Is Brain Fog Caused By Your Microbiome? with Dr. Todd LePine

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

Certain foods may trigger brain fog, and it is something that I think is intimately connected to the gut. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today we have a special episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy house call with one of my colleagues from the Ultra Wellness Center, Dr. Todd LePine. you probably know him by now. He's an extraordinary physician. He's been a doctor of functional medicine longer than I have, which is a long, long time. He graduated from Dartmouth Medical School. He teaches all around the world. He's one of the smartest guys I know. And he's just an awesome physician. And we get to talk about some really interesting cases today. Today we're gonna talk about brain fog. Now, that's not something I learned about in medical school. There was no class on brain fog. There was no ICD-10 diagnostic code for brain fog. But it is a real thing that people experience and most doctors dismiss. So in traditional medicine, we don't really have a way of thinking about it, actually. Except it is really, really common. And when people have it, they know what it is. I've had it. I'm sure you've had it. And it's not a fun thing. You feel like you're walking through silly putty. You can't focus, you can't think, your brain's all foggy, and it's very difficult to get through the day. And there's so many different causes of it. So Talk to me in general about, let's just skip the part where what traditional medicine does with brain fog, because maybe they'll give you an antidepressant, maybe they'll, I don't know, what's the other thing, ignore you. But what would be the major reasons that we're seeing this pandemic of brain dysfunction and brain fog today?

So brain fog is really a symptom, sort of like cough. Cough can be caused by a cold, bronchitis, pneumonia, post-nasal drip, asthma, a whole bunch of things. So you've got to figure out, okay, what's driving it? There is no ICD-10 code for brain fog. You might call it altered mental status, but oftentimes it's transitory and that's the really interesting thing. And I've seen patients where they'll get brain fog when they're in a certain building. They'll get brain fog after they've had a certain meal. Certain foods may trigger brain fog. And it is something that I think is intimately connected to the gut. I think the, and we'll talk about that at this particular case, is gut fermentation is oftentimes cause for brain fog.

I mean, it's like bugs fermenting the food you're eating, creating all this nasty.

Byproducts that you're consuming. Yeah, and I don't know, Mark, if you've had patients who've had, this is a really interesting thing because I have patients come in and they say, I feel like my gut is just bloating and I'm fermenting and that's exactly what's happening. So there is a condition, I just recently had a patient who had auto-brewery syndrome.

Yeah.

And I've seen that. So you have your own beer factory. Exactly. So when you wanna make beer, what do you do? You take sugar and you add yeast to it and you can actually produce alcohol. And I've had a couple of cases where it was missed. And it's actually not just, the recent findings is it's not just yeast in the gut that do this, but also Klebsiella bacteria. So both bacteria and yeast can actually produce these compounds which are toxins. Alcohol is a toxin. That's why when you get drunk, you're intoxicated. And you'll actually produce alcohol and other toxins which affect your brain.

It's interesting. I never really had that insight before. You said that word intoxicated.

Toxic.

Toxic.

Yeah, toxic. Exactly. That's how I explain it to people.

It took me six years to figure that one out.

Exactly. Exactly.

But I think that what you're saying is very true. I mean, I've had two times in my life when I've had severe brain fog. One was when I had mercury poisoning 30, 25 years ago. And my gut was a mess then because the mercury poisoned my gut. I had terrible bloating, distension, diarrhea. And the second time was more recently when I had mold toxicity and I had C. diff and I also had colitis and gastritis and my whole gut was a mess and I had severe brain fog. And it was pretty debilitating. You could barely focus, answer an email, talk to somebody. Oh yeah, you can't concentrate. You can't concentrate at all. And people think, oh, that's just sort of in your head. It's not in your head, maybe in your stomach.

Well, it's manifesting in the head. That's the whole thing. And we have these artificial boundaries between the brain and the body and the mind and they're all interconnected. and brain fog is a real, it's a real phenomenon. And then you have to sort of figure out what's doing it. The other thing that is interesting that I see with some people with brain fog is just gluten and dairy. And I tell patients that, you know, one of the most addictive foods is pizza. And the reason for that is that pizza has gluten in it.

It's true, you can eat a whole pie, right?

Exactly, oh yeah, I tell you, it's one of the foods that I'll occasionally indulge in, but I don't have it.

That often, 'cause it's not the best food for you.

But you have my cauliflower pizza with goat cheese, You can make a healthy pizza, exactly. But the two foods which are interesting is that gluten and dairy both get broken down. The proteins in those get broken down into caseinomorphins and glutamorphins. And caseinomorphins are the ones from dairy and glutamorphins are from gluten. And those have morphine-like effects. So you literally become a little high. You get a little high, you get a little foggy in the brain. and it also can cause cravings and it can sort of make you sleepy, you know, you eat it and then you get a little sleepy from it also. That's, you know, when children drink breast milk, they go to sleep after, they conk out. I mean, that's because of the morphine-like action in milk.

Yeah, so that's true. I think, you know, it can be our diet, it can be food sensitivities like gluten and dairy, which are really common and often people going on an elimination diet will have an immediate relief of brain fog, which is something that you don't know you have until you don't have it anymore sometimes. People just think this sort of slow decline of their cognitive function, they're not realizing that it's actually something that can be reversed and it can be reversed very quickly. So the second thing is the factors that are in the gut, bacterial overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, we call dysbiosis, that can also lead to a lot of cognitive issues because your gut's connected to your brain. and that causes this effect when the bugs are out of balance and it drives inflammation and then you get inflammation in the brain, essentially is what causes brain fog.

Absolutely. Well, the other important thing, and I think I talked about this last time, is that the blood flow from the gut has to go through the liver. And the reason for that is to filter all of the toxins that are there. So there's a lot of immune cells, the Kupffer cells in the liver and a lot of filtering processes and detoxification takes place in the liver prior to the blood from the gut, then going into the systemic circulation. So sometimes you'll have, in addition to leaky gut, you'll have problems with detoxification in the liver itself. And that's, you know, an example of that is the condition of hepatic encephalopathy, which is brain fog. That's essentially-- well, talk about that.

What is that for people who don't know what that's saying a big word?

I learned, and I think I mentioned this before, and it was one of the things that really stuck with me is when I worked at the VA hospital, there was a lot of-- alcoholics and when you're an alcoholic you basically turn your liver into a pickled liver.

You trash your liver, yeah.

You trash your liver and then you're not able to detoxify and I would typically see this over and over where patients had cirrhosis of the liver and their liver was not able to detoxify and then when they would eat foods, especially high protein type meals, they would get hepatic encephalopathy and literally go into a coma.

So, they would literally get delirium, confusion, Absolutely. Brain fog.

Brain fog. That's when they're on steroids.

And the reason is it was coming from their gut. And what I found so striking when I started learning about functional medicine was that here was a condition in medicine that we knew how to treat by fixing the gut. We gave people antibiotics to sterilize their gut to kill the bacteria that caused all these byproducts that made people have basically delirium or encephalopathy and brain fog. So it was like, wow, the gut is connected to the brain.

Totally, totally connected to the brain, absolutely. And in some cases, there have been cases of people actually having psychosis from gut dysfunction.

Yeah, you mentioned Auto-Brewery Syndrome. I remember reading a case of a woman who was arrested for driving under the influence and it turned out she wasn't drinking but she had a high blood alcohol level that was coming from her gut.

Yeah, it is. It's a very real phenomenon. You have to think about it and the way that you actually test for that is you can, it's actually quite simple. You just have somebody do what I call a pancake challenge. You basically some pancakes full of carbs, throw some maple syrup on it, eat it and get a blood draw at point zero. Eat the meal and then half an.

Hour later check your alcohol level. It sounds like a fun medical test. Pancake challenge. So we've talked about the gut. We've talked about gluten, dairy, food sensitivities. There are other reasons too. Infections.

Infections can do that. Another one that is- Tick infections. Oh, absolutely. Tick infections. Lyme. Yeah, those are, I would say that's in addition to brain fog, you get a lot of cognitive dysfunction too. Memory issues.

It's more severe.

It's much more severe. The one thing that I see a lot is allergies. I call it the allergic brain. And you can have food allergies that can potentially do that or even environmental allergies or mold. And the high levels of histamine, because histamine actually acts as a neurotransmitter. And I've seen this in a number of patients. I've had some patients with another condition which we're seeing more and more of is mast cell activation syndrome. It's sort of a buzzword. but it's a very real phenomenon and is related to the mast cells, which are the types of immune cells in the body, in the interstitial, the sort of the spaces between the cells where they reside, and they release lots of histamine. And if anybody has ever had hay fever, you see that the typical picture of a person with hay fever, they're like this, like half asleep and like they're walking through a fog. Hay fever is an example of a brain fog. And antihistamines can actually have a benefit with that. Naturally, things like quercetin and nettles can also be very helpful. And you probably have used it. This is something that I've been using more is the drug, chromal and sodium. I've had some amazing success with that in more difficult cases. I wouldn't necessarily go to that for my first choice.

What Todd's talking about is, this drug that's used for asthma and allergies that is usually inhaled. Yeah, usually inhaled. But there's a version you can take orally that before you eat inhibits your white blood cells from releasing histamine and creating an allergic response. And I often found it extremely effective for some patients. Exactly. So Todd, talk about this patient that you had that had really bad brain fog. This is a guy who'd come to see you who worked a lot, was a little bit stressed, and that could be easily dismissed as oh, you're just.

Stressed and tired, but you went deeper. What did you find? Well, he actually came into me and he had already seen a variety of different doctors. The background is that the gentleman as a child had lots of allergies and asthma. So he had ear infections, bronchitis, also developed some sinusitis type symptoms. So he had multiple rounds of antibiotics. And I always emphasize to patients that when you have an immune dysfunction look for the gut because 60 to 70% of your immune system is in the gut. And just like, you know, with what's going on with the COVID virus or the COVID-19 syndrome that we're seeing by coronavirus is it's not the virus or the bacteria itself that causes the problem. It's our immune system's response to it. And in general, we want to have a, I call it a balanced immune system. So we want our immune system to be idling. Yeah, so basically just sort of sitting there and okay, we're enjoying planet Earth. We're going out for a walk, we're.

Not reacting to this.

Not underreacting or overreacting. Exactly, underreacting or overreacting. And when you overreact, we call that an autoimmune disease.

When you underreact, we call that AIDS. So AIDS or cancer?

AIDS or cancer. Or overreaction is allergies or autoimmune. And I think we talk about a weak immune system or a strong immune system. It's really, I think, an intelligent and a balanced immune system. That's how I like to think about it. And that's related to immunotolerance, which is what the gut does. So when we have a healthy gut, we have an immune system that is tolerant to lots of things. And you can eat certain things, you can go out in the environment, you're not gonna react to dog dander and all these other things. There are some genetic, some people have genetic predispositions towards being more atopic or allergic, but having a healthy gut, especially early on, the priming of the gut, is so critical. You know, having a vaginal birth, being breastfed, not introducing certain foods like gluten early on in the- Living on a farm. Living on a farm, exactly.

Being exposed.

Expose a lot of- and crawling around in the dirt and literally putting dirt in, you know, I call it, you know, your body's immune system samples planet Earth. Planet Earth is a very dirty place. There's lots of bugs and all kinds of things. And your body learns to be immunotolerant. And one of the things that is really, I also focus on, is part of this immune system is called the T-reg cells. The T-reg cells are like the conductor in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. So you've got the wind section over here and the horns over here and they keep everything in balance. And the T-reg cells are really, really critical. And what we're finding- They're regulatory cells. They regulate, they regulate the whole balance of the immune system. And the T regs that we find out, the two things that are really simple that people can use to upregulate your T regs to keep things in balance are fibers. Fibers in the diet. Fibers are the key things that help with regulation of that. And then also, which I use quite a bit in the patients that I see, is vitamin A. Vitamin A helps to downregulate the immune system and helps to keep the T reg cells in place.

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Yeah, he was working in a building and they found out that he was in a water-damaged building unknown to him and he had mold exposure, which you've been experienced yourself.

Been lucky enough to have.

Yeah, exactly. And we live in, you know, A lot of people are in older buildings. And you don't know, you might buy the building and there's water damage, you don't even know it's there.

I mean, 50% of buildings have water damage in America.

That's a lot. Really? Yeah. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah, so he was actually, he came to me and he had the diagnosis of mold toxins. In fact, he actually learned about this through one of your podcasts. I think it was, you were talking with David Asprey. Oh yeah, I was trying. Exactly, it was a moldy, moldy, podcast. So that's how he sort of went down that road and he got treated with a variety of different therapies. He got some IV glutathione, he got some ozone therapies and other interventions and he got about 50% better and then within several months he sort of went back to where he was. He was also again not sleeping much because he was doing a lot of litigation, it was a lot of stress, he wasn't sleeping well. The big thing that I see with patients with conditions like immune dysregulation is stress and lack of sleep is a stressor, probably the number one stressor. So if people aren't getting a deep restorative sleep, that is a stress to the immune system. And I was trying to emphasize that you can do that for like one or two days, but you can't do that on an ongoing basis. So really, really important. I always emphasize getting good deep restorative sleep with patients. so I emphasized that with him. So when he came in, he also had a lot of digestive symptoms. He was actually on a whole bunch of inhalers. He was on like Brio, Spirova, Ventolin, on Zolair injections, Flonase for his sinuses. He also had Zolair is a very.

Expensive, like $20,000 a year, intense immune suppressing medication. Yeah, and he still wasn't better.

He still wasn't better. No, exactly. And that actually worked by stabilizing mast cells, which you can actually naturally do. Quercetin actually can help high-dose quercetin can be very helpful for mast cell activation.

Also good for COVID.

Exactly, yeah. So when he came in here, I did a thorough workup on him and I did retest him for mold and he did have some mold, but I compared it to his previous labs and it wasn't that bad. So I empirically treated him with some binders to sort of help. But he had already moved out of the quote, the moldy building that he was in.

You get out of the moldy environment and then use these binders to help get the mold toxins out of your system.

Right, because the mycotoxins, they do tend to recirculate in the body, the enterohepatic recirculation, so they'll get reabsorbed by the body. And what are the kind of binders you use? In him, I actually use very natural things. I used clay, med clay, and I also used to activate charcoal. That was pretty much it.

These are things that don't get absorbed.

That suck all the bad stuff out. Oh yeah, exactly. And you worked in Mercurium, right? Somebody would overdose on drugs, we would give them charcoal.

Yeah, that's right.

You make them drink black charcoal. It was terrible. And every now and then, you might.

Vomit up on you, get black. We've been there, done that. Yes, we.

Right.

Yeah, so this guy had also other stuff, right? gluten issues.

Oh, yeah. A lot of gut issues. Yeah. And unfortunately, when he went to the previous doctors who did help him out, they didn't go deep enough. They didn't sort of, you know, get all the pieces of the puzzle. So they did not check him for gluten sensitivity, which he would markedly was gluten sensitive. And also did the Cyrex testing on him for gluten and Cyrex for leaky gut and both of those were markedly positive.

So those are tests that we use at the Ultra Wellness Center that are a little bit different than traditional food testing that looks at antibodies that aren't true allergy, but there are reactions that our immune system is having against foods and we can tell what you should and shouldn't eat based on this what's causing an immune response.

Exactly, exactly. And then also did stool testing on them, I did the, what I think is sort of the state of the art, the GI MAP test, which does quantitative PCR for the DNA of bacteria, yeast, viruses, parasites. and he had probably one of the worst cases of dysbiosis I've ever seen. That's imbalance. Yeah, imbalance. Yeah, a lot of imbalances. You know, I tell patients that everybody has hundreds of different kinds of bugs in their gut and they're a little bit like weeds in the garden. No garden does not have weeds. You just don't want too many weeds. And the interesting thing about the digestive tract and bacteria is that there is a phenomenon which is known as quorum sensing. Quorum sensing means that when certain bacterias reach a critical level, they start acting as bad actors. An example of that is like a cluster of diphthearia. So when patients get antibiotics and they wipe out the good guys, the bacteria, the C. diphthearia somehow or another sense that there's not enough cops around and they take over the place and they start producing toxins. Same thing happens in this particular case, he had one of the highest levels of pseudomonas bacteria that I've ever seen. and we typically see that in patients with cystic fibrosis. So he had bacterial dysbiosis, that organism plus other organisms.

And he had a lot of gut symptoms, right?

Yes, exactly. A lot of mucus, and in my opinion, that mucus, that sticky mucus is a biofilm. That's where the bacteria live. They live in that biofilm layer, and antibiotics and such are very difficult to to penetrate that.

You're not having a smooth log that just comes out clean.

There may be some problems in there. Exactly.

Yeah.

And he also had yeast overgrowth, which was, you know, not unexpected because of.

All the antibiotics he had.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And the acid blocker he was taking.

He was on a proton pump inhibitor. That's one of my, you know, I hate, I hate them. They are good and bad. They, they, I, they can be helpful. But, I mean, I remember when I was in medical school, we talked about this in the podcast. We were told they just came out and they were these are very powerful drugs. You don't want to give it to any patient more than six weeks. It shuts down acid production. It's risky long term. And now everybody's on it for life. They're on the counter. They're over the counter. Over the counter and for life. And it causes all sorts of disruption in the gut. It causes you to not absorb your nutrients. It causes overgrowth of yeast.

It changes the pH.

Leaky gut. Leaky gut. I mean, it causes irritable bowel. Osteoporosis. Osteoporosis, pneumonia.

Small bowel deficiency. Yeah, there we go. We can keep going. It's a great way to keep the business going, isn't it?

Yeah, I wrote a textbook chapter on reflux and it was like, looking at.

All the data, I was like, holy cow, this is not good. Exactly.

Yeah.

And unfortunately, they're handed out like Pez candy.

Yeah. And patients stay on them long after the treatment. What's wrong with Pez candy? I used to eat that all the time. I had my little Pez dispenser. For those of you who are younger, you might not know what this is, but it's a little candy dispensing device with a little cute cartoon character on the top. Donald Duck.

You'd just pull it open and then.

The little candy would pop out and it was so fun to eat. It was. Yeah, right. I quit when I was like eight, no. So this guy had all this stuff and he had gut issues, he had gluten issues, he had mold issues. What I find really important to emphasize is that in functional medicine, it's about looking at the whole system and not just treating one thing. And often it's many things at the same time. Because when the system breaks down, lots of things break down.

Yeah.

So this guy's gluten issues, well getting off the gluten wouldn't fix them or just fixing the mold when they fixed them. or just fixing his gut wouldn't fix them. You've got to deal with all these various things. And you had, you know, another thing that you found on him as well, right?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Sinus issues.

Sinus issues. That was a, that was actually, he actually had sinus surgery for that. And it was, it was a really a big thing. And in fact, I actually just recently downloaded a paper from PubMed on the nasal microbiome. So, you know, we have bacteria on our skin, we have it in our mouth, we have in our digestive tract in in the sinuses, they're everywhere. Everywhere. And so disruption of the nasal microbiome can also cause brain fog. Typically you see that a lot.

And all the steroids he was taking up his nose and everything was affecting him.

Absolutely. And it's also, it's a dark, moist environment. So a lot of patients who have chronic sinusitis, it's actually been shown not so much to be bacterial as it is to be fungal origin. So you got to really think about that. I typically will, in his case, he needed surgery, so he actually had sinus surgery. That helped a little bit, but it didn't clear up the problem, which is really a dysfunctional nasal microbiome. So I actually treated him with Neti-Pot nasal saline irrigation. You can also do, there are certain machines.

I like the Sinupulse machine. It's like a water pick for your nose.

Exactly.

And put a saline in there, it rinses it out.

Rinses it out, right. For people who do have chronic sinus issues. And then in his case, I actually used SilverSiline, which is not a colloidal silver, but it's a SilverSole. And silver is actually a great antimicrobial, and I used that in him with great success. It was really very, very effective.

So SilverSole is also something that kills bugs. Kills bugs. And put up your nose, it'll help.

Deal with whatever latent infections are there. Exactly. And then this particular paper that I was talking about, which discussing the nasal microbiome, they were actually making a proponent to actually use probiotics like things like lactobacillus up into the nasal passages to recolonate the nose.

Incredible.

Yeah.

And if you translate that up your nose.

Exactly. And Dale Bredesen, who's been a leader in looking at the various causes for Alzheimer's, talks about the nasal sinus passages as a problem when you have chronic inflammation in the sinuses being a risk factor for Alzheimer's. That is directly-- Chronic inflammation, right? Chronic inflammation, exactly. It goes right up into the brain.

So you also did this nasal treatment. You also treated his gut. So what did you do for his gut?

I treat, I mean, we did, obviously, we put him on an elimination diet. So you got him off the gluten. You got him off the gluten, especially foods that ferment. Yeah, got him off a sort of a low yeast, low mold type diet. Got him on, I actually did not treat him with antibiotics. I treated him with antimicrobial botanicals. I also used oral silver, which I'll sometimes use in conjunction. And, and I also continued with binders, the activated charcoal and another product, GI detox. And it was pretty remarkable. His success within a month, he said is, he like, like the light bulb went on in his brain.

So you mentioned a product called GI detox, which is something we use that actually has charcoal and clay in it, right? So it actually helps to bind up all the nasty things that get produced by these bad bugs when they're fermenting the foods that you shouldn't be eating, right? So it's really, it's fascinating. So you also looked at this holistically from a functional medicine perspective, which is really quite different than most people. So the fact that this patient had gluten and mold and imbalanced gut flora, and sinus issues was the reason for his brain fog. But if you take 10 people with brain fog, we might have 10 different reasons. Just like you have 10 different reasons for a cough.

Right, mine was mercury.

That didn't show up in this guy. So really it's right, it's important. I think this is the thing that's so different about functional medicine is that we don't just stop thinking at the symptoms. We go, what's the cause of the symptoms? If you say you have rheumatoid arthritis, or you have a headache or migraine. Migraine isn't a diagnosis, it's a symptom. It's a certain type of headache. Right. It's like and so we really have to look at the different causes for each individual. So it's very personalized and.

Absolutely. And so totally personalized.

And it's often treating it not just one thing, it's treating multiple things in the right sequence to get people better.

Exactly.

And so he was building on getting rid of the mold and getting out of the environment and ozone and to thion, which certainly helped, but then there were other things, right? He got to get off the acid blocker. He had to get up all these nasal sprays that were suppressing his microbiome in his nose.

He had to get sleep.

He had to get sleep, right? He had to manage stress. He had to manage stress. He had to irrigate his sinuses and use natural antimicrobials to kill the bad bugs in there. He had to reset his whole gut system and get rid of the pseudomonas and build all this together in a protocol, which it sounds complicated and sometimes it is, I guess, you know, but that's what we do in functional medicine and it's a very unique approach that is the future of healthcare. It's not something that most physicians are learning in school. It's something that is actually working far better than most traditional therapies for these kinds of things. If you have an acute problem, you go to the hospital. I had atrial fib, you gotta go to the hospital and I get my little electrical system fixed, it's fine. But I think if you have these weird symptoms that nobody can fix or that they're trying to medicate, it just doesn't work that well.

Yeah, and you really bring a very good point because I mean, you know, regular mainstream medicine has its place. You know, you break a bone, you have a heart attack, you have a stroke, there's definitely places for acute care medicine. But when it comes to chronic care medicine, I would almost venture to say that the mainstream approach, which is either the scalpel or using expensive potentially toxic medications is actually doing more harm than good in most circumstances. It really is. It's unfortunate, but it really is. And then what happens is then one drug is layered onto the next drug, especially like in these young people with ADD and depression and stuff like that, they come in with polypharmacy. And I talked about the iatrogenic imperfetta, which is that the patients are getting problems related to the doctor's treatments. That's the the big issue these days. It's true.

The thing about functional medicine, it's agnostic when it comes to therapy, right? We sometimes use medications when it's appropriate, but it's usually around finding the cause and treating the cause. So if someone has a parasite, you might use a parasite medication, right? If someone has, you know, Lyme disease, you might use an antibiotic. But if that's not the right treatment, you don't do it because it's the only thing you have. That's the thing.

It's very, we have a very limited toolkit in traditional medicine. And functional medicine expands that toolkit and expands the map of how we figure out what's wrong with Exactly, and you have to map it all out. And the matrix, what we use as a intellectual way of framing how we see the problem, helps as like a pilot's checklist. So we're like, okay, well let's see, how is the immune system working? How is the gut working? How are the hormones working? So we look at all those different systems in the body and we do both traditional testing and specialized testing to help us. So we're not guessing. I always tell patients, you know, when you see me, you're coming in to see me because you've got an issue that nobody else has been figuring out. And you went to the Mayo Clinic and the Scripps Clinic in Harvard and you name it, and they're throwing up their hands, oh, here, take an antidepressant and see you later. I see that so many times. And we have to explore and lift up the rocks and shine the light on places that haven't been looked at before. That's right.

So the kinds of tests you're talking about, food sensitivity testing, the mold testing, the gut testing. These are things that are definitely outside the box, but they are the future. I mean, this is how the body works, whether we like it or not. There was a recent textbook that was published at Harvard called Network Medicine talking about the paradigm shift that's happening now around the body being this biological network and system. And that's really what functional medicine is. It's the application of this to what's happening today. And it's so powerful. And I think, you know, People out there are suffering from all sorts of cognitive issues. We did the Broken Brain series and whether it's ADD or dementia or depression or brain fog or whatever it is, there's usually a reason. That doesn't happen for no reason and that's what we're good at.

We're good at being detectives and finding the reasons. Exactly, yeah. It's interesting because I was trained, I was actually a chemistry major when I went to Holy Cross College and then when I went to medical school after I did my residency, did my training in internal medicine. So, I'm a board-certified internist. That's my specialty. And invariably, I'll meet someone and say, well, what is your specialty? And it's so funny. And if I- It satisfies in humans.

Yeah, yeah.

And they always say, what kind of doctor are you? And they say, well, I'm a good one.

A good one, right.

And it's sort of funny. And then if I actually say the term functional medicine, they get like this blank stare. What is functional medicine? So, I've coined the term, I call myself, I say I'm a psychoneuroimmunoendo-gutologist.

That's good.

Yeah, that's good. Which is basically understanding that it's all related. The psycho is the brain, the gut, the Pato in there. Yeah, right, Pato.

Yeah, exactly.

And you forgot Mito in there. Mito, yeah, yeah, right. Mito kind of. So, it's all interconnected. It's this unified organism and there's It's an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem, yeah.

Everything impacts everything else.

And the beautiful thing about the body is that if you give it the right environment and a tincture of time, in most cases the body is pretty good at self-healing.

Yes.

If you give it fresh air, if you get sunlight, if you give it exercise... You take out the bad things. Take out the bad things, exactly. You take out the bad things, put in the good things. and a tincture of time, the body is actually pretty good at healing. There are some cases where we don't fully understand the human genome. We do testing for genetics and we can get insight into genetics. I'll actually talk about that in the next podcast. But I'm very optimistic that when we start to combine artificial intelligence and big data sets, that we're going to start seeing some of these cases that are really complicated and saying, oh, this is what's going on with them on a genetic level or a mitochondrial level and be able to dial it in a little bit better.

I mean, that's what we do. We do pattern recognition. So you've seen thousands and thousands of cases and you see these patterns and you can recognize them. Then you sort of know where to go with the testing and figure out what's going on. You probably, you know, I play a game with myself. I don't know if you do this after being in this so long, as I, I try to write down everything I possibly think is going on with this patient and what test results are gonna show. And then I get the test results and 90% of it, I actually figured out before I even got the test. Because once you've done so much of it, you see those patterns.

And everyone knows there's curveballs. I always get all the curveballs myself. I get curveballs and sliders and knuckleballs. I was the curveball.

My own health issues were just curveballs. That's what got me learning about this. Well, Todd, this has been such a great conversation. I think those of you listening who struggle with these issues, it's tough, but there is hope. And I feel that people need to learn about functional medicine and they're welcome to come to the Ultra Wellness Center. We're now doing all virtual consultations. If people want to come virtually, we don't have to have you come here anymore. We can do the testing and go to ultrawellnesscenter.com to learn more about our practice. We have an incredible team of physicians and nutritionists, physicians assistant and nurses who are supported by an incredible administrative team. And we take care of people from all over the world helping solve these complex problems. So if you would like to learn more, just go to UltraWellnessCenter.com Thanks for listening to this podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. If you liked it, share with your friends and family on social media. We'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment, subscribe wherever you get your podcast, and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into 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 drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.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. Now back to this week's episode. 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. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.