Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: Endometriosis, Autoimmune Disease, Irregular Heartbeats, And More

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman here. My team and I have been working hard on something that I'm so excited to share a little bit about today. It's a revolutionary new platform called Dr. Hyman Plus, which is a premium membership.

Exclusive for my community.

With Dr. Hyman Plus, you get a ton of private content and special access that no one else gets. This yearly membership gives you exclusive access to ad-free Doctors Pharmacy podcast episodes, access to all of my docu-series including the Longevity Roadmap and Broken Brain 1 and 2, plus all the bonus content. You get monthly Functional Medicine Deep Dives where one of our doctors goes deep into a health topic to tell you everything you need to know to heal. You'll also get access to a monthly Ask Mark Anything Q&A where I answer the Dr. Hyman Plus Community's biggest health and wellness questions. This Q&A is only accessible with a membership. Because I'm so excited to share this premium membership content with you, I'm releasing a teaser of the brand new Functional Medicine Deep Dive episode diving into one of the most important topics in health. I hope you enjoy it and head over to drhyman.com/plush. That's drhyman.com/plus for more information. Okay, here we go.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the newest episode of Ask Mark Anything. My name is Hershel Perth and I'm the Dr. Hyman Plus Community Manager and I'm joined by Darcy Gross, one of the producers of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. Hi, Darcy.

Hi.

We've collected your top questions this month to ask our expert, Dr. Mark Hyman. Hello, Dr. Mark Hyman. Thanks for being with us here today. We're so excited to hear your answers on this month's Ask Mark Anything. Let's get started. Our first question is about endometriosis. What is it? What can cause it? If there is a woman that's suffering from this, what could be done to help her?

Well, this is a vexing problem. It's often undiagnosed for years, sometimes decades, for women who suffer from big symptoms like menstrual cramps, irregular periods, very, very painful, painful, painful vomiting, I mean, all kinds of horrible stuff. And essentially, it's, it's something that has been thought to be a hormonal condition, but it turns out it's probably more likely an autoimmune condition and Essentially, what happens is that women will have portions of their endometrial lining, none of those lining of their uterus, move into places they shouldn't be. It can get through the fallopian tubes and into the abdominal cavity and deposit on the colon, on the small intestines, on the bladder, on the kidneys, on the wall of the abdomen. and so every time you have a period, it's like you're bleeding into your abdomen, which is the worst and most painful thing you could possibly imagine. And it makes women really miserable. It also causes infertility and it's just not a fun condition. And it's really a problem for many, many women. So the question is, what is the cause? We'll get to that in a minute. But from a traditional functional medicine perspective, the approach is quite different than a conventional medicine approach. In conventional medicine, the approach is essentially to create a treatment that shuts off your period, which is something that women do sometimes anyway, given this crazy way that we practice medicine now that someone says, I don't have my periods, they give them the pill that stops their period. Not a big fan of that, but I do think that in endometriosis it can be very helpful. The hormonal programs are often very It's intense. They might just put you into premature menopause sometimes. There's really heavy duty drugs that they can use when it gets really bad. It's often diagnosed through surgical approach. You have to do a laparoscopic exam. You go through the belly button, you look inside with a little microscope and you can see all the lesions everywhere. This is really the most effective way to see what's really going on. It's hard to pick it up otherwise. Then they can cauterize or burn off those lesions, but it's sort of like mopping up the floor while the sink's overflowing, it'll just happen again. And it can provide temporary relief, but it's sort of a vicious cycle. And so what we're learning about from a functional medicine perspective and the traditional science is telling us now this may be autoimmune in nature. Then the question is, what do we do for autoimmune disease? How do we regulate those things? And really when we think about autoimmune disease from a functional medicine perspective, it's really five main causes. combined with your genetics and your predispositions. But it's toxins. And in terms of hormonal issues, toxins can be a huge player, both heavy metal toxins as well as the petrochemical toxins, which are we call persistent organic pollutants or xenoestrogens. They're very, very potent hormone stimulators or hormone disruptors that can be found in pretty much everything in our society, all the plastics and cosmetics and sunblock. I mean, just, you name it, it's in their makeup. And, and that's really why I work with the environmental working group to help educate people about the sources of these compounds in their food, in their water, in their cosmetics, in their household cleaning products, then you can really reduce your exposure. So that's really important. Second, you know, there may be gut issues as well. We can get food sensitivities that mean play a role. So it balances in the gut flora. And so infectious stuff, microbes can be playing a role. Allergens can trigger a flavor like gluten and other foods. Dairy can be a big player. It's very hormonally active, can be a big player. So that combined with stress and poor diet, we often can find the root causes of a lot of autoimmune diseases. So a lot of the treatments are really designed to help fix those underlying factors. Get rid of the metals, get rid of the pesticides, optimize the gut flora, reduce allergies, deal with any chronic infections, help optimize the diet, reduce stress, all those things will help. In addition, we'll often look at hormonal metabolism because there may be problems with estrogen metabolism that are pretty common. They can lead to abnormal pap tests, they can lead to heavy periods, PMS. I think one of the things that strikes me in our society is that women suffer so terribly from menstrual disorders. 75% of women have PMS or premenstrual syndrome. That's not normal. Many cultures, women don't experience that. The question is why are we experiencing that? Well, it's our poor diet of processed food, it's high in alcohol, sugar, caffeine, stress, lack of exercise, environmental toxins, all the things that our modern life is so full of. Those are the things that are driving these hormonal dysfunctions and imbalances that lead to these symptoms. Depending on what stage of your life cycle you're in as a woman, you can really end up suffering a lot. And I wrote an article called the Life Cycle of Women about all these different aspects of our hormone metabolism that change over time and what influences them. The good news is that you can positively influence your hormone metabolism through diet and lifestyle, cutting out all the sugar and processed food, caffeine, alcohol, up regulating your fiber content, prebiotic and probiotic fibers, probiotics, that gut plays a huge role. increasing all kinds of polyphenol-rich substances in the diet that help detoxify metabolites like the broccoli family, garlic, onions, which is so many wonderful foods that you can use to actually help them optimize your hormone metabolism. And sometimes we use nutrients as well, which is incredible nutrients that help to help regulate the function and the effect of hormones and also the estrogens that cause these many problems. So one of the things, for example, we'll use is methylated B vitamins B12, folate, B6 to help estrogen metabolism. We'll use various phytochemicals like indole-3-carbinol that comes from broccoli as a supplement, so forophane. We use flax seeds that help regulate estrogen metabolism in the gut and have lignans in them. There's a lot of options for us to optimize hormone metabolism using approaches that work with the body rather than against it. I've seen many patients with endometriosis. They often do very well and often can become fertile, have babies and do really remarkably well. I just remember this one case of a young woman who was about 28 and really miserable her whole life, really bad periods, endometriosis, infertile, trying to have babies with her husband and just not making it. And she had all kinds of other inflammatory issues and we really did a whole overall functional medicine approach and autoimmune disease focused approach and she really remarkably transformed and all her endometriosis went away. She felt great and she ended up having a beautiful baby. So I think there's a real opportunity for people to understand how to do things differently and to sort of take a root cause approach, especially with things like endometriosis.

Oh, that's so great. I'm sure that she was thrilled to be in that situation where she wasn't suffering and obviously could, you know, fulfill her goal of having a baby with her husband. So that's wonderful. Thank you. Do you have our next question?

Yeah.

Hi, Dr. Mark. Good to see you again. So kind of switching gears, but still sticking with the theme of functional medicine, of course. of course. The next question is about irregular heartbeats and arrhythmias. So basically, can functional medicine play a role or help somebody who has irregular heartbeats or arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation?

Yeah, well, not all irregular heartbeats are the same and they all have different causes, but they're often related to things that are completely reversible and fixable. The main kinds are something called PVCs, which is where you get skipped beats or premature ventricular contractions. People can feel that, it's like their heart jumps in their chest. That's really common and it's pretty benign. There are more serious forms of arrhythmias like supraventricular tachycardia, which can be an electrical short circuit. That can be challenging. Atrial fibrillation is something that's very common as people get older and older athletes. I had it. I think of giving me everything. My mother had it. It's probably genetic and I tend to be tall, skinny and athletic, which is the kind of prototype. George Bush, the first, the senior had it when he was jogging and he got it once. So I think it's not uncommon. They're a little bit different. But the question is if your heart is irritable, the question is what is causing an irritable heart? What is causing a twitchy heart? Well, there are well-known causes. Magnesium deficiency is a huge one. And in our society, we're probably 80% insufficient and probably 50% deficient in magnesium. And it's important because it regulates over 300 different enzymes in the body. It's critical for muscle relaxation, for essentially the relaxation mineral. So anything that's twitchy or spasmy or irritable, magnesium is the answer, whether you're constipated or have headaches or muscle cramps or muscle twitching in your eyes, all those things can be benefited by taking magnesium. And it's no different from arrhythmias. In fact, in the emergency room, when we tried all the drugs and someone comes in coding, meaning they're code blue, they're not breathing, they're basically dead, we have to resuscitate them. We use all these fancy drugs. We use the shocking machine. And then when nothing else works, we resort to the final, last heroic step, which is giving them intravenous magnesium. So why not start with that? In women who are having preterm labor, where their uterus is contracting and irritable, we give them IV magnesium. When women come in with high blood pressure and have twitchy blood vessels, we give them IV magnesium. If women are about to have seizures from preeclampsia, we give them IV magnesium. So it's something we do traditionally in regular medicine, which is kind of amazing to me that we sort of ignored that magnesium is so important. And then there are a lot of things we do in our society that causes us to have low magnesium. We drink coffee, we have sugar, we have sodas, we have processed food, we have a lot of stress. Stress literally causes you to pee out magnesium. And we don't eat a lot of magnesium rich foods, which are basically nuts and seeds and greens and some beans. And those are not typically found in abundance in most people's diets. except maybe chocolate. Chocolate's a good source of magnesium. So that can be helpful. But I wouldn't just binge on the chocolate. I think that it's really important to understand that that is one simple thing people can do to calm down their heart. The other thing is that there are mitochondrial factors that are important in stabilizing the heart muscle. It's like CoQ10, carnitine, ribose, creatine, magnesium, potassium, aspartate. lipid acid. These are all sodium sulfate. These are all really important compounds that are part of mitochondrial function. And the mitochondria are the little energy batteries in your cell, and they have to be working well for your heart to pump properly. So they can be very helpful as well in arrhythmias. Fish oil is anti-arrhythmogenic. So a lot of people are low in fish oil. 93 or 99% of Americans apparently are low in omega-3 fatty acids. And I've seen this a lot in my practice. We test for it. using a thing called OmegaCheck and we can get a really good idea of what people's fatty acid intake is. And honestly, it's striking to me how many people are deficient in Omega-3 fats, which really dramatically improves your rhythm. There was a large trial in Italy called the GC study many, many years ago where they looked at people who had heart attacks. A lot of people have heart attacks. After their heart attacks, their hearts get really irregular and irritable because they've killed the part of the muscle. And so the heart, all the electrical signals are not going right. and so they gave them fish oil compared to placebo in a randomized controlled trial and they found that there were dramatic reductions in the risk of death and arrhythmias after heart attacks if they gave them fish oil. So getting your magnesium up, your fish oil levels high, reducing those things that cause magnesium loss, and also dealing with stress on sleep, those are huge things. Sleep is a big issue because often people are higher cortisol levels, stress hormones, adrenaline, epinephrine, and when you think about, you know, stress, what happens is you get a flood of hormones and neurotransmitters, and particularly adrenaline and noradrenaline, and those are highly irritating to the heart and they'll speed up the heart. They're just like, they're like gas. And like, you want those when you're running from a tiger, so you can, the heart could be faster and you can do better, but not honestly when you're just sitting around. So dealing with stress or yoga, meditation, those kinds of techniques are really helpful getting up sleep. All is really critical. so arrhythmias can be dealt with. Sometimes you do just have a short circuit. And unfortunately, for example, I had a short circuit with atrial fibrillation, and I had to have an ablation where they go into your heart through catheters and you're going and they zap the areas that are basically a short circuit, and they just. They buzz them like a cautery, and that stops the transmission. And. And I had that, and I was really struggling. And I took it and I'm fine. I just raced on my bike this morning for as hard as I could for an hour with a friend. And I'm fine. I also sometimes where my heart's gonna explode. But I feel good and I'm doing well and I had the surgery. So it's not bad to have surgery for this. But for most of the kinds of common arrhythmias that people have, the jumping in the chest, skip heartbeats, all this stuff, that can be really managed to functional medicine approach of root causes and diet and lifestyle. I just, you know, I'll just give you an example of a patient I had yesterday. She should have known better. She's a doctor, and she's an ER doctor, and she was having to go into her shift, and she actually has some kind of weird cardiac issue. She has arrhythmia. She had V-tach, which is like really a life-threatening kind of arrhythmia. And she had to have a defibrillator put in her chest. and it's really rare. It's not that common, especially in someone as young as her. But what was so fascinating was that she said, I literally, you know, she was fine because she was following everything. But then she's like, I had to go to work, and it was a really stressful shift, and I drink a lot of coffee, and I took an Adderall so I could stay awake on my shift. And I'm like, okay, so you took speed and coffee and stress. and then she went into B-tac while she was driving and was able to pull off the road and had to wait until her machine kicked in and literally gave her a shock. She had to get like a, like when they do the paddles, but they have internal paddles essentially, which is less, less voltage, but still pretty intense. And, you know, fixed her. But she's like, I'm like, yeah, well, you, you caused that by putting all these things in your system, stress, caffeine and speed, basically, the Adderall that triggered the I think for most people with arrhythmias, they're usually pretty benign. Sometimes you need surgery, but often dealing with these lifestyle factors and diet can play huge role. Yeah.

Dr. Mark, thank you so much for all those tips. I think that's super helpful and really, really important information. I'm never going to give up my coffee, but thank you.

Well, I hope you enjoy that teaser of exclusive content that you get every single month with Dr. Hyman Plus. If you want to listen to the full episode and get access to ad-free podcast episodes, plus all the content from my docu-series and of course any future ones we're going to release, plus monthly Ask Mark Anything episodes, plus monthly Functional Medicine Deep Dive episodes, I guess, right? That's why we call it Dr. Hyman Plus. Head over to drhyman.com/plus, that's drhyman.com/plus, /plus to learn more. I'll see you there.

Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.