Is Mold Or Heavy Metals Driving Your Mysterious Symptoms?

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

It's probably one of the most ignored.

And underappreciated causes of chronic disease that doctors don't know how to think about, test or measure.

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Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. There is a compounded effect when it comes to toxic exposure. One plus one may not equal two. It might equal 100. And unfortunately, in today's world, we are living in a toxic soup. Our immune systems are constantly firing and our health is often negatively impacted. Mercury and mold are two such environmental toxins that can cause many problems, including endocrine disruption and histamine intolerance. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy on root causes of health problems that are often overlooked by doctors. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dave Asprey about why it's important to chelate or detoxify from heavy metals, with Dr. Todd LePine about what histamine intolerance is and how it could originate, and with Drew Proett about Dr. Hyman's personal experience with mercury poisoning and how mercury affects multiple systems in the body. Let's jump in.

These are really big topics. When you look at what happens when any animal gets older, they accumulate certain things from the environment over time. And I like to go fishing in Alaska with friends. And if I catch a 100-pound halibut, I'm throwing it back because that's a 100 year old fish full of mercury and nickel and lead and cadmium. And if you catch a young one, then it actually has far less toxins. So kids have less toxins, but they're more susceptible to toxins. And if you look at what happens as we age, mercury, lead, cadmium, thallium, if you eat a lot of kale, isn't an emerging big problem.

Kale from California.

Any kale is full of thallium. It's the world's nature's strongest attractant of that element.

It's toxic.

Yeah.

And also arsenic. Arsenic is another big one, thank you. So if you're going to live to 180, you are going to be full of metals. Metals inhibit mitochondrial function, they lower your testosterone, they cause hair loss, they cause graying, and they cause cancer, as well as actually a whole bunch of other diseases. So you've got to lower your exposure to them, and you have to get rid of them as you live. And there's compounds I write about called chelating agents that you can take with your food. When I eat sushi, you need the fat from fish. I take chlorella, which is a fraction so well. Chlorella will bind to the mercury in the gut, so you poop it out. But chlorella will not pull mercury out of your brain. So what you end up doing is over time, you lower the incidence of metal entering your body and you slowly remove what's in your body. And I talk about how to do that in the book. But if you don't know that metals matter, and you're just going to measure.

How much metals you have in your system?

Yeah, there's two ways in superhuman that I write about. The gold standard is you collect urine and see what your body's excreting, with or without an agent that may cause you to release more. And then a more common and cheaper way, but less telling, is a hair test. And there's usefulness for both of those, but you can go to a functional medicine doctor and say, I'd like to do a heavy metals test, and they'll usually order a urine test for you. and it's very common to find elevated mercury in lead. In fact, if you're over 40, you're probably going to find it.

Yeah.

So, let me just share with you as a practicing physician who one suffered from mercury poisoning.

Had a two.

And two have treated literally tens of thousands of people with metal poisoning and have done tens of thousands of tests. And I would say it's probably one of the most ignored and underappreciated causes of chronic disease that doctors don't know how to think about or measure. And personally for me, I lived in China and it got huge exposure to mercury. I don't have great genes of detoxifying. And it destroyed every system in my body. It destroyed my gut. I had diarrhea for years and bloating and pain. It destroyed my mitochondria. I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, and it was such an extreme version that my muscle enzymes were high, my CPKs were like 600. My liver was affected. My immune system was affected. I started developing rashes and sores all over. I was completely cognitively impaired. I couldn't focus, think, concentrate, remember where I was, you know, in training of thoughts. This was like, you know, 25 years ago, and I was so bad, and I literally had to become an expert. in mercury and heavy metals and detoxification. And I've written a lot about it, but I think, you know, I would say that for many of my patients who suffer from weird or strange ailments, it's right at the top of my.

List of things to look at.

And the only way to really know what your body burden is, you can look at your blood, but that only checks 90 days.

Yeah.

I mean, if you're eating a lot of sushi, you'll see it's high. But 90 days, you stop, it'll go away. You can look at your urine, but your urine also wasn't going to be high unless there's an occurrent exposure. So, if you're in a lead foundry or you're eating tons of sushi, you might see a little bit of mercury. The only way to really look at your body burden is to do a challenge test where you take a pill, it's a chelator, and you collect your urine for six hours. Hair tests also check for fish methylmercury, which is where we mostly get our mercury from. That also will go away if you haven't eaten fish for a while. And then, there's another test that looks at the blood work that measures the inorganic mercury, which comes from pollution or from fillings. And that's called the Quicksilver test. And that, that is surprisingly high in people who have a mouthful of fillings. And you can see the difference between fish or, or, or a dental mercury. And the treatments are, depending on the person, you know, can be very aggressive, depending on what they need. I have a patient who's got this terrible autoimmune disease, and we're giving her intravenous support. Other people can do oral support. There's medications, but it's a whole process that has to be done safely. I think your point is really well taken. I think it's an under-served, an under-appreciated component of medicine, and hopefully one day we'll get on board with this, because it's just, I mean, it was interesting. There was an article in the New York Times that I was quoted in, it was based on these special forces.

Oh yeah, those guys get led, right?

Yeah.

So this guy came to see me, who job was he was a special forces guy who was a blast expert. So they would go blow up stuff, blow up doors, blow up this, and they had to train and practice, and they had indoor practice training. And these guys were getting all sick. And now, you know, the special forces guys aren't malingerers, they're not whiners, they're not like, oh, I don't feel good, I don't want to work. Those aren't those guys. These are the guys who stay in freezing ice water for an hour and swim, and do 4,000 push-ups and don't sleep for three days. These guys are they're not whiners.

They're superhumans, right? Yeah.

And so the guy came in, I'm like, okay, well, tell me about your job. I'm like, oh, we blow stuff up, we shoot things. I'm like, oh, okay. And so I said, let's check your heavy metals. And they were sky high. We put them through a whole program. He was, you know, metabolically, his system wasn't working. He was overweight, he had pre-diabetes, he had Cogdis function, he had all these immune issues, gut issues, all got better. And then he started sending all these special forces guys to us, and we started treating them, and they just all got better. and one of them was written about in the New York Times.

Wow.

'Cause his, you know, medical crew and everybody dismissed him and he completely turned around. And the guy who was the lead expert at Mount Sinai who measures bone lead, which is the most accurate way to measure lead in the body, it's not an easy available commercial test, but it's a very powerful research tool. He said these guys had really high levels of lead. And he said on the follow-up test, he saw the levels come way down and he says he's never seen that. in his entire experience. And this is a guy who's an expert in lead.

How can you be an expert in lead and not know how to be a body?

It drives me nuts. Because it's not seen as a problem. Acute poisoning, yes. Chronic poisoning, no. And there's nothing you can quote do about it. It's just nonsense. And there's, in fact, an FDA approved drug called DMSA. It's designed for lead removal and actually removes mercury. So I think, you know, for people listening, if you have any strange or weird ailments, if you have anxiety, depression, insomnia, autoimmune disease, gut issues, fatigue, cognitive issues, It may well be heavy metals and you need to find a good functional medicine doctor to help you diagnose that. You go to functionalmedicine.org or ifm.org and you can find a practitioner who may know how to do this.

I'm going to go a little bit broader than that.

Go.

If you are over 50 and you have not gone through a course of chelation, you are not doing aging right. You have to do this if you are alive in the modern world and you want to live to a highly functional old age. And the reason I say this is that the safe EPA limits for lead used to be 20 parts per million and they cut it down. It was 40.

It was 40 to 20.

To 10.

To five.

To five. And now they're finding even down to one, they're seeing cognitive impairment in kids.

Cognitive impairment and increased risk of cardiovascular disease. And now the people who are the experts in lead are saying, quote, There is no safe limit of lead. And if you are 40 or 50, you cannot be alive and not have a lead burden in your body. You must remove it. and it's not that hard, especially if you're not really sick.

It's not going to be a big deal. And it's so strange, Dave, because medicine just ignores this. But in the journal Circulation, which is one of the top cardiology journals, there was a paper a number of years ago that showed that if your lead level was over two, which is quote within the normal limits, which by the way affects almost 40% of the population, has this lead level, that your risk of stroke goes up 89%. The risk of a heart attack goes up 150%. The risk of death goes up from a heart attack 55%. And this is more than smoking or cholesterol. And it's like, well, why doesn't your cardiologist talk to you about this?

Well, you remember those four killers we talked about at the beginning of the interview? All of those are tied to metals in the body.

Yes, yes.

And especially Alzheimer's.

Yeah, arsenic, Alzheimer's.

It's nuts. And so this is one of those things where if you want to feel good, you do this on a regular basis.

So what are the basic tips if you're not gonna get chelated? What are the basic tips for detoxifying?

For detoxifying, not just metals or you mean metals?

Metals, like how do you, I mean, how do, or it all works for.

Everything, but how do you- One of my favorite compounds is glutathione. And you can increase glutathione levels by increasing vitamin C, by taking N-acetyl cysteine, I manufacture glutathione pill, you can get intravenous glutathione, which- Acetic acid. And you do IV glutathione at your clinics, right? Yeah, and we do it at Upgrade Labs in LA for people to recover better. Alpha lipoic acid is another thing. Selenium can help. Zinc. Zinc can help. The natural chelator. Cilantro, but surprisingly you want to take cilantro only after you've removed most of the metal from your body because cilantro can actually move heavy metals into the brain because it's one of the things that can also penetrate the blood barrier. So you go through and you say, I'm just going to build some of these in on a regular basis.

And then you need fiber. You need to poop and pee and sweat.

It's shocking how those work. One of the things I write about in here.

Triple P therapy, I call it. There's... Respire.

So there's something called modified citrus pectin, where they take the white rind of oranges and lemons and they modify it with an enzyme that is shown to really nicely bind to all these heavy metals. The problem though, if you start taking large doses of that when you're young, it can actually do bad things to you. So this is something that you might take occasionally when you're young and you might take it more often as you age. And in superhuman, there's other stuff, Mark, that people would never know about and probably something that's really interesting. I interviewed Dr. Andrew Newhouse from Vanderbilt University, wrote the first study on nicotine as a way to Cure Alzheimer's disease. Not smoking. Smoking and using tobacco are bad for you, but using oral nicotine, a spray or a gum or a lozenge or a patch. And there is an argument that I make in Superhuman that says, as you age, you might wanna use one or two milligrams. We're talking like 5% of what's in a cigarette, small amounts of nicotine, in order to enhance cognitive function and reduce your risk of Alzheimer's. And a lot of vaping and smoking also, this is not an argument to do that, but it's to say small amounts of those will improve cognitive function. They feel good and they are probably anti-aging compounds as long as you don't overdo it. So I talk about how would you use that? How would you do that? And it's not an excuse to smoke. It's certainly not to vape. It's just looking at that.

You have that little spray thing you get. Yeah, I was trying to spray it.

Under my tongue and get me high. Every time you do it, you feel great. I'm just worried about Alzheimer's, Mark.

I mean, you're 60 now.

Yeah, I'm not worried about you. I'm worried about Alzheimer's disease. oh, my God. Okay. All right. Now, yeah, metals are a real deal. And learning how to detoxify, learning how to upregulate mitochondria and fix them, learning how to cool off inflammation. These are the central strategies around healthy aging. And then there's other things. There's this whole technology that you talk about called ozone, which sounds, like, weird. We're worried about the ozone layer and aerosol cans. And what do you mean, ozone?

Ozone is something that most of us know of as a pollutant. It turns out though that it is a free radical and as long as you don't breathe ozone, ozone is profoundly good for your cells. Because your mitochondria, they look for free radicals and we all say, oh, free radicals, oxidants, these are bad for you. Like this is a problem. But it turns out if you don't have any free radicals, your mitochondria become lazy and weak. So you can use ozone, you can use it intravenously, you can use it rectally, you can sit in a bag with ozone therapy anywhere from the neck down as long as you don't breathe it, and you can use it vaginally even, and it has profound anti-aging effects. It will wake up bad mitochondria, it will get rid of old mitochondria, it is broad spectrum antimicrobial, it'll fix infections.

I've interviewed people who use it. It's the most powerful disinfectant on the planet. He used it in World War I. Tesla invented the machine, not the-- Not the car. Not the car, but, you know, Nikola Tesla invented the ozone generator.

Yeah, it's a little spark gap thing. I have one at home. You have one in your office.

I do.

And you're saying, well, wait, how could this be? Well, it turns out Dr. Robert Rowen cured Ebola during the last outbreak in Africa with ozone. They've been using it on drug resistant tuberculosis. They've been using it on cancer. especially in Cuba and Russia, places where they couldn't afford pharmaceutical drugs. So there's hundreds of papers and studies and more than 100 years of use of this stuff, but most people have never heard of it. I will simply say, if you wanna live a very long time, one thing that is going to happen is you will accumulate the weird infections of old age. And these are bacteria that take 20, 30, 40 years to start having an impact on you. Mycoplasma, cell wall deficient things. And they come from mosquitoes, they come from ticks, they come from making out with people. The older you are, the more likely you are to have done that.

They come from your teeth. From your teeth, yes. The gingivalis, which is a dental bacteria.

Has been shown now linked to Alzheimer's in the brain. The Alzheimer's and also just to cardiovascular disease, right? So what if when you had a root canal, they used ozone to sterilize it? That's what I tell you to do in the book. What if on an occasional basis you did some routine ozone therapy because it lowers the bacterial load in your body and it wakes up your cells?

Yeah.

It changed my whole life. When I weighed 300 pounds, I'd been exposed to toxic mold, which is another massive mold.

You and me both.

Oh yeah, I mean, we're mold brothers.

And I was in your movie, Moldy.

You were, that's right. Moldymovie.com, it's still available for free screening.

And the irony of that is when I recorded that movie, I was actually living in my house, which I didn't know at the time was full of mold. And very shortly thereafter, I became Deathly ill from mold.

I was worried about you. It really, mold, it takes away your energy first. It's a lot like being old actually.

Cognitive function, energy, your immune system.

I mean, it's just like. Yeah, and this. Corrects you. I grew up in a basement that had toxic mold. So, a lot of the reasons that I know about the aging things, not just the 20 years of running an anti-aging nonprofit, it's also because I felt all of those things in my 20s.

You don't want to go back to that.

So, ozone, you said it saved your life from the mold.

It really did. And I bought an ozone machine and I write about the story in Superhuman and I used ozone every single night when I was home for a year and a half and it restored my brain function. It turned my mitochondria back on. And to this day, I would credit that with having a huge difference. So people who are old or who are getting old or who are just tired and feeling old, this is one of those things. It's cheap. You can do it at home, but you need to learn how to do it at a medical practitioner's. Yeah, rectal ozone. And it's pretty darn safe and remarkably effective.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I mean, I was so ill from the mold and I had a whole series of things I've talked about before, but essentially I lived in a house with mold. I developed a horrible cough for a year. I had a root canal that went bad and got it taken out. Took an antibiotic, which clindamycin that then caused something called C. Diff, which is a terrible intestinal infection. Then I broke my arm. So I had all this perfect storm of injuries and I literally was knocked to my knees. So I developed colitis from the C. Diff. I developed gastritis, my stomach, my whole intestinal lining from my stomach down all the way to my butt was just one big raw mess. I lost 30 pounds. I couldn't think, I couldn't focus, I couldn't answer an email, I could be.

On a phone call. Your eyes lost their sparkle. I mean, I saw you, I'm like, oh my God, I'm really worried about you.

Like, you could tell it. Yeah, it was, it was good. It's true. I was, I was ready to go. Like, I was on my way out and struggled, struggled, struggled. And, you know, you talked about ozone and a few other people and you talked about ozone. I remembered my patients saying to me, you know, the thing that really helped me when I was sick and nothing else helped me, whether it was an autoimmune disease or tick infections or whatever, was ozone. I was like, I always kind of had it in my mind as one of those things that's interesting, because I listen to my patients, you know, when they tell me, I tried everything but nothing worked except I paid attention. So I'm like, I put together a whole strategy and I went, found someone who did ozone, intravenous ozone. And I remember, you can ask my wife, but literally two days in, two days in, I was like, my brain's back online.

It's that turning your brain on.

My money, what matters the most. Force seven pain in my stomach was gone. My colitis was gone. My energy increased. This was in two days. And then I needed more and I stayed on it. And then I did something called 10-Pass, which is really powerful. We do that in our center at the Ultra Wellness Center. And it's super controversial. It shouldn't be because it works so well. It's being done in most countries other than the US on a regular basis. And it's a powerful modality because it's an oxidant. so we think of antioxidants as being what we should be taking, like vitamin C and vitamin E and so forth.

But we also need oxidants.

So it's a balance. And when you take ozone, it's a massive oxidant, but it only lasts for a few seconds. And then it turns on, it's like a trigger that turns on your body's own antioxidants. It turns on your immune system to fight things like infections. It kills everything that should be killed in your bloodstream. It shouldn't be there. improves the function of your mitochondria and it also increases stem cell production. Yes. So it's like, wow, why aren't we using this? And it's super cheap. It's super cheap because it's just like this little machine and yet, I mean, it's pretty interesting. So I think, you know, unfortunately we don't have enough science. We don't have big randomized trials. You know, we have a lot of data, but we have textbooks on it. It's used a lot in Europe and Cuba and South America. Latin America, but.

It'S this kind of.

Surprising therapy that I think is going to hold a lot of promise for many things that we're suffering from today.

I would just say that they can have my ozone machine when they pry it from my cold dead fingers. It is that fundamental. My daughter scratched her ear on a rose and got some sort of nasty infection. Her ear was three times the size it should be. This is when you would normally go for antibiotics. My wife's an ER doctor. so we're not afraid of using antibiotics, they're just a last line measure. So, let's try this. So we took ozone and we put it inside a funnel, not even a syringe, and just held it over her ear, it'll absorb through the skin. Two treatments of 20 minutes and the ear returned to normal. It was completely fixed.

Two 20-minute treatments. In World War I, they would wrap cloths and soak them in ozone and then they would put them around the wounds to heal wounds because they didn't.

Have antibiotics back then.

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Like this, tell me about a case.

That you might have had where it sort of kind of got you thinking about this and allowed you to really drive down into really the diagnosis and the treatment.

Well, you bring up an interesting thing, 'cause as I have seen more and more patients, and I think we are seeing more patients who have histamine intolerance, call it mast cell activation syndrome to what degree, is there are certain individuals who can be a little bit more predisposed towards this. So people who have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, you know, the hypermobile people can actually have, for whatever reasons, will have a higher incidence of histamine intolerance. The other thing, and the case I recently had, was a patient who came in to me with severe mast cell activation syndrome. It was on a whole bunch of different medicines, including chromium, which we talked about earlier. to decrease food reactions to histamine. And I saw the patient and he gave a very interesting history, had this skin lesion which sort of like morphed into this almost like a scarring type ulcerated lesion on his back area. He saw multiple dermatologists, had a biopsy, had part of the area removed and was ultimately diagnosed with some type of form of a scleroderma, sort of like a malignant scleroderma, which is sort of interesting and like, oh, what's that related to? But he was also having all of these histamine type reactions. And then when I asked him a bunch of questions, you know, I started thinking about, well, guess what? Lyme disease is also associated with histamine intolerance because Lyme bacteria resides in the connective tissues in the body, it sort of hides there. And that in turn can actually activate those mast cells, which mast cells are the first line defense or one of the first lines of defense against infectious agents. And when I asked him, because he had a lot of fatigue and brain fog type symptoms too, but maybe that was related to something else. So I asked him about potential exposure. So lo and behold, he ended up having a low CD57 count, which is oftentimes a marker. It's not diagnostic of Lyme, but it tells you that the immune system is not working so well. And when I did advanced testing on him, he had actually had conventional lab testing. I think we talked about that in another podcast, how regular conventional lab testing for Lyme disease is not that helpful. But I did a specialized T-cell Eli spot test on him and his Eli spot test lit up like a Christmas tree.

So, he had Lyme disease.

He had Lyme disease, which was actually triggering a lot of his mast cell activation type symptoms. So, I've been working with him for a while and he did very well. I put them on a supplement which is a combination of Quercetin which can help with...

It's like a natural antihistamine.

Natural antihistamine.

Turns out it's really good for COVID too.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Very powerful phytochemical. And he did very well by adding nettles along with Quercetin in supplement form. He also worked with the nutritionist, got on a low histamine diet. dramatically made a huge, huge improvement. His brain was working better and his energy was better, but he still wasn't 100% better. So that's where I went to the next level and he's currently actually being treated for Lyme. And it's in the medical literature. And I sort of stumbled upon this because I had this patient come into me and she had the same thing. She had severe mast cell activation. She was on Zoloft and she was on injections for It's like 20 grand a year. Yeah, yeah, 20 grand a year.

20 grand a year. Control the histamine, which could be controlled.

By diet and these other things. Exactly. And her condition actually turned out to be the same thing. It was actually undiagnosed Lyme disease. And this is, I think, one of those things where you have to think about it, not that Lyme disease causes everything, but Lyme disease is such a tricky condition that you've got to be thinking about it. Anybody who comes in- the great masquerader. It's like syphilis, exactly. It's like the great masquerader. And people can come in, I've seen people, with Parkinson's symptoms. I've seen people with brain fog. I've seen people with rheumatoid, you know, seronegative rheumatoid arthritis. And Chris Christopherson and Alzheimer's quote Alzheimer's. Exactly. Exactly. I had one patient with fibromyalgia who is, you know, quote unquote fibromyalgia, whatever that means. It means just, it means you hurt all over. And so Lyme can actually mimic fibromyalgia. Yeah. So you really got to think about it.

And it doesn't present as one, you know, neat little, neat little boxed diagnosis. It's really, you got to really think. That sort of speaks to the foundational concepts of functional medicine is that one disease can have many causes. Like histamine intolerance can have many causes. And one cause, like Lyme disease, can create many diseases. Lyme disease can cause neurologic issues and joint issues and skin issues and chronic fatigue and Alzheimer's and mast cell activation syndrome and pots and all these weird diagnoses that doctors treat as if they're the thing, but actually it's something else. Right. You know, it's also interesting about histamine is that, you know, there are, there are processes in our body. You mentioned this DAO enzyme that breaks down histamine. And a lot of things interfere with it. You talked about some of the foods that interfere with it, but there are also a lot of drugs that interfere with histamine breakdown through this DAO enzyme, antibiotics, antidepressants, antipsychotic medications, diuretics. even things like muscle relaxants, pain meds, GI meds, meds for reflux like the acid blockers, TB meds, and even over-the-counter stuff we use all the time like aspirin and Naproxen, like Aleve, Voltaren, ant-inflammatories, all can be really driving this inhibition of this enzyme that breaks down histamine. So you might be taking all these drugs, you might be eating all these foods, you might be nutritionally deficient, all these things can really be driving this histamine intolerance. and what's interesting is that in order to actually have the ability to break down histamine using DAO, you need certain nutrients, right? There's certain nutrients that really play a role like vitamin B6, vitamin C, copper, magnesium, manganese, zinc, calcium, B1, B12, folic acid, all these are critical nutrients and many of us are deficient. If you look at the nutritional testing we do here at the Ulchewana Center, I don't know about you, Todd, but people say, oh, you don't need vitamins and oh, people are eating a healthy diet, they're fine. Nonsense. I mean, we don't guess, we test. And we look and see the amount of nutritional deficiencies exist are just massive, even in our population, which is a relatively affluent, well-educated population. Imagine how bad it is. And I've seen what I call virgin patients. People have really never seen a functional medicine doctor who have you know, lower socioeconomic status, underserved patients, and they and they they have massive deficiencies.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, we really can, you know, take out the bad stuff, whether it's foods or drugs, and we can add in the good stuff, which is the right foods and the right the right nutrients.

And that's really what's so powerful about functional medicine. So Mark, let's give a case study. And I can't think of a better one than your own case study. You've written a lot about it. You've talked a lot about it, but we're going to go in more detail in today's podcast. So as you mentioned, you had chronic fatigue. walk us through what you actually did and maybe even who helped you down the process of getting to the root of what your particular contributions were that were ending in this result of chronic fatigue.

Well, you know, it was ultimately a blessing and a curse, right? It felt like a curse at the time because I could barely function. I couldn't get out of bed. I was unable to have any really clear thinking. I was barely able to work. I had a job, thank God, where I could work from nine to four. three days a week. And at lunch, I could go get a massage or do a steamer, a sauna, and an ice dip so I could literally function in the afternoon. And it was one of the most difficult periods of my life and I didn't know what to do.

And just to interject on your story, right? Just because I think this is really just, I'm curious for myself. You were also a single parent at the time. Is that correct?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Going through divorce. a single father, alcoholic ex-wife was kind of a messy time as well. So there was this psychological stress as well. Huge. And that underscored it all. But, you know, what really my own illness did was teach me functional medicine from the inside out and how to unpack what's wrong with somebody and how many layers there can be to actually getting better. So I didn't know what was wrong, just felt like crap. my immune system wasn't working. I was exhausted. And this is not just like, oh, I'm tired. Let me take a sleep and I'll get better. You never feel better. So you can sleep 10 hours. You don't you wake up feeling like you haven't slept at all. It's one of the worst things you can imagine suffering from. And I feel so much compassion for those who do because it's real and most doctors have no clue how to deal with it. And now, thank God, you know, when I went, when I had it, it was like, oh, you know, take Prozac, you know, now there's a lot of literature and science about the biology and the inflammatory cytokines and all the things that we actually can measure. and people who are chronically fatigued. So for me, I didn't know what it was. And my gut was a mess. Everything was a mess. So I started just sort of learning about functional medicine, and I discovered that I had mercury poisoning. That was the first thing. And that was huge for me to get rid of the Mercury. And it took me a long time. Took me probably five years or more to get rid of the Mercury through chelation and IV therapy and avoiding fish and doing all the foods that upregulated my detox Pathways. And I really learned about the science of detoxification of heavy metal treatment. and that was big, but it didn't get me all the way better.

And, can I ask one quick question about mercury, Mark?

Yeah.

How is it connect the dots? How is it that something like having excess mercury in your body could invoke something like chronic fatigue or make it worse? What is actually happening?

Well, so fatigue is coming from your mitochondria damage. So mitochondria are your energy factories. and they produce energy that runs everything in your body. That's your energy. It's called ATP or adenosine triphosphate. It's made by new breathe oxygen and you eat food and that gets metabolized in your little mitochondria, which are little engines inside your cell. They are critical for everything in your body to function and for aging and longevity and everything else. And I ended up having really bad functioning mitochondria based on my testing. I had elevated muscle enzymes, meaning my, my muscle cells and my cells were just being damaged because of something and I didn't know what. And it was really painful and really, really difficult. And the chelation test showed me I had a super high level of mercury that was damaging my mitochondria. And mercury and any toxin damage mitochondria. They're very sensitive, but they also damage your metabolism. They damage your immune system, they damage your brain, they damage your hormones, they have wide-reaching effects across the body. that screw everything up. The main symptoms are fatigue, cognitive impairment, autoimmune disease, gut issues, insomnia, anxiety, depression. I mean, these are the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning. And, and, and again, it's missed most of the time because most traditional doctors have no clue on how to diagnose it and certainly not how to treat it. I mean, I, I literally got an email from a patient the other week. I know it wasn't a patient. I think some guy randomly found me online, whatever. And he's like, Dr. Hyman, I know you've had mercury issues. I went to my doctor. I heard your stuff. and I've been eating sushi like three times a week for like a bazillion years and I know it's probably affecting me and I have all these symptoms. I went to my doctor and they're like, oh, not worth testing, nothing you're gonna do about it, just stop eating fish. And that was the end of the story. And I'm like, oh my goodness, that is just such a sad thing because he has all this mercury stored in his body, you need to get it out. So that's really important. And functional medicine is really good at helping design a safe way to remove heavy metals and other toxins from your system. So toxins is number one. But then I wasn't all the way better. And then I realized, oh, it was just kind of stupid and kind of shows how doctors are the worst patients. But I was like, oh, I'm going to check, I'm feeling a little tired. Let me check my Lyme test. And I, you know, I live up in the woods in the Northeast and there's a lot of Lyme and, and I checked Lyme and all these co-infections and ticks. And then I know so busy working and running around saving the world and being Dr. Hyman. I forgot to look at my result.

Because I was did my own test.

And I opened it up and one day I was like, what happened to that test? And like, I was like, oh no, because I had a PCR positive Lyme, which means not like, oh, I might have Lyme or it's maybe like, it's like I'm actively replicating in my blood, which is not good. And I also had Babesia. And so then I went down that whole rabbit hole of treating my own tick infections, which was very challenging. You know, you have to use antibiotics and herbs and this and that. And it was still really hard. and then, and then I found out.

A number of years later that I.

I lived in a moldy house. I lived in a 1825 post office that was converted to a house in a small New England town, and, and the basement was just full of mold, and I knew it, but I didn't, like, at the time, I didn't really know that much about mold and didn't connect the dots, and that was also contributing. And so I literally have had to deal with all these things. You know, normally it's like, oh, yeah, you eat bad and you don't exercise and you're stressful. I got, I had all that down. It was all this stuff that you know, happened in my environment, like toxins and mold and ticks and infections. And so for me, it's been a, it's been a multi-decade long process of unraveling the root causes of my own dysfunction. And, and I just keep learning more and more about it. And, and now I'm going the other direction. I'm like, how do I not just have energy, but how do I sort of unpack the science of longevity, which is the topic of my next book, which is all about how we create and heal and repair our energy systems in our body, our mitochondria, because most of the regulatory systems that control aging are in the mitochondria. And so I really am, like, you know, taking NAD and I'm looking at working on mTOR, and we'll talk all about this stuff in the coming months. It's gonna. I'm very excited to kind of dive deep into the whole aging space with you all soon, but it's. It's pretty exciting stuff, and I'm like, you know, going to start a new, a new aging medication soon, and I'm gonna try this. I'm gonna try that. And so I'm kind of experimenting. I'm pushing the other side of the envelope is how do I get stronger, bigger, faster, better, you know, like, you know, like Superman. I'm training. I'm training for the Centenarian Olympics, which.

My friend Peter Attia talks about, so. Yeah, well, I want to say, you know, I don't think it's intentional at all, Mark, but you're always taking one for the team. You're getting some infection, you're getting some disease, you're getting Something that happens, but I always appreciate how you bounce back up and then you share everything that you've learned with your community.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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.

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