Answering Your Questions About Lyme Disease, Detoxing, And More

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Every single thing with the brain that we get, depression, anxiety, OCD, autism, ADD, these are all inflammatory diseases of the brain. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now, I know there are a lot of functional medicine practitioners out there like I am, and we're all trying to get the best data we can to help our patients optimize their health. And that means we're often looking at things like hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and more to help us find the most effective path to health and healing. But it usually means having to order multiple tests from multiple different labs, which makes the whole process of ordering, tracking, and compiling lab results really difficult and time consuming. And that is where Rupa Health can help. Rupa Health is a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2, 000 specialty tests from over 20 labs like Dutch, vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. They make the process of ordering labs simple and fast, allowing you to cut down on paperwork and giving you more time to spend with your patients. This is a much needed option in the functional medicine space. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check out our free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com that's R-U-P-A-H-E-A-L-T-H dot com. If I've learned one thing during my two decades in functional medicine, it's that we're all unique. No two people are alike, which means we can all benefit from personalized medicine. But for most of the history of medicine, individualized healthcare just was not possible. We couldn't look inside the body and see what was really going on. But now, thanks to advances in technology, that is changing for the better and it's doing so in some amazing ways. And I've got a great example of amazing healthcare technology that I'm excited to tell you about. It's called InsideTracker, a wellness tracker that uses science and technology to deliver ultra-personalized healthcare guidance. They can analyze your blood, your DNA, your lifestyle habits, and then give you actionable recommendations to help you meet your health and wellness goals. InsideTracker provides provides you with the information you need to make powerful health decisions. It gives you a customized dashboard to help you track and reach your goals. And the numbers are calibrated to your body, as opposed to just listening to the normal ranges that your doctor might tell you. It also helps you understand those numbers and take action on them. If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed in to meet your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker. Right now they're offering my community 20% off at insideTracker.com/healthiq Dr. Hyman, that's D-R-H-Y-M-A-N, that's InsideTracker, I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N, and you'll see the discount code in your cart. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to a new series on the Doctor's Pharmacy called Masterclass, where we dive deep into popular health topics, including inflammation, autoimmune disease, brain health, sleep, and lots more. And today, my friend and podcast host, Drew Prohovitz and I are doing something really fun. We're answering community questions that you guys have in a new video app called hiHo. You can follow me on hiHo and submit your questions there and you might see them on the podcast. Welcome, Drew.

Mark, great to be here. We got some fantastic questions. And the first one we're gonna tee up here is from Whitney who has a question about OCD and the gut microbiome. So here's our first question from Whitney.

Hi, Dr. Hyman. My name is Whitney and I'm from Oregon. My question to you is how does OCD and your gut play a role in each other and what can you do to help with your OCD? Thank you.

Wow, Drew, that is the best question I've heard in a long time. Thank you, Whitney. And the reason is it reminded me of a story of a patient I had years ago that blew my mind that I wrote about in my UltraMind Solution, which is about how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first. And this patient had severe OCD. I mean, she wouldn't, move anything off the floor in her house. She wouldn't clean her house. I mean, it was a disaster area. It really was a public health menace. And she was, you know, very smart woman. You could talk to her, she thinks she's totally fine, but she had some weird pathological thing going on where she would not clean her house and just stuff piled up and piled up. And it was a disaster. And so I said, look, I, you know, let's see if we can just get you healthy and we'll start with, you know, looking at what's going on with your body. We ended up doing obviously a stool test and I did also test for bacterial overgrowth. We call this small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And also she had a very high level on her stool test of something called beta-glucuronidase. And she also had something high in her urine called DHPPA. Now these are markers of a particular bacteria called Clostridium. and they are not actually good for you. And there's a bad kind that I had a few years ago that caused me to have colitis. This is not that kind, but it's a bad kind of bacteria. And I said, let's try to just clean up your gut and reset your gut. So I literally, I gave her an antibiotic. I gave her any fungal. And it was like a miracle. Literally like a miracle juice. She said, my OCD is gone. I cleaned up my house. I don't know what happened. It's the first time I've done this in 20 years. And I was like, holy cow, what is going on here? And this is, you know, almost a decade and a half ago, nobody was talking about the microbiome in the brain. Nobody barely was talking about food in the brain. So I think OCD can have many, many causes, just like any disease. In fact, you know, the problem with traditional medicine is that we think we know what's wrong with you when you get a diagnosis. Oh, we say you have OCD or you have depression or you have rheumatoid arthritis or you have diabetes or you have, let's say, migraines. Well, those just describe the name of the problem. They don't describe the cause. Functional medicine is about the root cause, and you can have one disease that has many, many causes. So, for example, OCD might be caused by your microbiome, and I think it's a very important step to do an elimination diet, to reset your gut, to actually look for fungal overgrowth, bacterial overgrowth, to do stool testing, urine organics testing, to find a functional medicine doctor to do that with you, and to treat what you find. And sometimes you might need an antibiotic, you might need an antifungal, But the truth is you kind of got to get to the root. I'll tell you a couple of the stories about OCD that it's reminded me of, but the remarkable thing is that we actually can treat this and it may not be just an emotional disorder, it may be a biological disorder of the brain. And Drew, I don't know if I even told you this and I don't know if I've shared this on the podcast, but I recently, and I'm going to do a podcast with this doctor from Harvard, Christopher Palmer, Dr. Christopher Palmer. He's a Harvard psychiatrist who works at McLean's, which is one of the top psychiatric hospitals in the world. And he wrote a book called Brain Energy. And he asked me for a quote and I read the book and I was like, Holy cow, this sounds very much like UltraMind Solution. So I said, you know, geez, I'm sure happy to help you. Why don't you go ahead and read my book just in case, you know, you might give you some insights about things you're interested in. And he sent me back this very sheepish email basically saying, Look, Dr. Hyman, I'm really sorry. I promise I did not plagiarize your book because he found all the same kinds of things that I found about the metabolic disorder of the brain. We call this metabolic encephalopathy. and when the brain is not working, it doesn't hurt like your joint hurts if you have arthritis, but it creates behavior problems, mood problems, attention problems, memory problems. And so it's really quite profound. And he had a patient where he discovered this by looking at a patient with schizophrenia. And this patient had severe schizophrenia, severe hallucinations, basically was in his apartment all the time, never went out. except to see his doctor gets medication every month. And he was on this medication. Unfortunately, a lot of the psychiatric medications for schizophrenia cause insulin resistance and diabetes and obesity. And he gained 150 pounds on the medication. And he was kind of sick of it. He's like, Doc, can you help me? And he knew he wasn't good. The doctor knew he was not going to go see a nutritionist, going to go see anybody. He said, well, I heard a ketogenic diet might be helpful to help you lose weight. You've got insulin resistance. So he tried it. not only did he lose 150 pounds, but his schizophrenia went away. Okay, this is not a treatable condition or a curable condition given traditional conventional psychiatry. I mean, you just have to give severe psychiatric medications like Thorazine. We call the Thorazine Shuffle because people are so sedated they can barely walk and modern versions of that drug. Another case, it just sort of woke him up to realize that the brain is actually dysfunctional. And most psychiatrists pay attention to the mind, but not the brain. And most neurologists pay attention to the brain, but not the mind. So they're kind of related. In order for your mind to work, your brain has to work. And he, by putting this guy on a ketogenic diet, he changed the metabolic health of the brain, he changed the inflammation, he got rid of gluten and lots of other inflammatory foods, and his schizophrenia went away. I had another case of a young boy who had severe OCD. and he was a nice kid. And from one day to the next, he developed a really severe OCD and nobody could figure it out. Turned out he had something called pandas. It's pediatric autoimmune neurologic psychiatric disorder. It's kind of what it stands for, something like that. And essentially what happens is you get strep, which is a bacteria, but that strep produces a toxin that affects the brain and causes OCD. And so for him, we had to treat him. And we found, in fact, he did have this problem. You can test it with laboratory testing. and we treated him with ozone. And again, it was like a miracle because ozone is one of the best germicidal agents on the planet and anti-inflammatory agents, and his OCD went away. So I have treated many, many patients with OCD by using functional medicine to get to the root cause. And for you, it might be your gut or your microbiome, or it might be something else. So I would encourage people to really dive deep with a good functional medicine doctor or a functional medicine psychiatrist. There's not enough of them out there, but there's a way to get to the answer to this. And I think it gives people hope when I tell these stories, 'cause it's like, wow, maybe my depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, OCD, schizophrenia, you name it, can be helped using an approach that deals with the root cause. It helps the body get back in balance. It takes away the bad stuff and puts in the good stuff.

Great answer, Mark. And I think the thing that you mentioned at the end of your answer is that even if the gut microbiome isn't 100% of the story, it is still a major part of the story. And for sure, for many people, Even it's not the whole 100% that is the solution, a lot of individuals see a significant improvement. So don't ignore that on your journey to get to the root of why inflammation is happening in the brain.

I agree. I didn't really go into it enough. I kind of glossed over it, but I think I always start whenever I'm treating anybody for any mental health issue or any issue that's inflammatory. By the way, every single thing with the brain that we get, depression, anxiety, OCD, autism, ADD, what else is there? Schizophrenia, and obviously all the memory disorders, Parkinson's, these are all inflammatory diseases of the brain. And the number one, the number two, and the number three, and the number four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 sources of inflammation in the body are always the gut. Now, there are other things obviously like Lyme disease and mold and other things, but it's, you know, the one, two, three things that I think of our gut. And I'm always start with the gut. I always start with elimination diet. I start with a gut reboot. I make sure I treat the SIBO, the SIFO bacteria, fungus overgrowth. And I, I do a whole gut reboot. And I actually drew, because my gut was such a massive years ago, we created this product called gut food, which is like a multivitamin for the gut that contains five highly researched ingredients that all work in Synergy, prebiotics, probiotics and polyphenols to reset the gut. And it's something that I Take myself, I recommend to all my family members and my patients. In fact, we give it to our entire staff in our company because it's so important for people to keep their gut healthy.

All right, Mark, let's tee up the next question. This one is from Tammy who has some big picture questions that she wants to ask about Lyme's disease with a family member.

Hey, Dr. Hyman. So my husband has Lyme disease. He's taken antibiotics for a couple of times and still flaring up. Just looking for some advice. Dammit. You just open a can of worms or maybe a can of ticks. I don't know. This. If I could literally eliminate one condition from the planet Earth, it would be tick-borne illnesses. They are awful. I've had them. I've had Lyme disease. I've had Babesia. I've been sick from them. I get it. I promise you. and I've seen patient after patient who struggled not only for years, but often decades with chronic Lyme. And when I say chronic Lyme, I'm including every single tick-borne disease, Babesia, Ehrlichia, Babesiosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, all the tick-borne diseases. And there's, even with Lyme disease, there's multiple strains of Lyme disease. And I spent a lot of my life studying it, both from a personal interest because I was really sick from it, and from trying to help my patients and figuring out what works and what doesn't work. go online, if you listen to read books, you're going to get a thousand different ideas. And I'm just going to share with you what I've come to understand is probably the best approach. But just for the caveat that you're going to hear a lot of other different opinions that it might be different from mine. I'm just going to share with you what I found really works for me and my patients and, and what I've been able to call from working with this disease for a long time, looking at the scientific literature, looking at actually often things that aren't in the scientific literature that people are using that can work. So what is Lyme disease? Lyme disease, and again, it's all the rubric of all these different conditions. They're all manifest a little bit differently. But essentially it's a illness that you get from a tick bite. And the ticks carry these little spirochetes, these little nasty things, almost kind of like syphilis. And syphilis used to be the great masquerader. We called it the great masquerader because it would cause all these problems. And the same thing with chronic Lyme. Autoimmune diseases, memory issues. I mean, Chris Christopherson had, quote, dementia, but it was Lyme disease. It can cause heart disease, arthritis, it can cause all sorts of gut issues, it can cause skin problems, it can cause cognitive issues. It's just a huge problem. And essentially, you can also manifest this chronic fatigue syndrome and people can't figure it out. Now, let's just talk a little bit about, I'm gonna go kind of down the rabbit hole here because you asked and I'm gonna say it. I don't really get a chance to talk about this much, but I think it's an important thing to talk about. diagnostics is challenging. You know, we have antibody tests. You've heard of coronavirus antibodies. They tell you if you have the infection. They don't necessarily tell you that you have the infection. They tell you that you've had the infection. And that's important to know for sure. But the question is, do you have an active infection? So a lot of our tests on antibody tests, you go to the regular doctor, they test you, they go, oh, you're fine. You don't have Lyme disease. They're really not that sensitive. Sensitive tests means if you have it, it'll pick it up. In other words, if you have a bladder infection, you pee in a cup and you look under microscope, it's like 100, you're gonna find it, right? But this kind of test, you may not, and it's hidden because they hide, these little sneaky ticks hide inside your cells and they're hard to detect. There's another level of testing called PCR testing, which is often helpful to look at fragments of the DNA you know about coronavirus, PCR testing, same thing. And so, we can detect these tick infections through PCR testing. Now, I had a positive PCR and I had, you know, I definitely had it. And when you have that, you have it for sure. It's active floating around your blood. But sometimes you don't have that. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. And then you can look at your immune response to Lyme. And that's more what I look at because these are tests that were developed in Germany and Europe. We now have labs in the United States that do them. And essentially it looks at how do your white blood cells respond in real time. to some tick that they give in a laboratory. And that is called lymphocyte response assay. And that's very helpful. And we call it an LE spot test. And we use that a lot. And I find that really helpful to detect how your immune system's reacting. We look at your interferons, we look at all kinds of cytokines, you know about cytokines from the cytokine storm. We can tell, for example, natural killer cells go down, CD57 is one of the immune cells goes down. So we have ways of looking at this indirectly. Sometimes you can't really tell for sure even with all these tests, so you have to kind of go on a clinical diagnosis. And Dr. Horowitz, Richard Horowitz is one of the Lyme experts, written a lot of books on this. A friend of mine, he's really quite brilliant about this. And he developed a Lyme questionnaire, which I encourage you to check it out. It's called MSIDS, M-S-I-D-S, and you can download it, it's free. And you can see, you know, if you score high on this, It's likely you might have Lyme. Now you might never know you got a tick bite. I don't remember ever getting a tick bite. I don't remember pulling a tick off me. I don't remember having a rash. I don't remember having anything, but I had full blown Lyme disease. And it's like that for a lot of patients. They might not know. Now, if you live in the desert somewhere and Australia, probably you don't have Lyme disease, but pretty much everywhere in America, there's some degree of tick-borne illness. So then you got the diagnosis. Let's say we find you have it. but you know most doctors just look for Lyme. They don't look for Babesia or Leishmania or Bartonella or many of the other infectious agents that come with ticks or they don't look for different strains. So it's really important to do a cast a wide net when you suspect it. So let's say you have it, then what do you do? Well, traditionally you give three weeks of antibiotics and you're done. But that doesn't work unless you really have acute Lyme. If you have acute Lyme for sure, you get a tick bite, you notice it, you have a rash, you go in the emergency room, you get doxycycline for three weeks, that usually knocks it out for most people. But when you have chronic Lyme, it doesn't. And I'm just going to take you through a number of different frameworks that people are using. One, which I'm going to sort of tell you what they are and then I'll tell you what I generally do, what I think is the most effective and the least harmful. One is long-term chronic antibiotics. Some people put them on, some doctors put people on antibiotics for three months, for three years. That's a problem. because those antibiotics are not benign. They cause gut issues and many other problems. You get a lot of secondary issues. They may control the symptoms somewhat, but they're not. No magic bullet. And it's. It's just a rough road. So I'm not a big fan of that. I'm okay sometimes with a short course, six weeks, hit them hard, you know, and hit the different forms, because there's a lot of different forms along. There's a cyst form, intracellular form. So you've got to hit all the forms of different drugs to get them to go away and different. different ticks need different drugs. So it's not like one size fits all. Sometimes you usually have not one infection, you might have two or three. Like I had Lyme and Babesia. Some people have Lyme and Bartonella. So you kind of have to go through all of the right treatments for each one. We use a lot of herbs. That's another category. There's a lot of people who use herbs, Dr. Jang herbs, Byron White herbs, there's the Cowden protocol. So there's a lot of protocols and herbal protocols that often can be very effective. I had a patient, for example, who had chronic Lyme and used the Jang herbs, which are from Dr. Jang, who's a Chinese physician, Chinese medicine physician. And one of the, one of the herbs there is garlic. Now, garlic, we know, is a very powerful antimicrobial. It works, but you smell pretty bad. You want to be friends while you're taking the drug, taking the herb. So herbal protocols can be helpful. I use often as, as an adjunct. And then we go down a different rabbit hole. So there's a long-term antibiotics, there's short-term antibiotics. There's the herbs. And then there's all the stuff that I think actually works, which is way off the grid. Unfortunately, it's not easily found for most people. It's not accessible to a lot of people, and it can be expensive. But I think these are some of the most effective treatments. One is ozone therapy. And ozone therapy doesn't have to be that expensive. You can actually do rectal ozone. You can buy a machine for $800. You can do it at home. You can do it every day. And that's kind of a very inexpensive way. to get ozone on your own every day. And for people who have Lyme, I do recommend that and it can help but it takes a little longer than doing the IV version. And then there's intravenous ozone, we call it multi-pass or 10-pass ozone. I think that is one of the most important foundations of tick-borne illness treatment and many other illnesses.

But that they would have to do just to jump in, Mark, that they would have to do with practitioner and even in general with ozone, They should really be maybe trained by somebody or go through some sort of onboarding.

For sure, for sure. You need to find a physician. You need to be a doctor. You can't just, you know, kind of wing it and you need to get intravenous ozone by a trained physician. And there's training programs out there. And in Europe, it's very widespread and very popular here. It's less so, but you can still find it. And, and, and there's a, we can link in the show notes to a link of all the functional, I mean, functional medicine docs and also all the the ozone trained doctors in America and you can see who's in your state. And so that's a good place to start. The second thing I think that can be very helpful are peptides. And peptides are these small molecular weight proteins that are like little mini proteins and that your body uses to regulate all kinds of things including your immune system. So thymosin alpha 1, thymosin beta 4 fragments and others can be really helpful. LL-37, I'm just kind of rattling them off. But there's a number of peptides out there that are antimicrobial peptides that are immune boosting peptides, and that can be really helpful in helping people have their own immune system start to fight this. It's sort of like immunotherapy. Think about, you know, cancer and immunotherapy, where they, these treatments actually use your own immune system to kill the cancer. And then there's some things that have seen maybe a little far out, like hyperbaric oxygen therapy. That's essentially where you go in a decompression chamber, which they use for scuba diving. and you go down under two atmospheres of pressure or more under 100% oxygen. And guess what? Bugs don't like oxygen. What did one of the famous chief justices in the United States Supreme Court years ago said? The best disinfectant is sunlight. So, we need to, you know, oxygen is a great therapy. In fact, if you just go to PubMed, which is the National Library of Medicine research studies, you'll see an oxygen, intravenous oxygen, and you'll see it's actually been used in medical treatments for all kinds of things, including infections. So hyperbaric oxygen therapy can also be helpful. And that's an adjunct. I'll usually use herbs, I'll use antibiotics with that, and ozone, sometimes combinations of these therapies help. And then there's kind of a last resort therapy, which we use in patients who just don't get better. And this has often been a miracle for people who have been sick for 20 years. It's called hyperthermia. And essentially what it is, is it gives you a fever. You under medical supervision with intravenous lines, under anesthesia, they heat up your body to about 107 degrees. Now, that sounds crazy, and I've had it done twice and I'm still alive. And I've sent my patients down to Mexico, to Europe to do this. And often it's one of those treatments that they go, my God, Dr. Hyman, this stopped it. This is the thing that worked. After 20 years of struggling, I got a little better from this, this and this, but this is what knocked it out. So I think there's all kinds of therapies out there. and of course you have to also fix your gut and get rid of heavy metals and deal with mold and balance your hormones and get your mitochondria working and get your nutritional levels right and optimize. So it's a comprehensive functional medicine approach that has to be used to treat chronic Lyme. But it is treatable and I'm a perfect example of someone who actually was pretty sick from it and I'm good.

As new now, better than new. Mark, just a follow up question on the Lyme, is that do you see patients that feel like they're in great metabolic health, like their gut is working great, they work out regularly, they eat well, and they get, you know, one of these tick-borne infections, and they also get wiped out the same way that somebody who may not be as healthy or as compromised.

So I think it's a great question. The answer is the more like any infection, the more robust your health is, the less it's going to affect you. like COVID. COVID kills and hospitalizes those who are chronically ill, overweight, or old, all of which affect your immune system. We know that if you're malnourished, you're more likely to die from diarrhea or a respiratory infection. So, we do know that the host plays a big role. And so, in fact, there was a huge debate back in the 1800s between Louis Pasteur, who came up with the germ theory of disease, and his colleague Claude Bernard, who argued about the the host, he said the host was important. He called it the biological terrain. And it is really important to keep your biological terrain healthy so you can be resistant to infections. So just like with COVID and every other infection that we see, if you're healthy, it affects you less. Your immune system can handle it. So absolutely it's important to have your vitamin D levels optimized, your zinc levels, your vitamin A levels all optimized to be not inflamed from eating a sugary processed diet to make sure you're getting enough sleep. and the whole, all the things we talked about on the podcast and all the things I've done in my practice for 30 years. So, yeah, absolutely. It does not affect everybody the same. And the people who tend to get really sick from it are the ones who have underlying issues. They may have gut issues, they may have heavy metal toxins, they may have mold exposure. You know, for me, I'm, I had all of them, so I'm like an expert, even though I didn't want to be. But unfortunately, I had it. But fortunately, I learned about it and how to fix it, and so. that's what I've dedicated my life to, is sharing what I've learned with my patients and with the world to try to give people a little bit of hope and suffer a little bit less.

All right, Mark, our next question is from Marilyn.

Hello, Dr. Hyman. My name is Marilyn, and I suffer from tinnitus or tinnitus, not sure how you pronounce it. So if you know anything about it, I would love to have more information about the gut to ear connection beyond the to bring connection. Thanks, Marilyn. That was a great question. And the truth is, I don't know how to say it either. Tinnitus, tinnitus, I have no clue. And I'm a doctor, so don't feel bad. Maybe it's like you say tomato, I say tomato. I don't know. Anyway, this is an annoying problem. It's not a life-threatening problem. It's not a serious problem, but it is a miserable problem to have because it essentially means ringing in your ears. It's like having ring in your ears all the time, and it can be very bad or it can be more mild. And the truth is, we we don't have a lot of understanding about what causes it. So like anything in functional medicine, I simply try to get the body in balance and see what happens. What we found is that there are certain things that actually can be really helpful. It can be, for example, acupuncture can be helpful. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy can be helpful. Let's say what we were talking about earlier on the podcast where you go in a decompression chamber. And those things can be very helpful treating your methylation pathways. Often homocysteine can be high with tinnitus. So I I think it's important to look at all those things in terms of the microbiome. Again, it may be partly inflammation. So if you're thinking about anything that drives inflammation, you always have to look at your gut. You always have to start with what's going on in the microbiome, food sensitivities, leaky gut and reboot the gut. Again, that's why, you know, I haven't really created many products, but I created this product, Gut Food, with my team to absolutely help everybody who has a gut, get their gut a little bit healthier, whose gut is really not working. to get it really working again. Because we all in this country and increasingly around the world have gut issues because of our processed diet, because of increasing C-sections, antibiotic use, acid blocker use, environmental toxins like glyphosate, all these things drive huge problems for us. So it's really important to get your gut straight and to heal your gut. And that's what I really focus on with my patients first. And it's really why we created this product, Gut Food.

All right, Mark, our next question is from Jose.

Hey, Mark, my name is Jose. my question is, what's a good detox? And how many times a day do I do it? Do I juice three times a day for three days? I'm transitioning from unhealthy diet to a healthy diet, plant-based thank you. Wow, Jose, there's so many things in that question. First, you're trying to detox. We'll talk about that. And second, you say you're transitioning from an unhealthy diet to a healthy diet, and you close with saying plant-based and I'm going to talk about that because that might be a little bit misguided. So in terms of the approach to dealing with detoxification, there's many ways to do it. You can do a water fast for seven days, you can do a green juice fast for seven to 10 days, you can do a 24-hour fast, a 36-hour fast. I find that often you don't have to go so extreme. Now, it is good to give your body a break from eating every day and eat breakfast. In other words, breaking the fast. We should not eat for at least 12 hours between dinner and breakfast, ideally 14 if you can stretch it out, which basically means if you eat at six o'clock at night, you can eat breakfast 80 in the morning. It's not a big hardship. However, I have found that the most powerful approach to healing my patients, you know, and this is just really creating a broad net that works for most people most of the time. It's not what everybody needs for fixing everything, but it is going to hit the mark probably 80% of the time. And I created this years ago just as part of my medical practice, and I wrote a book about it called the 10 Day Detox Diet. Now, I call it 10 days because if I call it the 10 week diet or the 10 month diet or the 10 year diet, nobody would do it. But it's a diet that is eliminating most of the inflammatory foods from your diet. It eliminates sugar, alcohol, processed foods, grains, particularly gluten, dairy, and most sugary fruits stick with berries. It includes protein, vegetables, nits and seeds. And it's a really optimally healthy diet. It can be protein from animal protein like eggs or grass-fed meat and so forth, pasture raised chicken. And the reason this diet works so well is it literally resets the gut, it reduces inflammation, and it helps optimize your nutritional intake of phytochemicals and phytonutrients and fiber. So it helps all the things you need to do to kind of reset the body. and it works so fast. It's amazing. Like within two or three days, I do these programs all over the world where I have people come, we spend a week doing this diet or five days doing it. And the average reduction in symptoms from all symptoms, from all diseases in five days to seven days is 70%. That's huge. We did this with a thousand people online as a group. Again, same results. 70% reduction of all symptoms from all diseases in 10 days. Now, I'm not saying it's going to cure everything, but it works to kind of clean the slate and then see what's left over. If you have Lyme disease or mercury poisoning, it may not work or mold toxicity, you might feel better, but it's not going to fix the problem. You have to deal with those things. This one guy came to see me at Cleveland Clinic when I first started working there. He said, Dr. Hyman, I did your 10-day detox diet and my rheumatoid arthritis went away in 10 days. Is that possible? I'm like, yeah, it is. We had a woman from the Saddleback Church where we did the Daniel Plan, same diet with the same basic 10-day detox. to start. She said, I've been in and out of psychiatric hospitals my whole life on medications. She's overweight. She said, Is it possible in three days my depression went away? In six weeks, I lost 45 pounds and I feel like a different human being. I'm like, yeah, it's possible because food is medicine. And if you're doing the wrong food, it's poison. And if you're doing the right food, it's healing. So absolutely, you can heal so many things using a detoxification strategy. That means up regulating all the good stuff in your body, the phytochemicals, the fiber, the right nutrients, and taking out out all the bad stuff. And you don't have to go super extreme like just do juices. And I see people who juice fast and they might eat carrot juice and beet juice and apple juice. I'm like, that's terrible because you're basically, you know, loading your body with sugar. So I think green juice can be fine. But you gotta be careful. For example, kale, if you just juice kale all the time, that has goitrogens which can affect your thyroid. So you wanna have celery, cucumber, parsley, cilantro, watercress, ginger, lemon. and I drink green juices a lot because I do that as a sort of basic part of my wellness practice. And, and it's great to include in there, but you don't have to go so extreme. And I think the main thing people have to detox from is the most addictive drug in the world, which is sugar and starch. And so that's what the 10-day detox side is designed to do, to shift that switch in just a very short time. And I had a patient, again, another patient at Cleveland Clinic who came into our group program, and she had been diabetic on insulin for three days. I mean, for 10 years, in three days she was off for insulin. Three days. Okay. And then she was off all her medication in six weeks and had lost a ton of weight and had normalized her blood sugar. So these are not, you know, extraordinary stories. They're running those stories if you know what to do. It's like that joke. I don't know if I told you, Drew, but the doctor takes out this patient's appendix and he sends him a bill. and he's like, the bill was $1,000 and the guy, the patient goes, Man, that's a very big bill for such a simple operation. And the doctor goes, you,'re right, I'm going to send you a new bill. So he sends him a new bill and says, Taking out your appendix, $1, knowing what that, what needs to be taken out, $999. So I think, you know, it's just about knowing how to kind of work with the body and get it to do what it's supposed to do.

Love it. Awesome, Mark. We have like one or two more questions over here. This next one is from Bambi.

Hi, I have lupus and I wanted to get some advice for taking anti-inflammatory vitamins. Yeah. So thank you, Bambi, and I'm sorry you have lupus. It's a horrible condition. It is an autoimmune disease that affects the joints, the skin, your kidneys, lungs. I mean, it can be a very serious problem. However, again, like all autoimmune diseases, it can be treated very effectively by unloading all the things that create inflammation in your body and adding in the anti-inflammatory things. Now, you asked about supplements. They're called supplements for a reason. They're not replacements. So, I don't think that you can continue, for example, if you have gluten sensitivity or you have Lyme disease or you have mercury poisoning, you take a boatload of curcumin, for example, which is an anti-inflammatory supplement and expect the result. It's just not going to work. You have to deal with the root cause. Supplements can be helpful in the recovery and the repair and the activation of your healing systems and the renewal of your body for sure. And I take them every day. But I don't see them as replacements. It doesn't mean I'm going to I mean, I was talking to some this weekend and they were on this powerful drug for cholesterol called Repatha, which is one of the new drugs. It's an injectable drug. and his wife's like, he just thinks he can take this drug and eat his cheeseburgers and french fries and he's fine. I'm like, it doesn't work like that. You can't continue to do all the bad stuff by taking a drug or a supplement and hope that you're gonna get better. So for autoimmune disease like lupus, it's always the same thought process in functional medicine. Look for the cause. It could be a toxin, environmental toxin, pesticide chemicals, heavy metals, it can be a mold toxin, it can be an allergen, it can be something like gluten, dairy allergies are the most common eggs for some people, it can be a microbe like we talked about tick infections, it can be your microbiome imbalance, it can be poor diet, an inflammatory diet which is typically what we all eat in America, it can be stress, so there's a lot of things that can be triggering it or it can be a lack of certain things like vitamin D. We know for example, people who live in Northern latitudes have more MS, multiple sclerosis, which is an autoimmune disease of the nervous system and the nerves, the coating on the nerves. Well, that's because they don't have any vitamin D because they live in Norway or they live in Canada. And we know this is true. This is not just a functional medicine concept. This is pretty standard medicine. So, there's a lot of good evidence that if you don't have the good stuff and you have too much bad stuff, then you get an autoimmune disease.

So, I would encourage you, Bambi, to look at that.

And not just focus on the supplements.

Great, Mark. And to that, would you add in, you know, it's primarily for MS but there's a lot of people that go through the walls protocol as well. There's like a whole kind of support for that.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. So there's a whole framework we call the autoimmune paleo diet. We talked about the 10-day detox diet. That is essentially autoimmune paleo except it includes nuts and seeds and eggs and nightshades. so it's a little more extreme. The autoimmune paleo diet takes out nuts, seeds, eggs, and nightshades. And that's not just saying those are bad foods. It's just they might be more inflammatory for some people with autoimmune disease. So it's not a bad place to start and then add them back and see how you do. Like, you might eat, you know, cut out tomatoes and everything else, and then you might be better, and then you might add back the tomato. Oh, my God, my joints are killing me now. So you go, oh, Tomatoes. Okay. Nightshades are a problem for me, but if you're the 80 or 90% who it's not an issue for you can go back to eating tomatoes. So, I think the Wahl's Protocol is fantastic. She also talks about eating a lot of organ meats, which I think are among the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. Now, people go, oh, organ meats, liver, kidney, and heart. But actually, those are the most nutritionally dense foods on the planet. If you Google, just Google liver nutrient density compared to broccoli or think about the most nutritiously dense plant-based food you could eat. Well, the liver is going to win out by, like, 20 or 30 fold. It's pretty impressive, actually. So now I love liver because I grew up on it, but I get people don't like it. So you might need to, then, do more, more plant sources. But, but actually, it's important to make sure you're getting the right, the right density of nutrients through, through these various compounds that are in these Foods. It can help. help your body heal and repair and engage. And, the Walsh Protocol is a great place to start. Terry's a good friend. She was a functional medicine doctor. In fact, she was an MS patient who became a functional medicine doctor by hearing herself of MS using functional medicine and then started doing research on it and now she's really taken off and.

Done a lot of work in this area that's really impressive. All right, Mark, that was fantastic.

So, let's go ahead and wrap up today's episode and Take us out. Okay, Drew, thanks so much. I love these questions from hi-ho. It's real people with real issues, with real questions about real things that they're concerned about or they have issues with. And, I'm really happy to answer them. I've had so much life experience with my own illnesses and using this approach with tens of thousands of patients in functional medicine. So, I'm really grateful to be able to answer your questions. And, that's pretty much it for this week's masterclass. I want you to submit your questions so maybe next week you can have your question answered on our masterclass. If you would like to just share this episode with your friends and family and subscribe wherever you podcast and we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning in to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. and I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter, and in it I share my favorite stuff, from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to Dr. Hyman.com/picks to sign up. That's Dr. Hyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

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