67: Scott Forsgren - The “Better Health Guy” discussing The Forum for Integrative Medicine

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

All right, everyone, welcome to today's show. I know it's been a hot minute, but, you know, Christmas happens, so give me a break. It was also my birthday the day after Christmas, and so that's another reason why. But anyways, I wanted to bring on a friend of mine. This is Scott Forsgren. He is the. The co founder of the Forum for Integrative Medicine, which is a medical conference that we actually attend every year that it has been in existence. And this year, we are actually speaking as the only indoor environmental professionals that are presenting at the conference. And because of that, I kind of wanted to bring Scott on and talk a little bit about what it is and some of the background on the conference and him and the type of information that's being spread and just kind of spread the word. So, Scott, what's going on?

Hey, Brian, thanks so much for having me. Happy birthday.

Thank you.

I bet you a lot of folks that listen to this probably know of you because you are kind of a known commodity out there, but for those of you who don't know his full name, this is the better health guy as well.

I actually thought it'd be kind of interesting to hear just like, very top line, kind of like your background of what got you into being interested in this stuff, and then how you've kind of turned that into this whole conference that you have set up and how that's grown.

Sure, yeah. So my journey started in the late 90s here in Northern California after a tick bite, went several years with some pretty debilitating symptoms. Ultimately was diagnosed as Lyme disease. Mold illness was a significant part of that puzzle as well. Fortunately, working with lots of amazing practitioners that the universe has connected me with, I have gotten to a really good place with my health, but also, over time, migrated more and more into the health arena in terms of doing a podcast myself, doing health coaching, working with people that are looking for answers to their own health. And fortunately for me, I was at a dinner conversation about seven years ago with Susan McCamish, Dr. Christine Gedrick, a few others, and we decided that there was a need for an integrative conference. That was focused on complex chronic illnesses. And so that was what led to the Forum for Integrative Medicine, or what we call TFIM. We had our first event in 2016 and we've had events in San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle. Our event earlier this year, we pivoted at the last minute to turn that into an online event. And we're going to do the same thing again coming up March 5th through 7th of 2021. So that's going to be an online event this year as well. And really the goal of the Forum for Integrative Medicine is to share information between practitioners that will facilitate the treatment of these complex chronic illnesses to help identify the best tools, things that are working in clinical practice. How do we support detoxification, how do we support microbial burden and treating these stubborn infections? How do we bring back balance and well being? And so by making this an event that is focused on practitioners, we're hoping to create a ripple effect that will really have a far reaching implications in terms of improving the lives of patients. And so Susan McCamish is the founder, I'm the co founder and moderator. This year will be our sixth event. We have an amazing medical advisory team as well. I'm so blessed and honored to have Dr. Anne Corson, Dr. Christine Gedrick, Dr. Marie Matheson from Canada, Dr. Neil Nathan. We could not put these events on without their guidance and advisory role. And so I'm so grateful that we have this amazing team working with us. And then, you know, each year we have, we've had an amazing lineup of speakers. I'm particularly excited about the lineup that we have coming up here in March. We have Dr. Ebony Cornish is going to talk about Morgellon's disease. That is a condition very similar to where lyme disease was 10 or 15 years ago, where people think that it's more of a psychosomatic type condition, which is not the case. And so we're excited to have her speaking. Dr. Ann Courson, who has spoken at many or most of our events actually, in fact, she may have spoken at all of them. She's this year going to do more of a workshop talking about how she evaluates complex patients when they come in for a new patient appointment. So we're really excited, excited about that. Dr. Suzanne Gozda from Austin, Texas. She's a neurologist and she's going to be helping to unravel the mysteries of neurodegenerative diseases. Looking at a more functional neurology perspective. She's also involved with the ICI group. So she'll certainly be talking about biotoxins and mold illness and the impact that that has on our neurological system and neurological diseases. We have Dr. Russell Jaffe this year. He's going to talk about immune tolerance, how we build an optimal immune response. We have Dr. Datis Kharazian talking about the role of neuroinflammation. And we know that mold and biotoxins plays a role in that neuroinflammatory conversation. One of my personal mentors and heroes, Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, is going to be speaking about using muscle testing or energetic systems of biofeedback to gain insights into the challenges one might be facing when they're dealing with chronic illness. We have Dr. Deanna Minick that's going to talk about detoxification and using food compounds to support detoxification. We know in the mold illness arena that detoxification support is so critical. Dr. Robert Moiziani, he is a, a leader in the realm of Bartonella, which is a Lyme co infection. So one that Dr. Neal Nathan talks about in terms of being one of the sensitizing agents, mold being the other that can lead to these really ultra sensitive type patients. So we're excited to have him talking about the latest in Bartonella, how do we test for it, treat it and so on. Dr. Neal Nathan this year is going to talk about the cell danger response. And so that work came from Dr. Bob Naviao, UC San Diego. And so that's a model for inflammatory illness. And what can you do to get people out of that cell danger response? Beth o', Hara, who's a functional naturopath, she's going to talk about precision mycotoxin detoxification. So obviously mycotoxins coming from mold exposure, potentially from mold colonization. How do we identify the binders that might be most helpful for specific people that are dealing mold illness based on the mycotoxins that are found in urine mycotoxin testing. She's also going to talk some about mast cell activation syndrome. We know that mold plays a major role in mast cell activation syndrome in terms of that hyperactive immune response. So we're really excited to have her doctor Stephen Porges polyvagal theory talking about the role of the vagus nerve and all of the far reaching implications that that has on our bodily functions. Dr. Frank Shallenberger will be talking about ozone. So excited to have that as a topic that I don't believe we've covered before at any of our prior TFIM events and then Dr. Theo Theohoridis, he's been a speaker previously at one of our events. He's gonna talk this year about the role of cytokine storms in chronic inflammatory conditions. And he's well known in the mast cell activation syndrome realm. So very excited to have him. Dr. Ty Vincent, who's a second time Speake events talking about the role of low dose immunotherapy and how we maybe don't always need to focus on killing microbes, but how do you create immune tolerance, immune integration and using low dose immunotherapy to accomplish that. And then we have Dr. Nasha Winters who is going to talk about metabolic approaches to cancer and we're excited about that bringing more focus into our events on integrative strategies and tools that could be used in helping to support those with cancer. And so we're excited this year to be using some technologies like Slack to create some interactive nature of this event. You know, being a virtual event, we want it to also be exciting and some of that connection that people really like from going to in person conferences. So trying to create more interaction between not only the attendees but also the sponsors. And when we did our event earlier in 2020, that was the first one that we did online. We didn't have any opportunity at the last minute to have exhibitors and sponsors. This year we're excited to be doing that again. We have some amazing people that are joining us as sponsors. So beyond Balance Biopure Bio Resource, which is the company in the US that distributes the Pakana line of products that we really love, envirobiomics. Dr. Carolyn McMaken with frequency specific Microcurrent, she's been a long time participant and supporter of our events. Bob Miller and his team with Functional Genomic Analysis, Genova Diagnostics, Great Plains Hopkins that does a lot of the compounding work in the mold illness arena with things like VIP spray and so on. Priority one nutritionals protocol for Life Balance, Quicksilver Scientific. They play a big role in the liposomal space and detoxification tools. We have Relax, Far Infrared Saunas and then both this year as speakers and sponsors. We're excited to have the two of you. So Corey Levy and Brian Carr will be speaking at the event and their focus is going to be on inspection of buildings looking for mold and that soup of things that can play a role in people that are dealing with illnesses resulting from water damage, building exposure. So we are very excited to have you both as speakers but also to have we inspect as a Sponsor where we can interact with more people throughout the event. So if people are listening and interested in this, it is again a practitioner focused event. So for practitioners that would like to attend, you can learn more at forum for integrativemedicine.org if there are sponsors that would like to join us, you can learn more there as well. And again, this event will be Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We've, we've historically done Thursday, Friday, Saturday to allow people some travel time. This year we're going to do Friday, Saturday, Sunday, March 5th through 7th of 2021. So if people are listening and interested in connecting with like minded people with a tribe or clan that has very similar intention and ideas and is looking for tools to really help support those people that are dealing with these complex chronic illnesses, we would certainly welcome you and appreciate your interest. And I'm excited to experience the event this year.

Yeah, I'm really excited for it too. I was telling you before we started that this event is actually probably my favorite one that we do throughout the years.

I share with the folks that listen that we go to a lot of these things. That's part of what separates how we go through a home and our whole process is that we're learning about this stuff. And while I never claimed to be a doctor or no enough about it, it is good to actually know about it. So you know who you're working with. And, and this has definitely been one of my favorites, favorite events, I think, I think maybe we missed the first one, but we've been at everyone maybe since then, I think.

Right.

Yeah. So I'm really excited and I'm super, super excited to speak. You know, a lot of these conferences have not really done a lot of.

Presentations from the, from the inspection experts. Right. Because it's all, it's always been so, you know, health focus as well it should be. It's a health conference. But the fact that you guys are bringing that in I think is amazing because it's connected. Right. And there's, there's definitely a piece to that. So I'm really pumped about it. For everyone listening who is not a practitioner. After the conference, I'll probably come on and give a quick recap how everything went so you guys could hear that. But that's in a few months. So, um, I'll be talking a lot before that anyway. But anyways, I just, I wanted to let Scott come on and kind of share a little bit about it and support what they're doing because they're very supportive of us as well and I think as many of you know, you know, my goal is to get out and reach 100,000 people this year. And it's these types of relationships and these types of kind of connecting the bridge between the indoor environment and what's going on in the human body. This is how that happens, right? And so this is some of the stuff that we're doing behind the scenes. Just with the way that we talk to each other and now having more of a front facing platform like this, you know, that's, that's going to reach a large number of practitioners and from those practitioners, it's going to have a spider effect out to everyone that they treat. So very, very excited for the conference. I think the virtual format, especially with the slack setups, actually be pretty cool and maybe even more interactive than what a normal conference is like when you kind of think about how like the comments would be coming in during the presentation. So I actually think it's, it's even a cooler way to be interacting versus kind of sitting and kind of watching the whole thing and then trying to go up and you know, the last, the last one of these I spoke at afterwards, you know, the flood of people comes up to the speaker, like trying to ask questions and stuff and you get, you know, a couple seconds with each person. You're maybe there for 15, 20 minutes and that's kind of it. We're here with having an integration piece like this there, there's the ability to be interacting and kind of throughout the presentation if they have other people supporting them. So I think that's pretty awesome too.

So anyways, everyone, Scott, thank you. Also, side note, Scott's podcast, the Better Health Guy, is awesome and you guys should go listen to it. You heard everything that he just rattled off. He knows a lot about all these things and so imagine what he's talking about on his own show. It's probably pretty good, right? So go check that out too and we will talk with everyone later. Thanks.

Thanks, Brian.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.

RA.