166. Functional Health: Our Immune Systems + Increasing Longevity and Healthspan with Dr. Jeffrey Bland

This episode bubbles over with hope for living a healthy life as we continue our conversation with the Functional medicine founding father, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. I share my own story for why root Cause medicine was pivotal for me and I'll tackle controversy within new approaches and what entities might be involved in our getting less than perfect information about our health and and what can help it and what can Destroy it. Join Dr. Bland and me, your chatty certified Functional Medicine health coach, to see what functional medicine might mean for you. Welcome to the Wellness While Walking Podcast. I'm your walking guide and health coach, Carolyn Cohen. Whether you've been walking or otherwise moving regularly or it's fallen off your schedule, be here to help you make your own wellness a priority. We'll plan for about a 30 minute walk each week and while you're ambling, I'll be rambling in your ear. We will talk about walking a bit, but also about wellness in the largest sense of the word so that we can continue on a journey of a beautiful life of no regrets. Let's chat, learn, laugh and move in the most natural way possible and then get back to designing and living the best, most rewarding lives we each ever imagined. Hi. Welcome to episode 166. Thanks for being here with me today. Before we continue, a reminder that I'm not a doctor or mental health professional and the content presented here is for educational and informational purposes only. Please make sure you check with your doctor before making any health or lifestyle changes. It was 2005 and my kids were young and plagued with food allergies and a couple had chronic skin conditions. I was about 10 years into my health journey. I'd already resolved my diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome from about a decade earlier. I was a busy mom of four kids, but I picked up a book called Ultra Prevention that had just been published by the co medical directors at Canyon Ranch, where I'd been lucky enough to visit a few times. And this book was different from the other health books I had read as it spoke to an entire approach to healthcare that was based on prevention and personalization. Yes, I was undertaking this quest for more knowledge to help my family feel better and be healthier, but I still hadn't realized the extent to which we might be able to get to the bottom of the health issues that my kids and I were having. So I was starting to put together that we were experiencing an epidemic of chronic conditions because my kids were in really good company with their peers, also having allergies as well as asthma and ADHD and much more. This book consolidated many things I was learning piecemeal from reading and from my own experience. It spoke about health being personalized and that preventing the dysfunctions of disease was so key, but treating chronic illness with lifestyle interventions was also. It explained the forces behind illness in a way I'd never heard before. And one of the things it did was focus on inflammation. And I don't remember having read about that much prior to that book, at least not in the popular press. So there was an entire chapter that stuck out, you know, with me about inflammation. And I realized that inflammation had played a role in my developing ibs, or irritable bowel syndrome. So I realized what I had done had somehow quieted the inflammation. And what I'd done was I had managed my stress better. I'd gotten some of the ultra processed foods out of my daily diet. I paid attention to gut irritants, and I tried to eliminate them. And I worked on my digestion, which for me included eating less on the run, which had been something I not only had done, but kind of prided myself on. I mean, I was the adult primarily responsible for my four busy kids and my home and my own commitments. And, you know, I liked being busy, and I sort of. I prided myself on being able to balance a lot of commitments. And that forced me a lot, you know, oftentimes to eat on the go or eat quickly. So anyway, all those things I had done to address my ibs, I mean, it made sense that I was able to fight the inflammation that had manifested itself in those very noticeable gut symptoms. But often inflammation is a silent killer, and it can lead to basically all of the main chronic conditions like heart disease, stroke, dementia, asthma, diabetes, and so on. So I was really intrigued to learn more about there being tests that could detect it. So there oftentimes, you know, it being a potential silent killer. The symptoms aren't as noticeable as I had had, I guess, luckily, with ibs. So I'll come back to what happened, you know, when I asked my doctors to run some of those tests I learned about in this 2005 published book by Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Liponis, I think his name is, but I will get that right in the show notes. But this is a long way of saying that what intrigued me about the book was that the authors were not about trying to tamp down symptoms, but instead about getting to the root cause of the symptoms when prevention hadn't worked and something had developed. So, you know, once we had symptoms, not just prescribing a pill to alleviate them, but also looking, or instead really looking for the root cause of what was happening and changing that. It also felt like for the first time I was hearing about the network of our body's systems and what affected them as a whole and how they of course all affected each other. And not just that, but it also took into account all of what's going on outside our bodies and minds and souls and in our environment, which lots of conventional practices overlook, I would say. So in 2005 I had these epiphanies from reading this book and it gave me a jumping off point to explore the research and find what could help me and my family. A few years later I started my first health coaching program. Had there been a functional medicine based health coaching program at a time, I probably would have done that. But in my first certification program I did get to hear from Dr. Hyman as a lecturer, and also from others who practice both in a holistic mode and a bunch of instructors who had other approaches. So the rigor of that program was in exposing us to different approaches, which really did get me to examine many perspectives and sort of train myself to be open minded. So in that way I'm really glad that my first program was more broadly based. And then much later into my coaching career, I was then able to specialize more in functional medicine coaching. Though I haven't really spoken about functional medicine in depth in a few. It really is infused in a lot of what we do talk about and have talked about here for the past 160plus episodes, which is that we have power over our health and well being to a much greater extent than we're led to believe. And also that we're all different. You heard Dr. Bland and yet we are coming back to the wonderful Dr. Bland in just a second. But you heard him say last time that genes tend to account for about 30% of our health span. 30% is a very low failing grade. 30% really isn't a lot. We have 70% of our well being that we can at least somewhat control. The genes are dealt cards, but the rest is often within our ability to change, or it should be. And when we do change what we do or the environment that we're surrounded by, those genes can be turned on and off. There are plenty of reasons in our society and our culture and our current state of the world why this sometimes isn't possible, but I sure hope that proportion gives us hope. Anyway, back to 2005, I was given that perspective in a consolidated book and little Did I know that the course of my career had been impacted and shifted, as well as my health and the health of my family? Though the book was written by these two doctors, it cited the contribution of Dr. Jeffrey Bland to the medical field and this whole being personalized approach. As Dr. Hyman wrote about Dr. Bland and the acknowledgments, he said, Dr. Bland's a true genius and truly noble man who selflessly created the Institute for Functional Medicine where physicians can learn the skills needed to practice the future of medicine today. Dr. Bland was that genius that pulled together a group of docs who were realizing that the modern practice of medicine was missing something, well, maybe a few things, and that there was potential for another approach and the differing approach. This differing approach has had its share of controversies, which I'll touch on after I share the last bit of my conversation with Dr. Bland. So let's do that. First, let's hear the rest of what Dr. Bland has to say. We ended last time with his having shared the story of how he and his colleagues had read about a young woman with crippling illness in a local paper and then helped her find her way back to health and realizing much bigger dreams than she had ever felt were possible. I'll start this part of our conversation with my sharing about my most serious chronic disease autoimmune diagnosis, which followed from Dr. Bland's story. I hadn't really planned to share it, but if it helps one person see hope, then it's worth it. More on that after the conversation as well. So let's cut to the chase with the father of Functional Medicine, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. I do think stories are so important because people can see themselves in the story more so than maybe Anna in the pages of a book, let's say. Although I do want to talk about your book, which is a fantastic roadmap. So you're looking at another one of probably millions of people that functional medicine helped in that. This I'm holding up for Dr. Bland to see. It's a book about psoriatic arthritis. It's very thin, it's not usually too far away from me because I do want to remember from whence I came, which was getting a diagnosis, which is a clinical diagnosis, by the way, for psoriatic arthritis. So I filled, you know, I had a certain number of the required symptoms and I was handed a stack of prescriptions like you said, pretty hard hitting ones that I was probably going to be on for the rest of my Life and a $5 coupon. And by the way, the cost of the medication was upwards of $7,000 back then a month. So a $5 coupon really wasn't going to make much of a dent, even if my insurance company could pay for most of it. And I was reading this little book that I ordered from Amazon that kind of made me depressed every time I looked at it. And I noticed something which is kind of back to what you were talking about earlier in terms of genes not being our destiny. That compared with Japan and people who had psoriasis in Japan and people who had psoriasis in the United States, there was a huge difference in the percentage of people who actually went on to develop psoriatic arthritis. So the book didn't seem to make much of it. But I was like, well, why would that be? And there are certainly potentially things about Japanese genetic makeup that might have been the answer. But I also knew I was coming off of a period of incredible stress. So those two things made me think, you know what, maybe I don't have to take these right away. And I think it's super important to keep finding, keep looking for people who might have a little bit more of an open minded take to maybe postponing medication while we try some other things. And so I found within the same highly esteemed department of rheumatology in New York City, I found another man, another doctor who was willing to let me wait as long as I didn't develop irreversible joint damage. And so in that time I started to look, you know, kind of at what lifestyle things I could do. I knew I needed to manage my stress better. And then I also thought maybe there were some things I could add into my diet. I mean, I thought of myself as pretty healthy, but I did a lot of research and I was fired by that rheumatologist during COVID actually. He's like, you don't have psoriatic arthritis, so I don't need to see you anymore. And it really was because of the understanding of the nature of what happens, like what's our environment, what is happening upstream and what can we potentially manipulate to try without really doing anything too onerous to try to change the course of what develops. And another story that hit me hard from your book was about the BRCA gene, which you referenced in that back in the. I don't know if it was the 20s or the 40s, but the percentage of people who had the gene was somewhere around the same. But the number of cases or the percentage of cases that developed into disease were off the charts. Different as we went through time up until closer to the present time. This is a long way of saying thank you. And it's no small thing to be able to change your life in such a way. I can vouch for that. And I just want more people to know that our destiny is not our genes. And you said 30% and we have a lot of play and that we should be empowered to really take charge of our own health and well being.

Yeah. I think your story is so powerful and there's no better teacher, is there, than personal experience. And I think it exemplifies exactly what's kept me on this path. My wife often asked Jeff, don't you need to just slow down now? I mean, you've kind of done your work. And I would say our work is present until the last breath that we take. And then who knows what the work will be thereafter. We haven't figured that out. We get the chance on the other side maybe. But the work right now for me is to pass forward what myself and my colleagues that have been kind of playing with this idea more than playing, really trying to understand it and apply it in ways that people can put into their lives in. In successful ways. And I think one, one of the things that has been my learning and it's. It's probably going to occupy the remainder of my life. As my feature set of focus is there are only three ways that our body principally speaks to the outside world. 24, 7, 365 is gaining information and translating that into body's functions. And those three ways are through our nervous system, obviously through our mucosal cell layers in our body, which are our basic respiratory tract and our gastrointestinal lining. And then the third is our immune system. And the immune System is working 24 7, not just when we're exposed to an infectious organism alone, but it's constantly doing seek and destroy and seek and rejuvenate activities throughout our body through the various extraordinary complexity and wonderful architecture and kind of magic artistry of the immune system and its innate system, its adaptive system and the T lymphocyte system. And what I've come to learn is that all three of those systems are directly interfaced and influenced by how we think, act, eat, move and consume or let's say, are related to our environment through the air we breathe and through the liquids we drink and through the foods we eat and so forth. And so this concept that the immune system is like the shop box that communicates with the nervous system and with the mucosals of our body, they're all in cahoots, working together to defend us in 24, 7. And if they lose their resilience, if they lose their functional capability to be resilient, then it sets us at a state where the entree of numerous subspecialties of medicine might start visiting our lives. Because the one feature set that we know of all chronic illnesses, including long Covid, are alterations in the immune system that translate out into brain function, heart function, lung function, liver function, just organ d'. Azure. The immune system is present, it's omnipresent throughout the body. It is constantly being asked to do its work throughout the body, to repair and regenerate and to defend us against engagement either from foreigners or from injuries and recycling injured tissue to make new and replaceable. So this construct that the immune system health or function is a determinant for overall trajectory of our health patterns throughout our life is extraordinarily valuable. And it's really been brought to life, I think with what we've learned from SARS COV2. But I think what we now also recognize is that if you look at the most recent scientific discoveries about immune systems, what you find is that the age of our immune system, which by the way may not the biological age of our immune system may not be the same age we have in birthdays. You can have a biological age of an immune system that's older or younger than your age and birthday. But what has been found now through this type of research the last decade or so, is that the age of our immune system is the best predictor of the years that we will be alive, our life expectancy and also of our health span. And so to measure one thing, to try to give you a insight into your health card or where you were going in your life, it would be understanding the function of your immune system. That to me is a huge wake up call for me as to when we think about upstream or root cause, let's make sure we got that immune system working effectively.

Thank you so much for us to think about there. There's a wonderful chapter. Well, your book, let me just say, is a really helpful roadmap. Especially if somebody isn't sure they need to see a functional medicine doctor for whatever reason. It's not possible. There are a number of assessments. Everything is broken down into some really very easy to answer questions. And then you can see sort of is this one of the processes that you're having a hard time with? And one of those is the defense. So there's a lot of wonderful information in the disease delusion about that. I also will link for the listener for some ways to figure out your biological age or the age of your immune system and maybe get to work on thinking about how, you know, what is the next step you can take to make sure that it's a balanced one. I know a lot of times people talk about bolstering the immune system, but sometimes it's an overactive one and really balances is the key. And so learning about that, I think I'd love to dive deeper into that on the show. I also think it's really interesting because I think until 2020, we thought we were doing a great job with acute illness and managing acute illness. And then we weren't really focused on chronic disease enough. And that was where a lot of our challenges were. And then suddenly there was the collision of those two things. And I believe because of our lack of overall health, that with the basics of lifestyle behaviors, we were much more vulnerable to the effects of COVID 19 and I think it's taught us quite a bit that beep indicates we're about halfway through the episode. So if you're not walking a loop, you might want to turn around and head back. You focused at the beginning of your career on prevention. And I think what we're talking about in terms of laying the foundations of health or not, happens over a long period of time in many cases. How did you find that it was best to communicate to people why it was important before there was any real reason to think?

So what I've come to learn, and I think this is no, like, major enlightenment, it's just kind of sensible, is that people are willing to try new ideas, but they want to see some results within a measurable period of time to know whether these changes they made are really worthwhile. And so, you know, if we have kind of broad based prevention concepts saying you will prevent heart disease if you do the following, but your heart disease may not occur for 20 years and you won't even know if you really prevented it, because if you don't get it, you're not sure if you wouldn't have done anything, would you prevent it in any way? And so, you know, there's this whole kind of confusion about prevention, which is why probably people don't comply very well with these concepts. What I came to recognize is if you don't deliver something in a program that really produces a fairly quick response in what I'll call the feeling state, something that that person can feel, they think Better, they have more energy, they are more alert, they sleep better, they are less grouchy. You know, all these kind of variables, their skin improves, they lose weight. I mean there's, there's all these variables that associate with a feeling state. And so my attention has really been focused on how do we do, do quick things to produce long term good outcomes. And that's why I again, I like the immune system. Because if you do the right things for your immune system, it, it turns over about every three months and it's a new immune system. You're producing hundreds of thousands of new immune cells every second. So how do you then make sure that your immune system is friendly? Because that will speak to the rest of the body in friendly terms. And you'll produce things like better sleep and better cognition and, and lower pain and less inflammation because all inflammation is derived out of the imbalanced immune system. So that has been the focus and that's what led me ultimately into this Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, which I never thought I'd be into organic farming, but lo and behold, I'm an organic farmer and we own parts of organic farms in upstate New York. And we have a Fisnal Mellerenberg that's producing our first ever organic Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat, which has immune strengthening nutrients. And that, you know, I would have never believed in my life I would have been doing this, but I've drawn into that as a consequence of trying to find solutions to immune functions that produce quick hits in the way people feel different. Because once they feel better, then they're more likely to stick with it and do more. That's, that's the approach that I believe with prevention.

Thank you so much. I could go on and on talking to you. You have changed millions of lives. I appreciate the time you've given us today. And the listener, I'm sure as well, I will follow up with them on some of the things I didn't get to answer and more about your book and the work that you've done and how really just world changing it's been. So I will do some future episodes without you here smiling across the screen at me, but very much honoring what you've accomplished and bringing it forward to people in their day to day life, which is a real gift. So thank you so very much, Dr. Bland.

Just give you a shout out. I think what you're doing, this is infection, you know, this is viral. This is 1 become 2, become 4 become 8. We need to multiply this infection of good health. Across the global population. And what you're doing is really a catalyst to that process. And I can't thank you enough for your advocacy and your efforts. It's repelled by one person at a time, good health. So I thank you so much.

Thank you once again, As you heard, Dr. Bland plans to focus the rest of his career on better understanding our complex and elegant immune system and translating that into next steps for us to take to enjoy better health. I love his perspective on work, by the way, even as forces in society nudge him to slow down. This is a passion, a life's work, and another reason why I loved speaking with Dr. Bland. Anyway, we've heard more about cytokines in the past few years than we ever have. And my first real introduction to them beyond studying them in bio was, you know, and their importance to my health, I guess, was in that same book, 2005 book, Ultra Prevention, Understanding how to Balance the Word of the Year makes an appearance. Balancing the immune system to get it to function the best it can can help us increase our life expectancy and critically, our health span. So I promised a few things. One was that I wanted to add a little bit more information to the story of my diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis. One thing I hadn't connected the dots for you on was this whole specialist thing. When I got diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, the diagnosing doctor who was a top rheumatologist, handed me that stack of prescriptions and don't forget the $5 coupon, and he told me if I wasn't going to take them, I wouldn't be his patient. And by that time I did know enough to be wary. But I shuddered to think what would have happened had I taken them, because I'd still be on them now. I and I know I'd be experiencing serious side effects by now. That's not to say that these drugs can't be helpful and we might decide eventually that their benefits offset the side effects. But I wasn't ready to do that then, and I needed to find a doctor who would monitor me for irreversible joint damage while allowing me to try to reduce the symptoms I was having in other ways. And that's the dot I haven't connected for you yet. I recently did talk, and I'll link to the episode in the show Notes about an article. It was in the New York Times Magazine 10 years ago and it was called A Boy with a Thorn in His Joints. I'll link to it again. But basically it was about A regular mom who had a three year old diagnosed with arthritis. She first started him on all the prescribed medications, but there were multiple issues with those and things kept getting worse anyway, not better. So she listened to another mother who had seemingly helped her child return to a normal life with, I guess what was considered an alternative health protocol. And this ended up working for the boy at the center of the story. And it's pretty compelling anecdotal account of how looking at disease differently can sometimes open other doors, let's just say, and especially that gluten sensitivity exists and it can be a powerful contributor to someone experiencing symptoms of poor health. So anyway, one of the rheumatologists mentioned in this article was looking to connect autoimmune arthritis. Actually, plural of arthritis is arthritides. So he was looking to connect autoimmune arthritis to the gut microbiome, which is the collection of microbes or bacteria in our gut that A, outnumber the number of human cells in the body and B, control a lot of our health by being balanced. Ding, ding, ding. I'll stop, okay? I promise I'll stop. So they do control a lot of our health by being balanced or imbalanced, which is called dysbiosis. This doc was in the same top rheumatology department at the same top hospital as the doctor I'd seen who wasn't willing to give me a chance to postpone starting those hard hitting drugs that I'd be on for the rest of my life. So I did connect with this new doc that was mentioned in the article. And while he felt like his research that he talked about in the article on microbes was probably too early to have an impact on my care protocol, he was still willing at least to wait until there were signs of my body being harmed by the disease before I started on medication. So that's a really good illustration of trying to find the best practitioner we can. And, you know, we'll talk about that more. Another thing I said I'd come back to is the controversy about functional medicine. And seriously, this is the kind of topic I could do a miniseries on. If you were at my house, I could talk to you all weekend about this. Our information that we get is very, very tailored by forces that we don't see working. This is one of the aspects of having to walk against traffic to be healthy. Because what we get for health information can be so skewed by countless invisible entities. And I could give a zillion examples. But let's talk about one that's been in the news in the past week, which is that there's a Tufts University led effort to try to rank foods as healthy or not. This is not the first attempt to do this. It's just that food is complicated and situations are complicated. And so it often doesn't go that well to rank foods on like a red, yellow or green light system. And often, in my opinion, they get a lot of things wrong, like slamming foods for some attribute that I think has health benefits and vice versa. We've all seen how what we know to be highly processed sugary cereals get labeled healthy in certain ranking systems. In this Tufts University effort, there had been some headlines about some sugary breakfast cereal being ranked as healthier than a steak, and we won't go there right now. But the work being done at Tufts is being funded in part by the Danone Company, French company that makes den and yogurts and many other products. The nutrition site from this Tufts effort says that the company Danone had nothing to do with the design or the results of the study. But we know that the effects of such sponsorship are insidious and the researchers might not realize what they're doing. But oftentimes, whoever sponsors the study has an impact, and it has certainly the ability to impact what we learn about the study. While there were lots of rankings of various high processed high sugar treats listed by names and brands in the study, when it came to yogurt, there were no brands used. And the researchers, you know, like I said, they were really happy to evaluate Quakers, Captain Crunch or Kellogg's Raisin Bran. But I didn't see any data on Dannon's Danimal line of sugar filled yogurts that are marketed to kids. So again, the information we get is often corrupted and often that's for financial gain. I'll just touch on this next part briefly, but let me know if you want more in depth coverage of it. If you do, check out the Wikipedia site for Functional Medicine and many of its founders, you'll see that the entry is not open to editing, as most Wikipedia entries are. There are a lot of misconceptions in that description and no one's allowed to contest it. And similarly, if we're using Google as our search engine and other search engines as well, they're filtering out a lot of potentially useful information for us to be able to learn based on what goes into the search engines algorithm. So it's really incumbent on us to use our best media literacy skills when we're trying to find out what's Right. And I guess I'll just say that Big Pharma and Big Food are powerful entities. They get their way into the US government and probably that's true in other countries as well. There are books written on the power that they have over our health. But when a group of conventionally trained medical practitioners observe that our health system isn't able to improve the health of millions of us who suffer with chronic diseases, and they decide to take a step back and look at the human body as a whole and try to address causes instead of aiming a fire hose at symptoms, which I'll come back to in a minute, I'd say we need to be open minded enough to consider this approach. Right. They, they came from within the system, they saw the system wasn't working, they went out on a limb and tried a new approach. And I really think that's super important. And then just about the fire hose at the symptoms part. Quelling symptoms isn't curing them, it's just reducing symptoms. And often that doesn't last forever. And again, it often causes other symptoms. So I would ask that we're open to looking at things differently if we see something that isn't working and also, by the way, so incredibly unsustainably expensive. Okay. And then we also need to think about who's trying to stop these practitioners. You know, they're trying to stop them in their tracks. And this is a bit of a departure for me. But we, you know, we continue to be harmed by bad information. And so it really bothers me when an entire movement is squelched without really looking at the research. And I can't tell you in my own experience, you know, since I've been following functional medicine since 2005, I can't really tell you how many principles that are part of functional medicine, how many of these things I've been, you know, I've seen that were originally written off as suspect or quackery, and now how these are embraced and followed by conventional medicine because the research is there. So one last story before I wrap up today. I read that book Ultra Prevention when I lived in the Boston area. And I had a lovely primary care doctor who was a professor at Harvard's medical school. She was really wonderful. And because I'd read the book and I already had had ibs, I knew inflammation was a potential issue for me. And I also had a family history of heart disease. And the simple blood test for inflammation, the high sensitivity C reactive protein test, had some research supporting its predictive ability of heart disease. So I asked her to include this simple blood test in all the rest that I would get for my annual checkup. And she didn't know what it was. I was a layperson and she was a professor at Harvard Medical School, and she'd never heard of this test, even though there were research studies on its predictive ability. Now, I don't really remember a time when the CRP was ridiculed, but I can tell you there are many examples of things that were ridiculed initially that are now common conventional practice. And certainly CRP has only recently made it into a fraction of, you know, primary care doctors, blood test, recommendations for an annual physical. It's probably not that many that do that still. So it wasn't maybe ridiculed, it just wasn't used. But one of the ideas that was ridiculed, and I watched this for years, if not decades, was that antibiotics could disrupt the microbiome balance and that countermeasures might help restore that balance. And that that was important. So that was really pooh, poohed for a very long time. And it was actually my vet who suggested a course of probiotics when our dog had to be on antibiotics. Let's just say this is a huge topic, but I think, you know, those who are ridiculed on understanding that antibiotics can have a detrimental effect on the, you know, beneficial bacteria within our gut, not just the ones that are causing us to be ill. I think that the people who initially suggested balancing antibiotics with probiotics or food that has probiotics or prebiotic capabilities, you know, I think they've been exonerated. And then finally, another great example is vitamin D and other supplements as well. But for a long time, the importance of vitamin D was really poorly understood or at least wasn't being talked about in actual doctor's office with patient care, despite research showing that as being low is associated with many illnesses. Well, again, after all the ridiculing, there's more understanding of the importance of this. Well, it's actually not a vitamin. Vitamin D is a hormone. But there's more understanding of the power of many micronutrients to contribute to health when they're in balance. So I guess my call at the end of a lengthy episode is to keep an open mind and to try to be aware of the filters that we're getting our information through. And it's really hard and we shouldn't have to be in this position. But I'm going personally to err on the side of looking for root causes and antecedents of disease any day versus signing on for the next prescription to tamp down my symptoms. That might work only for a short period of time and might come at a cost to my health. So I'm not saying again that there's no space for prescription medications. I'm just going to try to look elsewhere first because I really am not sure we're getting all the information that we need. Okay, let's stop there. This episode is long. A huge thank you to Dr. Bland for spending time with us and thank you for taking the time to consider your own health and well being. And if you think this information is helpful, please consider sharing it. Thanks to all of you who already do share the show on social media. If that's not your jam, then showing a friend how to listen on their phone or sending a specific episode to a loved one are also great options for sharing and they're all super appreciated. There's more information on this and how to share and functional medicine and Dr. Bland's thorough and helpful book in the show notes actually, I should take one more second and say that while there were people in the functional medicine movement that wrote books sooner for lay people, as I talked about, Dr. Bland's book is really thorough and can lead us to the care we need if we don't have the ability to see a functional medicine practitioner ourselves, or if we just just want to understand our health better. It's very helpful and thorough. Okay, thanks again for putting yourself on your own list. Please stay front and center at least some of the time until we're back together again. A reminder that neither I nor my podcast guests are doctors or healthcare professionals of any kind, and nothing on this podcast or associated content should be considered medical advice. The information provided by Wellness While Walking Whole Life Workshop and Bermuda Road Wellness, LLC is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before undertaking any new healthcare regimen, including walking.