scale, or how close can I get to the electric clock in my bedroom? my refrigerator, or my microwave, or what am I getting from the cell towers in my area? So, you get an idea of what you're actually getting exposed to. And, no matter what kind of exposure you have, you can block it to a certain extent by getting your devices shielded. So, my Kindle is shielded. My phone is shielded. So, my router— is way across the room so that I'm not exposing myself at this moment to any significant EMF. But a lot of folks need to know that. Yeah.

Well, I think it's kind of interesting because I think— I'm not sure if you mentioned it in your book, but Prescription for a Healthy Home by Banta. And it was interesting going through that. And they talked specifically about dirty electricity. But one thing I just was reminded of is that the Russians actually knew about this concept back in the '50s and '60s. And so this idea of illness from electromagnetic fields might be, you know, novel here in America or novel in our consciousness. But over in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe and Russia, they've known about this for over half a century. So that's something else I think is important for people to realize. Some of these things we're talking about are not— they're novel to us, but not necessarily new. Right.

Right. The Europeans have been much more on some of this than we have. There's a type of electric field that comes out of the earth Called a geopathic zone. It's literally a pillar of energy that comes out of the earth. And I know it's going to sound weird, but you can perceive it by dowsing it like you would dowse water. Again, many people would view that as a woo-woo type of thing. But in many communities in this country, I lived in Missouri for many years. If you're going to drill a well, you got a dowser to come out to your property and show you where to drill. Because otherwise you could waste a whole lot of money just digging in the wrong place. But these geopathic zones can affect health adversely. So there are many clinics in Germany that will insist that they go out to your home to check it for a geopathic zone because your cancer may be caused by the fact that you're sleeping in the middle of one. And health might involve just moving the bed to the other side of the room so you're no longer in the geopathic zone. So, yes, there's way more, that old Shakespearean comment, many wars going on in this life than is apparent in your philosophies, Horatio.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because some ancient cultures where ancient cities and ancient places where people lived, they actually had a— somehow, they had knowledge of this. And yet, in some of these zones, my wife and I were at a clinic in Switzerland, and they actually had known like one of these areas over there. So, it's really, again, interesting. This is not new in the historical perspective, but it's novel to us here in the United States. We'll talk about it. I want to transition to something that I actually had never ever heard of before until it was actually mentioned in the book. It was actually this thing called spiky leaky syndrome. I'd actually not heard of that until I was reading it. And I was like, this is 100% novel to me. So, could you talk about that briefly? That, because that was something that was just 100% novel to me as I was going through the book.

I first learned about it In fact, while the book was being written and I held up production of the book to include it, 'cause I thought it was important, I heard Andy Maxwell give a lecture on it. Andy's a pediatrician who has been working with a lot of sensitive kids for a long time, and he and his medical partner for over several years began to put together a bunch of medical events that made sense for them. So basically, the spiky leaky theory, sorry about the complex name, I didn't make it up.

Yeah.

Is that if there is a loosening or weakening of ligaments at the base of your skull, right where the skull attaches to the first cervical vertebrae, that's a very sensitive area. And this is in the category that we talked about a little bit before about weakened ligaments or people with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, in which if the ligaments at the base of the skull become looser, the skull collapses on itself. And, in doing so, the blood vessels, nerves, lymphatics, and all the things in here get compressed. There's literally blockage to a certain extent of outflow of all those tissues. So, these people can get A facial edema in a way that you would not expect it to. They can get headaches. And it's very tied into another condition called CCI, which is cervical cranial instability. But it's the same concept. Cervical cranial instability basically means at the craniocervical junction, the skull and the cervical vertebrae, instability means loosening of those ligaments. So we get a structural imbalance here that causes a, a blockage which profoundly affects the autonomic nervous system. It sets off a domino series of events in the body that is very similar to what these other inflammatory conditions affect.

Hmm.

And Andy Maxwell has found that one of the major things that, that triggers this CCI or instability is the mast cell activation triggered by mold toxicity.

Hmm.

So, mast— so we're, you're beginning to tie some of these things together.

Yeah.

So the actual paper that Andy wrote is 50 pages long with multiple diagrams. It's super complicated, but we tried in my book to make it as accessible as possible to understanding what's going on. So it's very difficult to diagnose this because these structures at the base of the skull where it's all happening are very tiny. The resolution of an MRI is less than 2 millimeters, meaning if what you're looking for on an MRI is 2 millimeters or less, it's not going to see it because it can't. It's beyond its resolution. So you need to do special MRIs You have to put people standing in different ways in order to be able to make that diagnosis, which is tricky.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, with the way it was described, spiky leaky, but then the craniocervical instability, I had a lot of patients with hypermobility that have a lot of different types of dysautonomia. They might feel better, you know, first thing they wake up in the morning, they have these headaches that they feel better after laying down for a period of 24 hours. They get up, all of a sudden they get these weird sounds, hearing things, perceptual abnormalities that seem kind of like they're crazy, but it's literally that part of the brain that regu— it's the regulatory system in your midbrain. I feel like it's one of those things that's common. It's just we don't know how to diagnose it. And as we learn more about it, we're going to see it more and more.

So, part of this congestion or lack of flow going on inside the head, part of that is cerebrospinal fluid. Which can't flow down through the body the way it is supposed to. And then it leaks. That's where the leaky component of this thing comes from. A couple of very simple things that people can do to kind of hint that maybe it's going on would be to get a soft cervical collar, which would lift the skull up a little bit and take some pressure off of that. Another trick that Andy has found is that if the cerebrospinal fluid is being built up, Taking Diamox, the medication that we use for people who are in— prevent mountain sickness, can be very helpful.

Yeah. Now, something else that was in your— and I've come across this before. I forget where you're— I think it was some of your lectures somewhere else about thiamine deficiency, which has, for me, has been a game changer for a lot of my patients from Dr. Laundra's work at the Cleveland Clinic. You know, how thiamine affects your nervous system and how a lot of complex patients have these mitochondrial issues that can be exacerbated by functional thiamine deficiencies. Could you kind of briefly talk about that? Because I feel like this is something that we've known about historically going back into the early 1900s with what was going on in Japan, and workers would be outside and get sun exposures and develop, you know, weird neurological issues. But here in our overfed society, we're actually getting nutritionally driven overfeeding syndromes that induce these functional deficiencies that, again, can look like a lot of bizarre kind of things.

So, thiamine is kind of unique. It's vitamin B1, in that the biochemical reactions by which we make energy, which we call the Krebs cycle, almost every step of the Krebs cycle requires thiamine as a cofactor to make that work. So, if we don't have enough thiamine, we're not going to be able to have the energy we need. Our mitochondria are not going to be able to function properly. And it's probably way more common than people realize. The, for example, mold toxicity. Sorry to focus on mold, but mold toxicity prevents the body from absorbing or using thiamine the way you normally would. So, the vast majority of our patients with mold toxicity are going to have a thiamine component to that. Which is pretty easy to treat if you recognize that's what's going on. There are 4 million people in this country right now taking metformin, medication we use to treat diabetes. Metformin blocks the body's ability to utilize thiamine properly. So, and again, there's a whole bunch of other nutritional issues, what we call the Standard American Diet, which is called the SAD diet because of our use of high fructose corn syrup, our, our use of preservatives of every type. That diet would make us deficient in thiamine 'cause it's not present there in adequate amounts. So more Americans have a thiamine deficiency than they would realize. And supplementing that is a simple thing to do once people recognize it's a bigger player than you would think.

Yeah.

Again, thiamine is critical for The functioning of the autonomic nervous system, which has been a theme in what we're talking about today. Yeah.

Every fall, the schedule tightens and most of our attention goes to getting the kids ready. Almost none of it goes to the person holding the whole thing together. So I put together these 3 things just for that: a daily multivitamin in the active forms your body can actually use, quercetin and nettles to support your immune and respiratory health without the drowsiness And NAC, N-acetylcysteine, to help your body rebuild its own antioxidant reserve. This is what I take every fall. That's aaronhartmanmd.com/backtoschool. You know, I'm not sure if you've done this before. I've got several patients with Parkinson's I'm working with right now, and actually read a book about thiamine therapy with Parkinson's patients, and the doses there were super high, you know, 2, 3, 4 grams a day. Have you used it or utilized thiamine with patients with significant neurological issues and had a really nice response, a profound response? Or, in what situations have you seen patients have significant responses to some kind of thiamine therapy?

Again, I've started using it routinely with my mold-toxic patients. A thiamine deficiency will cause ataxia, which is an instability where you're walking and you can't really walk with Normally. So, with patients with ataxia, I found that to be helpful. And Chandler Mars, who wrote the book, co-authored the book, has shared with me that some people need massive amounts of thiamine to make it neurologically therapeutic for them. Meaning, we're talking 1,000 to 1,200 milligrams of thiamine a day, whereas most of us need 100 milligrams a day. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. You're using like the—

But if you like, I'll comment on the Parkinson's picture in Parkinson's, and that applies to Alzheimer's disease and ALS and to almost any neurodegenerative disease. The underlying pathophysiology of it is inflammation. And so figuring out what is triggering that inflammation is really helpful for treating it, as I'm sure you're aware. And so I just wanted for your listening audience to talk about the fact that any patient with Alzheimer's, we should look at mold toxicity, we should look at Lyme disease, we should look at heavy metal toxicity, particularly lead and mercury, as possible causes. And if you can catch a Parkinson's patient early, you can really make a huge difference in their clinical course.

Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely agree with that. So oxalates are an interesting topic. I think Kurt Ruhler, I think, did a chapter in your book. And I actually came across his work back in 2017 when I was doing some research on autism as a person who sees a lot of kids with autism and works with autism. Can you talk to us about oxalates? Because I feel like that's one of the things that's super common. When you do urine tests, you routinely see oxalate crystals in it. And people just kind of, have you had kidney stones? No. They just glance over it and ignore it. Yet, these can be a trigger for myofascial pain, fibro pain, neurological issues. Could you kind of give us a little primer on that?

Sure. If you were able to look at an oxalate crystal, it's not a pretty little crystal. It's got shards all over it. It's a type of crystal that if it is found in your joint, it's really painful and irritating to it. If it's found in any tissue, It's painful and irritating to her and is a real source of inflammation. Don't want to beat a dead horse here, but mold— moles make oxalates so that it adds a whole level of oxalate toxicity to people who might be predisposed. Oxalate stones are one of the most common form of kidney stone. So anyone who has developed a kidney stone has some degree of an oxalate issue. And you may need to look at measuring oxalates in the body. The OAT test has traditionally had several different measures of oxalates, which we found to be quite helpful. And if we're measuring oxalates in the body, we can treat it. But then you have to think about looking at the foods and supplements you're taking that might be making oxalates accumulate in your body based on your own genetics and biochemistry. So, not everybody is sensitive to oxalates, but quite a few people are. And, common sources of oxalates are things like spinach, kale, rhubarb. I mean, those are very, very high in oxalates. Yeah.

And, I've found— I've had multiple patients as well who had overgrowth of yeast in their GI tract as a driver for oxalate production. And, after you work on their gut, I've been able to normalize their OAT testing. So, I think it's one of those things that it's on some of the testing we do, but a lot of practitioners don't know how to either address it or it just kind of, it's not commonly discussed even though it's something that's really, really commonly seen.

Yeah. There's, I mean, we have a great chapter in the book. It was written by Emily Givler, who herself has wrestled with oxalates and she's a nutritionist, which is very helpful. And that's a good start. If you really want to get a great book on oxalates, Sally Norton has a book called Toxic Superfoods. In which she not only goes into oxalates in detail, but tells you how to lower your oxalates. The biggest issue is suddenly deciding that, oh, okay, oxalates are a problem. I'm going to stop eating them. That's a very bad strategy because if you suddenly decrease the amount of oxalates you've taken in, you can get a phenomenon called oxalate dumping, in which the body goes, oh, okay, this is great. I got a whole bunch of oxalate in me. I'm going to dump it all at once. And you can get much, much worse that way. So, if you're going to come off oxalates, you really need to understand how to slowly reduce your oxalate consumption. Very important.

Yeah. That's a great point because sometimes when you— uric acid's another great example of that with people with high uric acids and you bring it down too fast and they can literally have a flare of their gout and their joint pain. So, it's another example of a a crystal storage disease that if not— if you don't take people off the edge slowly, you can literally flare their pain, which flares their cortisol, which can then almost be a triggering of their underlying trauma stuff.

Well, speaking of coming off things slowly, I thought I'd segue this. Many people don't realize that antidepressants like SSRIs, you need to come off of them slowly also. I know people know you need to come off of benzodiazepines Slowly because the body will resent it greatly. But I don't think even psychiatrists appreciate how suddenly stopping an SSRI like Lexapro, Zoloft, what have you, can really mess up the neurotransmitters in the body and set you back enormously. It has to be stopped very, very slowly and gradually. Just for your audience to know that that's not something you can come off of quickly.

Well, actually, I was going— that's on my list of things to talk about, actually. So, you kind of transitioned us to that one. You know, it's something I've seen it for years. I've been practicing for, you know, only about 24 years, but I saw this early on in my career where there's some people who you have to, like, you know, go from 20 milligrams to 17 milligrams to— you used to take them off so slow. And it didn't quite make sense to me back then, but, As I've studied and learned, I've realized there's that certain population. In your book, this is the first place I actually saw it listed out that you can have benzo withdrawal, SSR withdrawal as a trigger for the sensitive patient. And that's, I think, again, something I've seen, I recognize, but didn't necessarily connect the dot with some of my more, in particular, my mast cell patients and my patients have more, and my mold patients that are sensitive to everything. It's almost like they need their Benzo for the muscle stabilization. They need the SSRI for the cortisol effects. And if you take them off of that too quickly, and sometimes it's just like baby doses, like what are your thoughts about how, how you address that in someone you're seeing that's sensitive when they want to get off the medication, but you're managing all these other things?

Point is very well taken. I often ask that people not withdraw from those medications. I know how toxic they are. I want them off the medications. Until we've addressed the root cause of what's been making 'em sick in the first place. So if they had Lyme or mold or you name it, whatever the chronic illness is, that once that's been addressed, the inflammation level in their body is markedly decreased and they can handle that much better. But I've had patients where they were on really high doses of things like Ativan. And I would reduce that by teeny, teeny bits a month or more. I mean, the level of withdrawal has to be matched to the patient. So some patients can come off fast, but if you're taking somebody off and you're moving too fast, they're telling you, I can't do that. So again, you can say, oh, you've become an addict. This is terrible. But no, I'm not usually the one who put them on the drug in the first place. But— That notwithstanding, they're telling us the path. And, I've had people take 2 years to get off of benzodiazepine and a year to get off of an SSRI-type medication.

Really?

It's just slow. And, they were thrilled when they got off because they realized how fragile their system was from that perspective.

Yeah, yeah. I've actually— I'm working with a young guy right now. He's maybe 12-ish. He's a young kid with horrible dysautonomia. At one point in time, he'd come in the office, couldn't hardly even get up. He'd just lay down the whole entire time. He'd come with sunglasses on. He was sensitive to so many things and disrupted sleep. And one of the things we figured out early on, he has some mast cell issues as well. And I'm kind of curious your thoughts about this because obviously sleep is critical, right?

Yeah.

And so, a small— he was at that point in time maybe 10, the smallest sliver of a 8th of a milligram of Klonopin actually helped him to sleep and actually gave him a good night's rest. And so, over about 6 months, he actually started turning the corner and feeling better and having energy throughout the day. Like, what are your thoughts about, in certain situations, these medications? Because I'll just say personally, you know, I think we overuse them, but then there are those patients with mast cell issues that sometimes this is the only thing that kind of helps them.

I have patients where I've used those medications. It's not It's not a no-no. Each patient has to be viewed separately for their own biochemistry, genetics. When I have patients, I mean, mold toxicity or Lyme and Bartonella can make people incredibly anxious and depressed and hopeless. And many of those patients will benefit from an antidepressant, or I'm not opposed to using it. I'm merely commenting on when you come off, you just have to come off slowly.

Yeah.

Those, I mean, it's not, we're not chastising anybody for taking those meds. They're life-saving for some people.

Yeah. Well, I think that's a great— I wanted to just clarify it because I think we're on the same page with that. And ultimately, you're personalizing your, this treatment for the individual. You're not blanket saying everybody needs this or blanket saying no one needs this. You're literally meeting the patient where they're at. And sometimes these medications can be transformative with done the right way, but also realizing they can be addictive as well. So, it's a Give and take kind of thing.

I mean, that's— many people have asked me to, to create an algorithm, how to treat mold toxicity. And I have refused to do that because there is no algorithm. Each person has to be viewed separately. It's— if you were to try to plug sensitive people into an algorithm, you're going to make them all sick.

It's— It's the ultimate kind of personalized medicine where you're literally Making changes to the patient's treatment regimen based on how they respond. It's truly the practice of medicine in many ways. I mean, it's the practice of medicine you're practicing.

It takes time. It's not, honestly, it's not for everybody. But gosh, I've helped so many people who were, whose lives have been profoundly impacted. They weren't able to work anymore. They weren't able to leave their homes. I think it's in the thousands now of people who've gotten their health back. So yes, it's a lot of work for me to do that. And that's very rewarding work. Yeah.

So I feel like we could keep on talking for hours. So, I mean, I've only gone through like, you know, 2 pages of my 8 pages of notes here. But so what are you up to now? I know you're doing, you're doing this practitioner's course. We have about over 200 physicians. Why don't you tell us like what you're doing right now and how people can learn more about what you are doing, where they can go for that kind of information?

Sure. So unfortunately, not fortunately, I retired from clinical practice about 3 years ago. But as my wife will tell you, I'm not really retired. I've kind of shifted gears to do more teaching and more education. So as you said, I have a mentorship program and other healthcare practitioners in which I work with a fabulous naturopathic physician, Jill Krista. And we combine both traditional medical approaches with naturopathic approaches. To help practitioners understand a wide array of options they have for treating these various inflammatory conditions.

All right.

Well over 200 people in the program right now. I do consult if people are interested. You can go to my website for that. My website's simply nealnathanmd.com. We do consult, but my, my consultations are more in the teaching realm, meaning I want to have your physician on the Zoom With the patient so that I can not only help the patient understand what to do, I can help the physician get better at it also. I do a lot of that. I have several more books that I'm in the middle of writing. My publisher has asked me to write a second edition of Toxic so that we're updating it. And so for that, I wrote 5 or 6 new chapters and then updated the information in there. I'm writing right now a new chapter on— it's basically about inflammation as the underlying physiological process behind most chronic illness. And again, I'm writing that with another person and it goes into a lot of the newer cytokine measures of inflammation, which I think would help patients understand. I mean, often when patients say they're inflamed and their doctors will do A CRP or a sed rate, and they'll go, oh, those are normal, so you're not inflamed. There are other measures of inflammation that we're learning about to help patients understand, yep, it's not in your head. Very real. Let's figure out what this is so we can move ahead. I do a lot of what I'm doing with you, Aaron. I do a ton of podcasts and a lot of webinars. So, I'm trying to teach people what I know.

Well, that's— I mean, I think it's awesome because that's how ultimately this spreads. Not just, you know, even though you've done this for a long time, is You can see your thousands of patients, but if you train 200 people, now your impact is just— you're multiplying it by 200 versus just— there's only so much you can do when you're a little, you know, squirreled away on the West Coast doing what you do, you know?

Right. I mean, I decided that 5 or 6 years ago. It was, I need to find a way to teach more people what I know so that we can have way more people doing it. Not a lot of physicians do what we do. So, we got to train more people to do it.

Agreed. Agreed. Cool. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Nathan, for your time. I really super appreciate it. Again, your book, The Sensitive Patient's Healing Guide, there'll be links below. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Take care.

Great. Thanks for having me.

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