How a Doctor Cured Her Autoimmune Disease with Functional Medicine with Dr. Cynthia Li

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. One of the themes also that comes up over and over again with chronic illness, and I know for myself too, is reaching that point of hopelessness or helplessness. And there becomes a learned helplessness on top of that when you get punted from doctor to doctor to doctor.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy.

This is Dr. Mark Hyman and that's.

Pharmacy with an F-F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you've been ill, if you know someone who's been ill, if you've had struggles with chronic disease like I have and like our guest has, then this show is gonna help you figure out a different way of thinking about it and give you hope because a lot of times when we get sick, we feel hopeless and that's not good because we actually have ways to think about disease quite differently. And our guest today is going to share as a physician how she's reimagined medicine for herself as well as used a new medicine to help heal her chronic diseases. Our guest is Dr. Cynthia Lee. She received her medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She's practicing internist in many settings. She's been at Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco General Hospital, St. Anthony's Medical Clinic. She served the homeless. She's worked in in very remote rural areas in China helping with HIV patients. She's worked with partners in health and all kinds of amazing community-based ways of healing people. Her personal health challenges have really led her to a very different view of medicine that we learned in medical school, integrative and functional medicine. And she now has a private practice in Berkeley. She's on the faculty of the Healer's Art Program at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. And she's written a remarkable new book called Brave New medicine. It's her first book, but it's an important book, as you'll see why as we have this conversation. So welcome, Dr. Cynthia Lee.

Thank you so much for having me here.

So we were just chatting before the show, and it was kind of remarkable hearing your story because it seems in a lot of ways we've gone down the same path, which is trained in traditional medicine, both suffered from a series of different chronic diseases which were mysterious and strange that traditional medicine can't help with. And we both were in China and got sick. We both had GI issues and got sick. We both, you know, had mold in our houses and got sick. We both had Lyme disease and got sick. So it's kind of fascinating. And, and I just sort of want to unpack your story because you knew you had it. Everything you had a great career in medicine, you have fantastic marriage, beautiful kids, and then like happens to many people, one day you're fine, and the next day you're not, and everything falls apart, and you had this mysterious symptoms that traditional medicine couldn't solve. Your tests came back, quote, normal, but you weren't feeling normal. Your doctors were confused. You were lost. You were in bed. You couldn't get out of bed with young kids, and that's, really the beginning of the change in your career that led to discovering a new way to heal yourself. So can you take us through that journey and like, where did you come from and how did you get here?

Oh my God, yeah. Well, first of all, this is not a journey I would wish on anybody. So I mean, when we were comparing our- Comparing our notes, right? Oh my God, you know, like I wouldn't, yeah, would not wish this on anyone. I mean, I know that millions, right, millions of Americans suffer from these kinds of mystery conditions that are very debilitating. So this is not a spurious experience by any means.

Although many doctors go, well, we can't figure it out. Your tests are normal. There must be all in your head, right?

Exactly, exactly. And I went through that myself. My own health challenges did not fit my own paradigm. So for a long time, I was stuck in my head, like, I just need to get past it, I need to get past it. So to, yeah, just to kind of go backwards a little bit, about 15 years ago, I was a few years out of residency. So I was at this place in my professional life where I felt a sense of mastery, right? I just, I knew the studies pat, I knew the protocols pat. You know, I was running ERs and just feeling like, okay, I've got this.

You're a master of your craft.

Yes, yes. And I felt really proud of where I had come to in my life.

And.

I had married the love of my life. I did something really radical. I had always been sort of the good girl, the conventional girl, which is funny why, you know, I ended up taking this very unconventional path as far as this culture is concerned. I was, yeah, I had a very conventional upbringing and, My husband and I, shortly after we got married, I did something radical and I quit my job and we traveled the world for six months. No itinerary, just a backpack with a few necessaries in them. And I felt so free and so alive. And after we returned, I I started a job at the county hospital where I was working with underserved patients and really found my calling. So it was during this time that I got pregnant. And again, you know, the pregnancy was easy. Nine months later, we had this miracle of a baby. We were thrilled. But it was three months after that that I started feeling off. And, you know, started feeling really tired, my hair was falling out, falling out, I was losing weight, I mean like super rapidly. And again, it's just one of those things that I think as not wanting to complain, as our culture tends to do, is normalize unwellness to where you sort of tolerate it. And so I thought it was all postpartum stuff.

Suck it up and push through.

Exactly, suck it up. And a lot of times things resolve and life goes on. which I had learned in residency, right?

Best healer is time, everything goes away if you just wait long enough.

Right, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? I didn't realize at the time that only works for acute things, not chronic. So I was very much in that mentality of invincibility, both because I was young and then the other reason because I was a doctor. There was this strange sense that because I understood chronic diseases, I mean, I was an internist after all, an expert in chronic diseases, that I was somehow immune to it. You know, my patients were over there and I was over here.

Since you knew all the diseases, you couldn't get them.

Exactly. And it took me a while to even recognize the signs. And I remember very clearly that I was, you know, I'd been kind of slogging through my day-to-day life, you know, with this new baby and an active husband and my job. And I was seeing a patient and she was a single mom, had like three kids, was working two jobs, she was exhausted. And she came to me for fatigue. And I was looking at her and I was just going through the checklist, you know, all the review of systems. And I said, oh my God, you're a textbook case of hyperthyroidism. You know, I'm gonna run these tests. And it dawned on me that, oh my God, her palpitations, her insomnia, her fatigue, you know, her weight loss, her hair loss, and I was like, oh my God, I am a textbook case too. So that was a really big eye-opener for me.

You saw yourself in her.

Yes. And also that I had a chronic disease, most likely, because thyroid diseases are usually chronic. So that was the beginning and I.

Had, which by the way, low thyroid and thyroid problems in women affects one in five women. and half of them are undiagnosed.

Yes.

And many who are diagnosed aren't properly treated.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think it goes to the fact that we dismiss symptoms that are, I mean, they're seemingly vague, right? Fatigue, I mean.

I'm tired, I'm a little depressed, I've got dysfunction and sex, my skin's a.

Little dry, my hair's thinning, you know.

Right, exactly. So- Estipated, whatever.

It's like normal. Absolutely. And oh, so for me though, my initial presentation was hyperthyroid. Hyper.

Yeah.

And then I fell hypo, so I was kind of on this thyroid roller coaster. And what I had was Hashimoto's, an autoimmune thyroid condition. And when it happens in the postpartum period, most of those cases resolve in about a year. And so I followed actually that textbook trajectory. And about a year after I was diagnosed, I wasn't feeling well, but I saw my endocrinologist, who was a top-notch specialist, and He said, yeah, you know, I think it's time for you to try tapering off your levothyroxine. And I did, and my numbers stayed normal. And I was by his book and by my book, I was cured.

But you still felt like crap.

I still felt exactly the same. So that, it goes to show, you know, where I was in my mindset was, you know, what the paradigm that we're trained in superseded my own experience. And what we're trained in is that everything hinges on the diagnosis. If you don't have a diagnosis, you can't treat.

Right.

And the diagnosis is a set of criteria or it's a lab test or it's a pathology report. It's something very, very concrete. So I'm living my life and I was still living a full life. So I was also basing health on functionality.

Yeah, you were managing.

Yes, yes. I was managing quite well. So then a couple of years later, my husband, our then toddler and I take a trip to Beijing. And my parents and my sister were living there at the time. So I had taken these trips annually and we went and I had a very dramatic experience there.

Before you go on, I just want to sort of clarify for people. for those who haven't been to Beijing, it's been cleaned up a little bit, but on a sunny day, you can't see a building across the street because the air is so thick with pollution. And most of it is from coal, rock coal that they burn, and from some of the inversions that come from the weather patterns from the Gobi Desert. And it's so bad that many people in Beijing walk around with literally with face masks. You might have seen those pictures.

So we're not talking about just a little pollution.

We're talking about air so thick that you can basically cut it with a knife on a sunny day and can't see the sun.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, my sister taught elementary school when she was there, and they, every day, they would get these color signals about whether or not they could go out. And there were many days where They couldn't even go out at all. Stay indoors with high heavy duty air purifiers going on. So yes, it was, so I went to Beijing. So I went to Beijing. What a nice family trip. Nice family trip. And you know, I will say, I was, we were, we took a hike on the Wild Wall. So right, the un- Unrestored. Yes, the beautiful sort of rustic but crumbling, wall of the Great Wall. And it was a really beautiful hike. And I stood at this lookout tower, and I said to my husband, I said, I feel like myself again. I was feeling like, I'm coming back, right? My stamina was back, the aches and the pains and just that low-grade fatigue was gone. So I felt an ounce of of real hope there. And then we went to a dumpling house to celebrate.

And.

You had asked me before this, what might have triggered this turning point? I was eating- Dumpling disease? I don't know, but I was eating a ton of things, some of which were tons of different kinds of fungus. Mushrooms, like things that are, you know, can be immunologically triggering as well. So I have no idea if that had anything to do with it, if it was just the foreign food proteins. But I was having the feast of my life when I suddenly felt like I was gonna pass out. You know, and I was going through all the, you know, differential diagnoses in my head and heat stroke, dehydration, I was drinking water, But suddenly, I mean, before I know it, my life flashes before me and I think I'm gonna die. And then I pass out. So I come to in an emergency room in downtown Beijing. And when I came to, I just came to a body that really wasn't my own. I didn't recognize myself. I could barely move my muscles. The entire room was, spinning around as if I was on a boat that was really, really being tossed around in the high seas. Bird in the hand.

Yes.

And that was something that was completely outside of my own box as a doctor. I was calling the shots in the ER 'cause the doctor overseeing me was a resident.

Yeah.

And I've had that experience being in a hospital in Thailand with severe gastritis. telling him what to do.

Yes. I mean, it is challenging being sick, but it's challenging being a doctor who's sick because people are still looking to you to number one, stay calm and number two, figure out what's going on. And I was using my really, you know, basic Mandarin too, trying to communicate. I also realized that I had brain fog. I didn't know it at the time. I just, I couldn't, remember things. I was looking at my own EKG, which was normal, but I couldn't quite read it.

You had a broken brain.

I had read, yeah, thousands of those, right?

So.

I was kind of in a state of shock, but really just trying to push through the misery of it. And in the smattering of tests, they did stabilize my blood pressure, which was low, I got IV saline and.

But.

All the tests turned out normal, as they so often do in these mysterious cases.

Must be on your head, right, Dr. Lee?

And the one that did not turn out normal was one that I really ordered as a precautionary test that we do for all young women. It was a pregnancy test and that came back positive. So that was, again, a huge shock. And my husband and I were really trying to wrap our heads around the fact that I felt like I was gonna die. But then, oh my God, wait a minute, I'm pregnant. And I'm miserable. So at the time, I did not realize that this was gonna be a decade long journey.

And you mentioned that you had a GI problem then, right?

Yes, that didn't manifest until the very next day. The next day, I started having nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. People said, well, it's probably the pregnancy and whatever you got, this dehydration, you just overdid it. But then my husband and my daughter got it too. So I realized, okay, you know what? There's a gastroenteritis going on. All of this was in hindsight though. You know, I wasn't- so you went.

From like literally the top of the mountain on the great wall, feeling the best you felt in years to like the worst you could possibly feel.

Yes, yes.

In a matter of days.

Yes. And we were scheduled to get on our plane trip home, like three days later, after the ER visit. And I didn't-- it was some miracle that I made it. But I had my first full-blown panic attack as we boarded the plane, because I was so weak and I was-- I barely made it on. I was in a wheelchair, and I was thinking, 13 hours, 13 hours. Like, what if something happens? you know, I can't do this. But I made it. I made it back home. And I remember calling my medical director and saying, I got a gastroenteritis and I am in the early throes of pregnancy. I'm gonna need an extra week to recover, but I'll be back.

Yeah. Or so you thought.

So I thought, I never did. I never returned. So that was really the beginning of the rest of my life. And it took me being housebound for two years to break out of that paradigm that I knew.

So you were still looking at traditional medicine to solve the problem.

And they weren't giving any answers.

And you went to see everybody.

Yes, I went to see specialists after specialists. And again, another sort of, you,'re depressed, take Prozac, right? Yes, well, I mean, even things like, I was afraid to say I was depressed, 'cause I was like, I don't wanna kill myself. I'm just miserable. You know, like, I'm miserable. I'm not depressed. Yes, yes. But I knew from the other side what doctors did with patients like me. So I had a lot of symptoms that I kept to myself.

What they did, meaning.

Meaning, yeah, antidepressants or potentially, you know, a major psychiatric evaluation or getting stigmatized as a difficult patient.

Yeah, we have a very, you know, in the medical world, we have a very pejorative way of talking about these patients. We use a fancy medical word. We say it's super-tentorial, which means it's in your brain, it's in your head, and it's very nasty and not true. And I think your experience is very important because I think most of us who suffer aren't doctors. And so we don't have that insight. But when you actually are a physician and you get that, you know, I had someone say to me the other day, oh, you know, I don't believe all this fatigue stuff. When I want energy, I just jump up and down and run up the stairs and I get energy. I'm like, no, you don't get it. Like when you get your tank emptied and you don't know how to refill it. It's real. It's not in your head. It's not psychiatric. It's your biology. And I had exactly the same experience. So I get it. And it's sort of what led me to be a functional medicine physician and to so be passionate about telling the world, which I think also why you write your book, is to share with the world, look, I'm a physician. I know the science. But I hit a dead end when it comes to the paradigm that we were trained in, and I needed to find a different way. So tell us about how you- Can.

I ask you, were you as hard-headed as I was? I mean, did it take you... Oh, well, first of all, too, for me, I think partly it took so long was because I was pregnant. And all the specialists told me that this is a difficult pregnancy, and part of me wanted to believe it, or that a lot of it would resolve. And amazingly, I had this baby who's, she's healthy, and she's, the strongest one actually in the whole family. So there was that piece. But I was, I'm just curious, did it take you as long as it took me to realize there was another path?

Not, I, well, it was interesting. I mean, I literally went down hard. I mean, I was the same story. I lived in China, I was exposed to mercury, I came back from China and I was up on a lake in Maine, and I got some kind of bug, some kind of stomach bug, and I never had anything like it. I thought it would get better, and it didn't. So the mercury was sort of like the sort of underlying problem.

Yes.

And then the straw that broke the camel's back was getting an acute stomach issue, which caused a leaky gut and this massive inflammation, and my whole system collapsed. Not only did I have the stomach issues and diarrhea and pain and bloating, I also had immune issues. My rashes all over, my tongue would swell up when I ate certain foods. I'd get rashes around my eyes. I'd have all sorts of abnormal blood tests, my low white count, positive ANA, which is like autoimmunity. I had elevated liver function tests. I had severe cognitive problems. I couldn't focus. I couldn't remember anything. I couldn't really barely work. I had trouble sleeping. I mean, just my whole system was down and was called chronic fatigue syndrome, which for a long time we thought was psychological. And now there's real good data that there are a lot of biological markers of what's going on in chronic fatigue syndrome. It's not just some fabricated thing. We call it a syndrome in medicine when we don't actually understand the answers. It's like, oh, you have irritable bowel syndrome. What does that mean? It means your stomach hurts and you have diarrhea or constipation or bloating. It's like, that doesn't mean anything. So for me, it took me a while because this was 25 years ago and there wasn't like a big functional medicine movement. But thank God I was working at a place called Canyon Ranch where there was a nutritionist, Kathy Swift, who introduced me to this guy, Jeff Bland, who's the father of functional medicine. And I heard him speak and it was like the light went on. I'm like, oh, okay, there's a different way of thinking. I said, well, if he's either crazy or he's a genius, and I better figure out which one. So I started to learn and read about it, experiment on myself. So I was working part time, experimenting with my patients. They would get better. I wouldn't get better. I couldn't figure it out. I mean, it took me years and years and years. if I know what I knew now, then I would have gotten better a lot faster. But I didn't have all the information. I didn't have all the tools. I didn't know. But I did find a huge level of mercury and all sorts of other issues. So I think for me, you know, I was, I don't even know, stubborn, but I knew, I knew, like you going to specialist after specialist after specialist, that this wasn't in my head. Like, I knew I wasn't depressed, like you said, although I felt depressed, I felt fatigued, I felt unable to cope or manage, but I knew it wasn't in my head. Yes, it was affecting my brain, but it wasn't emotional or psychological.

I think you were, yeah, a step ahead of me. So I ended up referring myself to a psychiatrist because... Well, I went there too. By that point, I wanted a diagnosis, right? I wanted something I could hang my hat on. my hat on.

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And I hear this a lot from my patients too. It's giving a name to something somehow makes it more real. And I had a moment in the bathroom, I remember I was coming out of the shower and I was feeling my heart rate racing and my blood pressure dropping, feeling like I was gonna faint. And I was going through all my symptoms and I basically diagnosed myself in the bathroom with chronic fatigue syndrome. and dysautonomia, this total dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, right, which is the branch that controls largely unconscious vital body functions like heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, you know, it's like, I really say, well, it's like air traffic control, well, worse, but more serious, 'cause as soon as it's gone, you realize what it was sort of keeping together. Managing all these moving parts. So nothing really felt like it was working within myself. And like you said though, I mean these are syndromes, which kind of mean nothing. So I didn't want that. I wanted something to say it's treatable.

I would say the name of your disease isn't the cause of your disease.

Right, exactly.

Dysautonomia just means your nervous system isn't working. Chronic fatigue syndrome just means you're tired all the time.

Right, exactly.

It doesn't tell you why.

So, yeah, so I did. I went to a psychiatrist, I think, you know, where a lot of patients like us end up one day. And she said, you know, something that made me almost laugh, you know, she said, this is not, you're not depressed, you're not anxious. I think it's your hormones. I think it's your immune system. I mean, she was really actually going into the systems. But at the time, like I was like, well, my endocrinologist, you know, said it's not my thyroid. And, you know, an immunologist, like why would I go to an immunologist? you know? And so I kind of exited. And had I known about functional medicine or even integrative medicine at the time, it would have been a much smoother path. But because I had to rebuild the paradigm from the bottom up in order to even get there, it took me many more years. Yeah.

So how did you come out of it?

So the first thing I did was I went back to basics. And so I did not suddenly just start seeing an acupuncturist or start trying energy medicine or anything that's really alternative. I was like, okay, no, I'm a doctor.

You're gonna start off with crystals?

No, I didn't. And oh God, meditation was like pulling teeth. So, no, I went back to basics and I took out my Pathology 101 textbook. Pathologic Basis of Disease.

Robin's and Cotran. Exactly. We all take it first. Second year medical school.

Right, and Kumar was my pathology teacher.

Oh wow.

So I took it out, you know, I still had it. It was highlighted, dog-eared, I mean, and it actually was good for me. Like if I know neuroplasticity, right, it kind of brought me back to this time where I had more of a sense of agency over my life. So in that sense, it was also healing. I didn't recognize it at the time. But I started reading about how chronic disease develops, about cellular repair and cellular injury. And I was like, wait a minute. And they actually talk about this was published, I don't even know which edition, but 20 years ago, where they say the one cause, one effect paradigm does not work anymore. We're in this complex, Living environment where nutrition matters, where environmental toxins, I mean, this is 20 years ago. And they probably wrote that several years before that, that was published, right? So I started reading that and I thought, well, wait a minute. And then that diseases are not defined by a set of criteria. They're this continuum, this process.

And that- yes, I remember going back and reading chapter one and it said, Any pathologic change is always preceded by a biochemical change. Yes.

Which means that anything you see on.

A microscope, there's gotta be a lot of years of stuff going wrong with your biochemistry and physiology before that happens.

Yes, years.

And we don't know how to look at that in Western medicine. We just wait till you have something wrong and then we go, oh yeah.

Now I know what it is. Right, right. Because in the way that we've been trained, inflammation, which is what I had, widespread inflammation in my nerves, inflammation in my gut, inflammation, In your brain. In my thyroid, exactly. It doesn't qualify as a treatable disease.

Inflammation.

Right.

That's what I was joking to say, functional medicine doctors are inflammologists.

Yes, I love that. I remember that from the first functional medicine conference I went to.

Where I gave a talk on that, right?

Right, right. So that was a really big aha moment for me, was wait a minute, Okay, I understand this sudden disturbance, would I call it in Beijing. But then I had the thyroiditis before that, which was sort of right the preceding trigger. And then before that, okay, wait a minute, you know what? When I was in residency, post call, 36-hour shifts, my muscles would feel really crampy. Probiotics, like I felt like I'd run a marathon. And I was dizzy. And I just assumed, well, of course everyone feels this way because they're exhausted.

They're just sleeping, right?

Right. And so I started going backwards and realizing, okay, this has been going on for a long time. And for some people that can be really, you know, sort of disheartening. But for me at where I was, it was a little ounce of hope because it meant that I could sort of stepwise piecemeal address inflammation in a way that I could tolerate. What I was really afraid of because I was so brittle was having any kind of setback that would push me down further. And so if I could do it in a way that was more controlled and gentle, then it felt like something I could move forward with.

So what did you do? Or the things that helped you recover?

So, one of the things was, yeah, was IBS.

By the way, chronic fatigue syndrome was not something most people recover from, right? Fibromyalgia is not something people recover from.

Absolutely.

Unless you see a functional medicine doctor.

Right, right. Or have some one of those spontaneous remissions, which is one in a million, probably. Yeah, so what I ended up doing also was distancing myself from the diagnosis and the prognosis because it was more despairing. My marriage was held together by a single thread. I had two young kids. I had everything to lose. So I was like, if I don't get my act together and start trying differently, then I'm going to lose whatever, what little I have left. So I was really motivated. And the first thing I did was really, I started reading about Well, I knew I had to get sleep. If I can't get sleep, I'm gonna not have enough energy. So really looking, understanding the circadian clock and, you know, I learned things that I was surprised I didn't know already. You know, I knew about the pineal gland and the hypothalamus and we have this master clock and we have jet lag and that's why. But I didn't know about every organ having its own clock, its own rhythm.

And even a whole field of chronobiology where the different kinds of chemo is better given at different times of the day to work better.

I know.

This is in conventional medicine.

Right. And it makes, I mean, it makes like complete rational sense, right? So I started, first of all, being more regimented about just, okay, you know what? I'm gonna wake up, you know, and get up out of bed, Even if I feel kind of miserable, but I'm going to, my body needs to know that it's awake and that it's alive. So really basic fundamental steps. And I learned that when we deviate, I mean, particularly when you're brittle like that. I mean, of course, when we are more resilient, like now, I have much more flexibility. But when I was brittle, when you stray away so often from a routine, it causes stress on the body. So I was like, oh, okay, this is maybe an easier way where I can reduce stress in my body.

Yeah, rhythm. We all live different lives.

You know, my dog, I feed my dog at the same times every day. Why don't I do that for myself? You know, and he gets walks now at the same time. Why don't I do that for myself? So it was, I started syncing myself also with my kids.

Right?

Like, okay, I'm gonna take care of my kids, I can take care of myself at the same time. So I think that also as in that caretaker mentality, you know, as a mother or a partner or a doctor, is we tend to put ourselves last. And so it was kind of time to put myself first, you know, as my first patient.

That's good. And so you did the rhythm and what else? Change your diet?

And then, yeah, and you know, a lot of it was just asking new questions. the diet piece, I thought I was eating, quote, healthy, you know, which was largely vegetarian. I was cooking meals, but also doing a lot of prepackaged meals, but, you know, not a lot of processed stuff. And it wasn't until I saw an acupuncturist. So the acupuncturist that I saw, Robert Levine, who's in Berkeley, California, he.

He.

Was brilliant, really brilliant. He's still practicing and he's a good dear friend of mine, mentor of mine. I learned a ton from him about understanding the body in terms of systems. So when my thyroid was out of whack, it wasn't just my thyroid. It was my whole hormone system, which is tied then to the digestive system, which is tied to the immune system. It suddenly started making- Bones connected to.

The thigh bone, right?

Yeah, exactly. And the body is connected to the brain.

Which is actually amazing in medicine that.

Our entire training teaches us the opposite, that there's all these organ systems, right? We take the GI system and the liver and the lungs and the brain and the heart and the hormone. And you go to specialists for every different part of you and nobody connects the dots. Right, right. And traditional Chinese medicine is actually a system of thinking of the body as a system. And that's what functional medicine is. It's a systems thinking of the body.

Yes, absolutely. And so, you know, we can extrapolate that to any size system, right? We look at our communities and our world, right? And, you know, one of the things I feel like that drives almost everything, if not everything, that we do as individuals and that we do as societies is how do I get more energy?

Yeah. Right?

My Qigong teacher was talking about that. How do we get more energy? You know, whether it's through, you know- Chi means energy. Yeah, whether it's through solar energy, you know, fossil fuels, whether it's, yeah, I mean, it's food, nature, movement. So, you know, I began to shift my thinking in relationship to health and disease in a much more living sort of embodied way. So the, but the diet thing, he was the first one, he was like, you know, you're so deficient right now. I think you need more meat. And you need more of these heavier foods. Like you're doing lots of salads, which are great, but not for you right now. So I hadn't even thought about a personalized diet. And I was like, More meats? What are you talking about? And this is before Paleo days and all that. I mean, what's the enemy? I began researching ancestral diets and the work of dentist Weston A. Price.

And Price, and Melvin Connor's work.

Right. suddenly made sense. Like, oh yeah, okay, I'm gonna eat like my ancestors ate. I'm gonna prepare food the way my ancestors prepared so I can maximize nutrient density. Nutrient density equals more energy. And then the gluten issue came up, you know, I was really skeptical of it, you know.

Well, it's one of the biggest drivers.

Of thyroid disease, Hashimoto's. Yes, yes. And the celiac experts know that, but endocrinologists don't. So there's no crosstalk there either. And this is in conventional, medicine, right? And I do remember asking my endocrinologist, what can I do? What can I do? And he said, nothing. It's genetic.

Oh, gosh, no, it's not.

It's a predisposition, but not predetermination.

But.

The gluten thing didn't actually arise. I think I was partly in denial about it. There were lots of rabbit holes that I knew about and I just didn't want to go down. as long as I was steadily getting better, it was my older daughter who, she was five at the time, I was taking her to her first dentist visit. And I felt like as a family we ate pretty well. She didn't do a lot of sweets, but she had not just one cavity at her visit. She had six cavities.

Wow.

Yeah.

And I was floored. And the dentist kept saying, well, don't feel guilty. Don't feel guilty. And I was like, wait a minute. I wasn't feeling guilty until you just said that. But it made me investigate like something else is going on. Like, I know how we eat, I know how she brushes, and I know cavities happen, but like six, it just, it didn't compute. So I started researching, and that's when I came across Weston A. Price's work around the condition of teeth tied directly to diet. Diet. But then going deeper, and then in my research, I came across gluten. and gluten causing enamel defects, gluten causing inflammation in the gut, which therefore could translate into poor oral hygiene or just conditioning of the gums and the teeth. So that was just kind of another step in that process when I realized, oh, I gotta go back. And again, this is not unconventional. This is traditional Hippocrates said all diseases begin in the gut. So we're just kind of going back and I realized I have to learn how to heal my gut as another step.

Did you still have digestive symptoms after that initial gastritis in China or did it get better?

They were largely quiescent until I removed gluten. And I removed gluten and I had massive withdrawal. Diarrhea, irritable bowel, and again, this was kind of before the time that I realized I understood about detox and how healing happens is that often it gets a lot worse before it gets better and that it could be a good sign. So I was really frightened by how severe my reaction was when I stopped gluten. So I was thinking it was a bad thing. But then, you know what? I stuck with it and a week later it calmed down and then my health improved a notch. So and not only that, but you know, we changed the way that our whole family ate. And my younger daughter, so my older daughter's teeth really basically resolved. I mean, they became really strong. Some of her cavities even filled, like they recalcified and didn't have to get filled. My younger daughter, who didn't really have anything that was alarming, but she had like this perioral eczema, which is this dermatitis, which is very difficult to treat with- It's often dairy or- With steroids, which is how we treat most dermatitis.

Anything red on the skin, they put steroids on it.

Exactly.

Why is the skin irritated coming from the inside, not the outside?

So she had that and she would get asthma when she got colds. And both of those are totally resolved.

Off of gluten.

Well, off of gluten, but also doing the ancestral diet.

So off of dairy.

Yes. Yes. And so it was just one of those things. I was like, you can't make this stuff up. And this stuff isn't written up. And it's very individualized.

But if you look in the literature, doctors say, Where's the evidence? Where's the evidence? Well, there's 900,000 papers published every year. Most doctors haven't read that many of them. And the truth is that most of the ones that are on these subjects are completely ignored. And when you put all the dots together, there's a pattern there in the data that suggests that these things are real, that there is something called leaky gut, that there is inflammation that comes from the microbiome, that foods do cause reactions in the body that lead to all these diseases, that heavy metals and toxins are an issue, that they cause disease. I mean, there's no lack of data.

It's just not data that doctors pay attention to in literature. Right. And it takes, on average, 14 years, I thought that was- 17 years. Oh, 17. Oh, God.

That's not a good day.

For information.

That's not a good day.

For information and research to translate over to clinical care.

Yeah, I think that's not a good day. The guy who discovered that we should wash our hands before giving any surgery or childbirth was basically ridiculed for suggesting that doctors could be causing their patients to get sick by not washing their hands. And he was basically exiled and ended up dying in sort of disgrace with no money. excommunicated from the medical community, semio wise. And it took 50 years for them to go, oh yeah, maybe we should wash our hands. Oh my God.

Where's the science on that? Yeah, right.

Well, it was in an ethmoid at a doctor, is that, oh, you could suggest that a doctor would be causing their patients to die from childbirth fever because they didn't wash their hands. That's nonsense.

So it is tough to change medical paradigms. Right, right. But I mean, some of it is common sense. Yeah. we don't need science to show us that, right?

Well, I mean, when they didn't know about bacteria, common sense was, you know, yeah, that's true.

That's true. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I kind of just did this stepwise progression to get to the point where I was much more able to get out of the house. And then, and one of the things I also explored, which I would say maybe is down the unconventional path, was, I began to shadow integrative doctors on.

Just.

Different paths in integrative medicine or sort of, you know, I didn't actually know about functional medicine at the time. So I was shadowing an anthroposophical medicine doc, you know, someone doing like sort of anti-aging hormone therapies. And then it was when I was shadowing a integrative pediatrician, who said, well, what are you... I was still unwell. I had taken off work for a couple of years. But I was starting to think, oh, how would it look if I were to return to work? What are the different ways I could practice? And it was the pediatrician who said, what are you interested in? I said, well, I love the traditional Chinese medicine paradigm. It makes so much sense to me, the systems thinking, and about the gut, you know, sort of being the foundation of healing. And I'm really, you know, ancestral health, you know, figures into it. And she said, it sounds like you, you know, you're interested in functional medicine. I was like, what is that?

What's that?

What is that? So, and she really strongly recommended that I go see the take this course with Institute for Functional Medicine. So I, it was sort of a bone for me, right? Like I could I was aiming to get healthy enough to be able to travel, to go attend a conference. And so, and it came to Santa Monica, and I live in the Bay Area. So it was, it felt doable. It wasn't, yeah, cross country. And I went, and it was, I think I had that aha moment like you did when you, you know, listened to Jeff Bland. I was like, oh my God. Oh my God, and like this is something that's been developed and developing, and there's a framework. I don't have to make this up.

No.

So it was a really important turning point for me. It gave me hope both in, you know, as a patient, but also as a doctor, how can I give back? What it did also cause was it caused a little bit of anxiety.

Yeah, because you have to relearn medicine.

I had to relearn medicine, but then suddenly I went from having no or very few options to having infinite options.

And how to get better?

Yeah, right? Okay, like which diet when? Which supplements? What do I rule myself out for? Mold and mercury and all these things. And it felt very overwhelming. And so that's when I ended up I actually did.

You need a navigator.

I did, and you know, I had a very unconventional navigator was we had a visit from some friends of ours who ended up staying with us. And we had known them for years, but they'd never stayed with us. And we've always known them through sort of the sustainability work, right? So I had been doing environmental health. My husband is in public policy around renewable energy. So we knew them through work circles. And anyways, we were hosting them for a weekend and they come. We knew that the wife, Pia, was also clairvoyant. So she was a sustainable architect and her husband was one of the leading climate physicists.

So they were the very skill to have.

Exactly. So they're a very dynamic couple. We knew about her clairvoyance through sort of hearsay, but We had never experienced it up front and kind of never really were curious enough to go there. That would be woo-woo. Oh, yeah, exactly. That's how I felt. So they ended up staying in our house. And one of the things was that my younger daughter was having night terrors for four months, which did not bode well for my insomnia. And we had tried everything. I mean, and actually gone out kind of on an alternative limb too, right? She was doing like chamomile drops, and some homeopathy, but nothing really touched her. And so Pia walks into her house and she starts coughing, coughing, coughing. And she said, you know, there's something going on. The energy in this house is really heavy. Do you guys feel it? And we're all looking at each other like, okay, you know. And she said, well, but it's really heavy. and she said, do you mind if I just walk around? So she's walking around and she said, it's heaviest in the girl's room. And so, you know, nothing opens your mind like desperation, right?

Sure, right.

So I have- that's why I say.

People only change when they have, when they don't have N.E.P. Syndrome anymore. N.E.P. Syndrome is not enough pain.

Yes.

When people have enough pain, they're gonna do whatever.

Right, right. And you hit that dead end, right? So I just said, I said, you, know what? Maybe it's heavy 'cause Sonia, my daughter's been crying every single night, right? And she said, wait a minute. She said, no, no, no, it's the other way around. Sonia's crying because she feels the heaviness too. And I'm like, okay, whatever. So she goes off to Whole Foods of all places, gets a sage wand, right, with a smudge stick, which I had never heard of before. It's a Native American way of creating energy from within. Exactly. So she just goes around and she says, It's really important that you come with me. You're the lady of the house and your intention really matters. And I'm like, But my intention is I don't actually believe what you're doing. She said, no, no, just say whatever doesn't belong here needs to leave. And the thing that really convinced me to do it with her, well, first of all, it's low risk. I mean, there was, right, I'm always looking for high potential gain, low risk. Little sage Exactly, never heard anyone.

Bad stuff, get out.

She said that she had a vision and she described this vision of this man, you know, tall, slender, reddish-brown hair, balding right here, wearing a plaid shirt. And it sent chills down my, just threw out my body because this was the seller of the house who we'd met three times, like to a T. Wow. And so she said-- She died. he had not died. He had moved out, but he had not wanted to move out. And she said, that's just what keeps coming to me when I look at the energy. And I was like, okay, whoa, weird, but okay. Like, that's really spot on.

Yeah.

So we just walked around and, you know, and I was kind of just being very sympathetic, too. I've. I sympathized with the seller, right? That he had to leave his home.

Yeah.

So, you know, but I wasn't holding my breath. And from that night on, Sonia slept soundly.

Amazing.

I mean, you know, to this day, she's an incredible sleeper. So, you know, and then there was still part of me who was like, well, you know, there's no control. You know, how do we really know? Maybe it was coincidental. But before Pia left, what she did was she said, I actually approached her and I said, well, if you can lift the heaviness in a house, can you lift the heaviness in my body? You know, I mean, I'm much smaller than this house. And she said, oh, you know, it doesn't work quite like that. And she said, but I can do one thing. I can teach you how to develop intuition, which I had never heard of. I did not know that intuition was something like music or art. Like you can develop it. Yeah, you can practice it. And she was very pragmatic about it. And she said, no, no, this doesn't mean you're going to be clairvoyant. Right? But it just means that you can learn to open this other side of your brain that has probably been closed off for a long time because of your training and your upbringing. So I, so she taught me how to do that. Well, she taught me what I needed to do to begin to practice to open up to that. And a lot of it was, it was so basic. A lot of it was just silencing my analytical mind and being in my body. And that second part was the heart, well actually they were both really hard. They were both really hard. Silence, analytical mind, being in my body because my body was so uncomfortable. And so she said, you can only heal something that you are connected to. You can't heal something you're detached from. So that was healing on multiple levels, both that I had to inhabit my body, which was probably one of the biggest steps in terms of healing, not being afraid of it, but going into it. And then also learning how to read sensations as messages and not just symptoms that were making me miserable.

I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body if you listen to it.

Absolutely, absolutely. So the intuition piece came in incredibly handy. When I was introduced to functional medicine, I wasn't really practicing it because I was doing steadily better.

And then I-- Were you trying some of it on yourself?

I was trying some of it on myself, but like it was, it was, you know, I mean, you know how it is when you're like, it's like, you know, someone wants you to play piano piece, you can't even read the notes yet, and it just, it's laborious. So I wasn't, I wasn't motivated. But then I go to the intro to functional medicine conference and saw all these tools, but then felt overwhelmed. And then I was motivated to practice intuition. And I really learned to use intuition to guide me. Like, how do I choose what to do next? Is this the right diet for me? Is gluten really, you know, is it something that I can return to or is it something that I really need to stay off of strictly? So it began to, it made that navigation much easier for me. And it's something that I encourage my patients to develop if they're interested. It's simple. It just takes a lot of repetition and quiet listening.

So you found one of the causes was gluten, right? and toxins you got from China that you've worked on getting rid of. Was there anything else?

I did a lot of detoxes. So, you know, I learned how to balance my hormones. I think my hormones were really out of whack after that incident.

What does that mean?

Well, my estrogen and progesterone levels were really low. So, I, you know, for a while I actually took bioidentical hormones to just support my system so I could get strong enough just to help balance out the immune system. And then as my whole system got stronger, I was able to really wean off of those. And just last year, even like 14 years later, I actually completely tapered off my thyroid medicine as well. So I didn't know that was possible.

Yeah. Amazing what happens when you learn how to take care of your body.

Amazing, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, functional medicine is an incredible roadmap. It's really about thinking differently about disease. And it's what you said, it's about understanding the body is a system where everything's connected, where there are root causes of things that we can get to, where there's things your body needs like rhythm or the right food to help it restore balance. And when you do that for yourself, it works. And often, you know, it's not something you even have to do in a doctor's office. A lot of things that actually work to create balance are things that everybody can do, whether it's eating well, moving, right, sleeping.

Absolutely.

Meditating, connecting, you know, being in a social support system. And then sometimes you do need help to get rid of some of the drivers, things like heavy metals or infections like Lyme, which you said you had, or mold, if you're, which I had almost died from a couple of years ago. Allergens. Those, those are the things that actually you might need a little help with. But if you're suffering out there, if you're listening and you're wondering, what's the road? How do I get better? I've been told that this is just something I have to live with, that I have to manage, that I have to take medications for. I encourage you to just have hope, because if you are suffering, there is a road for most people that recover. And functional medicine is the GPS system to figure out how to navigate that road. and it really is a powerful model. It's not the answer to everything, but it is a far better mousetrap than we were trained with in conventional medicine. And it's what I've done for the last 25 years. It clearly is what helped you recover and helped me recover. And I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing if I didn't actually understand the body in that way. And every day, you know, I remember first practicing functional medicine. I wasn't like for you, but I was like, I would tell people to do this stuff that was sort of outside the box of what I learned in medical school. they'd have severe migraines, you know, 25 times a month, or they'd be having severe irritable bowel, or they'd have, you know, an autoimmune disease. And. And I would tell them to do, you know, change your diet, do this, do that. And they'd call me back six weeks later or whatever, and they're like, I'm better. And I'm like, you are really? I say the same. I'm like, what? That worked. Okay, fine. You know, I was like, I really took me years and. to expect that people would get better. Because I was like, well, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just gonna try this stuff. And it seems to make sense and it's not gonna hurt them. And people just recovered. And it just was amazing to me. I mean, I had a woman the other day who came in with vestibular migraines, which is a terrible kind of migraine where your head is spinning, you're in vertigo. It's like you were saying, you experienced, she had severe migraines 25 times a month. She had severe other, quote, other symptoms. So she was seeing the neurologist for that, but they weren't worrying about her gut. And she was having severe bloating, fluid retention, digestive issues. She had anxiety. I mean, she couldn't even come in my office without the door being open. And she was a really smart young woman who wanted to go to be a nurse practitioner. She was a nurse. And it wasn't in her head. And she was on all these antidepressants and psychiatric medications and any anxiety medications. and vertigo medications and migraine medications, you know, the drill.

And I'm like, well, and then medications to counter those side effects of those medications.

Right.

And so, you know, I just followed the basic map of how do you help people restore health and function? And for her, I was like, well, you know, she's got a lot of inflammation going on. I could see her. She was swollen, she had fluid retention, she had gained a bunch of weight. And, you know, I, I wasn't treating her migraine. I was helping restore her gut function. Yes. And I was helping her. you know, eat a diet that was anti-inflammatory and I was helping her with certain nutrients she was low in. And, you know, I never really had a patient like this before, you know, that was that severe, that had vestibular migraines. And in functional medicine, it doesn't matter if you've never seen the disease before, because if you follow, if you follow the principles of removing the stuff that's causing a problem and adding in the stuff that creates Health, the body knows what to do.

It's super smart. Right, the body figures it out. We don't have to.

No, and so I just fixed her gut.

She had really bad, I gave her stuff to clear out SIBO, she had bacterial overgrowth, she had fungal overgrowth in her gut, so I cleared all that out. I restored her gut with a gut health shake which contained polyphenols and cranberry and pomegranate and green tea, and gave her probiotics and prebiotics and just fiber and things that help her gut. few basic nutrients, got her on an anti-inflammatory gluten dairy free diet. She came back six weeks later. I didn't recognize her. I mean, she. All the fluid went out of her body. She was bright and alert. She was funny and had not had a migraine and was, you know, symptom free. Her gut was completely better. And she was off the medication.

That's amazing. I don't. I never want to discount also the fact that you acknowledged her and validated her. Yeah.

I mean, which is a huge piece of change. I'm like, you,'re not crazy. You saw her. Yeah, I saw her. Right. I mean, she was in bed and she, I mean, I could tell she wasn't a malingerer or she wasn't a whiner.

Right. But she get, it's easy to dismiss.

These patients and go, well, it's just.

You know, they're just psychological or whatever. Just give them some meds and kick them on. Right. But then they're psychological because they feel miserable. Right.

Well, that's very important. Right, right.

I'm like, wait a minute. Like, okay, we're going to get you some meds. Your body isn't working, your brain is. Right. Difficult patients are the ones who are really suffering, right? That's why they keep coming back.

That's why they're irritable.

That's why- and your doctors called you a difficult patient. Yeah, I mean, I call myself a difficult patient. You wanna be a difficult patient. But it's the difficult relationships that force us to grow. I mean, we have to start asking the question, like, wait a minute. And I would say it's like any other relationship, right? Even if one person is the one who's sort of being dismissed and is kind of miserable, Both people in the relationship know something's not working. So even before I got sick, I knew that the tools that I had in my doctor's bag were really limited. I already knew that, but that's kind of the best I could do.

But you didn't know what else was out there. I mean, you and I both had the experience of being knocked to our knees in order to figure out a different way. I don't wish that on all our medical colleagues. But I do wish they would understand that the paradigm that we learned is only part of the story. And that, yeah, everything I learned in medical school is useful and I use it and I rely on it. But there's another meta layer of understanding how the body is organized. Because those are just the piece parts. Like what does the puzzle look like when you put it together? That's what functional medicine is. And it's such a powerful model. It's what we do at the UltraWellness Center in Lenox. You know, I have three other doctors, two PAs, five nutritionists, and we work with people from all over the world. We've like, you know, probably over 70 years of clinical experience together. And it's just amazing the kinds of things that people can recover from. And now you're doing that in your own practice. You've written this great book, Brave New Medicine, which is a really fabulous story about how you as a physician understood that there's a different way to heal your illnesses and your autoimmune disease and all this weird nonsense that we don't.

Know how to deal with in medicine. Right. And sort of just, what does it look like, the lived experience? You know, to your point though, I mean, I write at the end of my book about this essay, this famous essay called Arrogance back in, I think it was 1980 in the New England Journal of Medicine editor at that time, or he had been retired, Inglefinger. He was dying from cancer and had written this this very provocative essay where, Amy was talking about arrogance at the time, and I would say arrogance is probably not the, you know, not the vice of today. I think it's more just not seeing, right? Not seeing or denial.

It's a little bit of hubris, a little bit of denial.

A little bit of both. And he had posed the question, what would medicine look like if one of the prerequisites for all doctors entering medical school was that they had a serious illness.

Yeah.

Like, what would it look like?

Right? Yeah.

And so, yeah, would there be more empathy? Would there be more belief? I mean, like this, this one of the central questions in my life has always been around belief.

Yeah.

Right.

Like, what is true and what is not true? How do we make ourselves believe things if we don't?

Yeah.

And yeah, and like how do we start with that? Like as a doctor, like just believing all patients.

And that's really important because, you know, as physicians, we were subliminally trained to have a dismissive attitude to many categories of patients. You know, if you had irritable bowel, well, that was in your head. Or if you had chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or if you had even more serious illnesses like Crohn's or colitis. Well, that was psychological. Yeah, it manifested physically, but these were troubled patients.

Right, right. I mean, which is so ironic and unfortunate for everyone. I mean, I know for myself and many of my colleagues and friends that I know went into medicine to alleviate suffering. And how much of it are we perpetuating? And one of the themes also that that comes up over and over again with chronic illness, and I know for myself too, is reaching that point of hopelessness or helplessness. And there becomes a learned helplessness on top of that when you get punted from doctor to doctor to doctor. So are we perpetuating illness as well through this system? And so yeah, would I want doctors to go through this? I mean, hell no. you know, so I sort of turned that question on its head. Like, what would medicine look like if doctors, nurses, health care practitioners had an immersion in wellness?

Yeah.

Like, what if doctors, right, were taught to sleep well? What if doctors were fed well in their training? What if doctors, you know, no, I'm serious.

Like, that's so terrible.

What would it what would medicine look like? What would medicine look like if we.

Could explain- Sleep deprivation is considered weaknesses in residency training.

I know that.

But.

Would we have that experience then to be able to translate to our patients, right? I mean, we're ultimately teachers.

Well, that's what functional medicine is. It's the science of creating health.

Yes.

And when you do that, disease goes away as a side effect.

Yes.

And you're right, I think, you know, if you look at most healing traditions, a lot of shamans or healers went through some crisis, some health crisis, some.

Trauma, some initiatory illness.

It was sort of helped, you know, sort of select them to be healers. We don't do that anymore. We just have the hazing of medical school. But that makes us all kind of unwell in a way, and we sort of then normalize that.

Absolutely. Yeah. Then we sort of pass it on, right? It's a kind of trauma.

It is.

It's a kind of trauma and then we pass it on to our patients inadvertently. So how do we break that cycle? And I would say one thing though, just to bring up related to that in terms of my healing was it was hard for me. I mean, even when I found functional medicine, I just had such little energy. that it was easy still for me to have hope, I called it hope fatigue, to try another thing, to try again. And what I ended up discovering that was easier was to release. So instead of sort of going, you know, trying to think positively, trying to be optimistic, which were things that you.

Kind of have to surrender to it.

Absolutely. I mean, because Those qualities feel like sunlight to someone who's suffering from a migraine. I know I need that sunlight, but it is killing me right now. My husband was this sort of embodiment of resilience and confidence and optimism. I couldn't stand to be around him. It was stressful from where I was. And so what I ended up stumbling across was, oh my God, I'm carrying around a lot of grief. Okay, yes, I've got my lost identities and time lost and all this suffering, but all this stuff came out, right? I went to a grief ritual. I didn't know those things existed. But back generations ago in cultures, those like soul detoxes, right? How do we do that?

It's not a body detox. I love that soul detox.

How much are we carrying? it is subconsciously programmed into the way our DNA folds, into the way our neurons are wired. And grief is nondiscriminate. So I thought I was going for my health, just the loss of the function of my body. And all this stuff came out, cobwebs, right? From childhood, from residency, relationships, in the past. And then the shame, the shame of having this mysterious illness.

Yeah, the doctor's shame.

Shame of being a doctor who cannot figure it out.

Yeah.

And that was really, really healing. So then, as you say, as a side effect, what ends up filling up that space is health.

Yeah. Right?

It is, oh, I suddenly become more optimistic. I have more hope. because there's space for it. It's not something that I have to will myself in order to get, because I couldn't do that.

That's amazing. And so you've taken all you've learned. You've been through so many different cycles of struggle, and you've recovered and come back on top, and you've written this book. And what's beautiful is, it's really your story, but it's an inspiring story, and it's sort of a window into both sort of how in traditional medicine we kind of miss the boat a lot of times and how you can on your own become empowered to find a brave new medicine. But you also share at the end of the book 15 steps that are about healing, about how to care for your body and how to heal. So in a way you sort of make it really simple for people in how to actually create health for themselves. Can you take us through those?

Yeah, so I mean a lot of the steps were ones that we covered. And so the way that I sort of lived through the experience of my healing journey is, you know, it was really through the journal that I kept. And the journal was something that I'd kept since I was a little girl. And so when I began, when I sort of made that shift, like, I've got to try differently, go back to Pathology 101, review inflammation. Okay, what's my first step? Like, this is going to be my experiment. I'm an N of one. I'm my own doctor. I'm my own patient. Life is the experiment. Step number one, ask new questions. And so then, you know, number two, I think was the resetting my inner clock, right? Number three. So I kind of, yeah, I just build it stepwise as I'm living through my healing journey. So it's a how-to, but it's sort of...

But it's really beautiful.

It's simple.

How do you set your rhythm? How do you sleep? How do you give yourself permission to receive and how people help you?

Right? Right, right. Which was, yeah, it was really challenging.

Yeah.

Because I stopped driving for quite a while. And yeah, most people were just like, oh my God, that's just horrible. You know, how do you get around? You can't even get around. And you know what? I started thinking about, who can I carpool with? Who can get a ride for? It ended up being a strange community building experience.

We can do it ourselves. I can do it myself.

Right, and then I realized also, I don't have to live my life so fast. I can slow things down. I can wait for a carpool. So there's a lot of things I think that happen with healing, like for instance a diet. I might prescribe a diet that's healing for myself, for my family or my patients. And maybe it's less about the diet per se than just getting them to connect to their food, getting them to connect to their bodies. And they're paying attention and they're treating themselves with love. So how much is that? -Right.

-Beautiful. Get a daily dose of nature, detox by your house and yourself. And it is really well laid out and very simple. It's almost like you've taken all the concepts of functional medicine and traditional Chinese medicine and everything you know about healing and integrative medicine put into really very practical, simple things. And some of them are kind of strange, like, let your intuition tell your thinking mind where to look next.

Right? So, that's a quote that I took from Jonas Salk, the inventor of one of the polio vaccines. And that was another thing that was was sort of reassuring to me when I, when sometimes I thought, well, I'm getting too woo-woo out there. But really looking at scientists, you know, forefathers of modern medicine who were, they, they let their intuition sort of guide their discoveries. So I was like, oh, again, it's not woo-woo. Why are we calling it woo-woo? It's actually very human. We have just forgotten it in our culture.

And there are so many other great things here like heal your gut and the basics of a 30-day diet reset, which is super important because diet drives so much disease as people know. And breaking old habits and just having pleasure and looking for root causes. I mean, surviving love and loss, really, really fantastic.

Thank you.

Finding your story. I mean, these are just real nuggets of wisdom around healing that you've really come to the hard way.

Practicing pleasure is my favorite prescription.

That's a good one.

It's amazing how many patients won't do that unless a doctor prescribes it to them.

Yeah, it's really true. I think we don't prioritize fun and play and joy. It's so great. Well, you just have shared such a wonderful story about how sick you could be how sick we get and how much illness there is and your own road out of it. I think it's inspiring for so many people. And I think I really feel like that's really why you do what you do. It's why I do what I do. It's why we spend time teaching and sharing because there are so many people who suffer unnecessarily, who suffer needlessly, and there is a way forward. So thank you for sharing that.

Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, I would this taboo about doctors not disclosing their health problems.

Yeah.

There are a lot of doctors suffering out there too.

It's so true. Yeah. I think my advice to doctors listening is to tell your story, share with your patients.

Absolutely.

Don't have this doctor-patient relationship, which is sort of very distant and estranged. Be a human. Let them know. who you are and that always works. It builds a relationship, it helps them know that you've suffered through it. I mean, even if you haven't suffered, you can share something. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your story and everybody should get Brave New Medicine, a doctor's unconventional path to healing her autoimmune illness. It's been out since September 1st, 2019. It's a wonderful story, very inspiring and very practical.

So thank you for joining us. Absolutely, thank you.

And you've been listening to the Doctor's Pharmacy. This is Dr. Mark Hyman. If you love the show, please leave a comment. Please share with your friends and family on Facebook or Twitter or social media. And if you don't already subscribe, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

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