Learn How This Doctor HEALED Her Autoimmune Disease With HER DIET | Terry Wahls

The evidence about the link between the gut and brain just continues to grow and grow. This is the most nutrient dense diet I have ever used.

So Dr. Wahls, you've had an extraordinary story that has revolutionized the way you practice and the way the rest of the world thinks about MS and neurodegenerative disease. And sadly, you had a debilitating disease and it led you to discover a way of treating these conditions like MS with a whole new paradigm. And so, I'd love for you to share your story and tell us a little bit about what happened, how you discovered this, and what as a result you learned.

So, I'm an academic internal medicine doc. In 2000, I was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. And being an academic doc, I thought I should treat my disease aggressively. So, I sought out the best MS center I could find, the Cleveland Clinic. took the newest drugs, and still within three years my disease had converted to secondary progressive MS.

Which is not good.

Which is not good at all, because that means you're gonna go steadily downhill, that functions once lost or gone forever. And so that is when I took my bisantrene, a form of chemotherapy, then I took Tizabri, the new biologic agent.

To suppress your immune system.

To suppress my immune system. and I continued to decline. And that is when I realized, you know, conventional medicine is not stopping this decline. I was on track to quite potentially becoming bedridden by my illness, potentially demented by my illness. MS-related pain was a big part of my illness, and that was getting more and more difficult to control. So I was worried that refractory pain. was going to be a big factor. And so that's when I went back to reading the medical literature and would discover the ancestral health movement. I would discover, you know, vitamins and supplements. I would discover the Institute for Functional Medicine. And I would integrate all of that into a comprehensive diet and lifestyle program that not only stopped my decline, which was pretty incredible, but to my amazement, to the amazement of my physicians, was associated with a remarkable return of function.

So you were in a wheelchair. Yeah. And it was only a one-way street worse.

As a wheelchair, I couldn't sit up anymore. I was in a zero gravity chair where I was fully reclined, knees higher than my nose. I struggled to walk 10 feet using two walking sticks. I was losing my keys, my phone. I had the severe MS pain, was having to go to the pain clinic, take frequent Solu-Medrol to try and control the pain.

Powerful steroids.

So life was very tough. And that's where I was in 2007. I was still doing my little tiny workouts, like a 10-minute, very simple little stomach curl. If I did 12 minutes, I couldn't function for a day and a half. but I could do 10 minutes and go to work. In 2008, after doing my diet and lifestyle protocol, I was able to do a 20-mile bike ride with my family. That's how much transformation had happened in that 12-month period. So that, of course, changes how I think about disease and health. It changes the way I practice medicine, and it would start me on this new path and ultimately would change the focus of my clinical research.

Extraordinary. One of the things you discovered was that there's a part of our cells that's required for energy. And by the way, you had terrible energy. That's a classic feature of MS. It's just you're fatigued all the time. You discover that these little parts of the cells called mitochondria, it's like the energy powerhouse of the cell. were critically important and they were part of the therapy they used to treat the mitochondria through diet and other things. So tell us, why are the mitochondria so important in neurodegenerative disease?

Well, the mitochondria are the little bacteria that were engulfed by bigger bacteria about a billion and a half years ago. And they were very efficient at converting energy from the food we ate into biochemical energy that our cells use. And that would allow cells to become multicellular, to develop organs, tissues, locomotion. It would let us develop brains, hearts, retinas, et cetera. And the cells that need the most energy, which are our brain cells, our retina, and our heart cells, have like 10,000 mitochondria per cell.

Yeah, and the heart I think 17,000.

So it's just so critical. If your mitochondria not working very well, then that organ doesn't work very well. In the brain, that means that you begin to have problems with fatigue, with pain, with irritability, with cognitive decline. That was actually one of the first things I discovered when I'd gone back to start reading the science, was that mitochondria were at the heart of neurodegeneration, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, Lou Gehrig's. No one was yet writing about that for MS, but I thought, you know what, I bet it's the same. So I'm going to learn everything I can about what I can do to tune up my mitochondria. And so that was my initial interventions that I did, which was a variety of vitamins and supplements to support my mitochondria. Now when I was first reading about that, Mark, what I was able, you know, I had this, supplement cocktail of creatine, lipoic acid, carnitine, B vitamins, CoQ, and after about six months, I thought, it's not helping, I'm wasting my money, so I quit and I couldn't get out of bed. I was just completely exhausted. And three days later, my spouse comes in and says, you know, honey, I think you gotta take these again. And I took them and I could get up and function again. And that was very interesting to me. So two weeks later, I did the same thing, stopped all my supplements, couldn't function, and three days later I started them and I could function again. So my conclusion was, you know what, they may not be recovering me, but they're clearly doing something for my fatigue. And that was very energizing, very exciting because this also taught me that the mitochondria were important. and my neurologist and my primary care doc were not telling me stuff like this. So I could be teaching myself by using PubMed and reading the literature and beginning to do the self-experimentation. So it was a very big discovery.

So great. So how do you take care of your mitochondria?

If.

They'Re responsible for contributing to the symptoms and the disease states of the neurodegenerative state, and even things like autism and many other diseases. We may not have the mitochondria be the cause, but it's a big factor that gets damaged when you have problems. So how do you recover your mitochondria?

So there are three things that I think about. The first one is what's the nutritional need for that mitochondria? So the mitochondria, if you remember from ninth grade biology, there's the little oval with a lot of squiggles in the middle. that's the cell membrane. So this mitochondria has a lot of cell membrane, which means it has a lot of fat. So you need the right fats, a lot of omega-3s, omega-6 fats to make healthy membranes. You need a lot of B vitamins, and that's essentially the whole B vitamin family to support some of those enzymatic steps. You need a bunch of minerals like zinc, magnesium as co-factors for a lot of those B vitamins, some sulfur amino acids as well, antioxidants. So there's really important nutrition that you need for this mitochondria. The next thing you need to think about is why did the mitochondria begin to not function very well? The most common reason is that they've been poisoned and it can be poisoned by things like heavy metals, lead, mercury, arsenic, pesticides, I will do that, the insecticides will do that, some plastics and solvents. Poisoning is the most common thing. And then the third category would be some of the stealth infections where an infectious particle has sort of hijacked the mitochondria and taken it away from manufacturing energy to manufacturing viral particles. So address those three factors and you do go far in restoring that mitochondrial health.

That's so great. The other thing, you know, I think might affect the mitochondria and also the immune system. And, you know, I had a patient with MS many years ago and, you know, I found I learned the most from just listening to my patients more than any textbook. And this woman said, you know, when my gut symptoms get worse, my MS gets worse. and I was like, oh, that's interesting. So I began to sort of work on the gut and people would get better. And I'm curious what you think about the role of the gut in MS and also neurodegenerative disease and how it affects the mitochondria.

So the evidence about the link between the gut and brain just continues to grow and grow and grow. You can go into PubMed.gov and put in microbiota, in MS and there's more papers coming out. You can put in microbiota and autoimmune conditions and you'll find that there are more and more papers identifying that you have a different mix of bacteria living in your gut if you've got an autoimmune condition than if you're healthy. As they eat our food and each other's byproducts, they're secreting compounds that cross over into the blood and then into the blood-brain barrier. and can increase inflammation, they can shift behavior, they can shift our mood, can shift our cognition. So that's clearly having an impact on the brain. Now, in terms of mitochondria, one thing that they can do is, I believe about 25% of our detoxification capabilities are managed by our gut microbiome. And so if you have a healthy vigorous microbiome, health promoting bacteria, you'll have improved detoxification and you'll have less poisoning of your mitochondria.

Amazing. You had both an autoimmune and a sort of a neurologic condition.

So you said you had both of them.

Yeah, that's right. So a lot of the therapies that we use in autoimmune disease in this country are problematic. And you talked a lot about how there's a hidden cost to the therapy and can you sort of tell us more about why physicians are just stuck on that and not telling the full story that you're telling?

So, yeah, there's a really interesting lecture by George Ebers. He's an MS researcher out of the United Kingdom and London. And he reviews that when we were looking at the development of drugs for MS, there was a big question, a conference with the MS researchers, what measures should we monitor to decide that an MS drug is useful. And it's time to the diagnosis of secondary progressive, time to needing a cane, time to needing a walker, time to being bedridden, time to being dead. Because those are the things that really drive cost and suffering. And in that research meeting, MRI findings, number of relapses, that was like number 19 and number 18 on the list of 20. So they were not thought to be important.

Because they just assumed the disease is going to progress.

When you look at the epidemiological literature, number of relapses do not predict time to cane, walker, wheelchair, or death. Nor do they predict time to secondary progressive MS. And the number of relapses are very slightly protective. So MRI lesions come and go. And they don't appear to have a very clear relationship to are you going to become disabled, are you going to develop secondary progressive, are you going to need a cane, are you going to need a wheelchair, are you going to become bedridden? You know, and I'm not surprised because what I think likely is going on is the neurodegeneration, which is probably driven by mitochondria. It's probably driven by nutritional status and nutritional deficiencies. Now of course none of that is gonna be treated by suppressing the immune cells, 'cause the immune cells are trying their hardest to repair my brain. They're trying their hardest to come in and quiet that inflammation to begin to remyelinate. So, you know, it's sort of interesting when we did, and we looked at our studies, we saw that the people who were less like, the least likely to have improvement in gait were the folks on taking disease modifying drugs.

So the drugs that are supposed to help you actually didn't help you.

May not be so helpful. You can turn off these acute lesions. Yes, you can do that. And the drugs are very effective at that. But what we don't know is, will they really change the time to wheelchair, the time to bedridden?

Yeah, and you got from bedridden almost to riding your bike 20 miles.

The biking 20 miles.

So you've taken your learnings and your personal experience, and you're not just sort of taking your goodies and go home. You really stepped up and created a research program at university looking at this approach, not just to MS, but to many other kinds of patients with all sorts of conditions. So what is going on with your research and how do you do it within the center and what are we learning from your work?

So first thing that we did, we had a case series where we used the e-stim and I did that with the physical therapist and we were able to show that we had improved gait and mobility and so we got that published. And then the next thing we did, we had a little phase one feasibility study where we had other people with progressive MS. So again, people who spontaneous recovery is not going to happen. You could expect them to steadily decline. So we enrolled people with secondary or primary progressive and we had 20 folks. We were able to show that yes, they could implement this complicated diet and lifestyle program that I utilized. The biggest side effect, Mark, was if you were overweight, you lost weight without being hungry.

Oh my God.

That's a serious side effect. We had the largest reduction in fatigue severity that's been reported today in the most severely disabled group that's been studied today. So that was very exciting. Then we got that up and going. We then did a small pilot study. and people were randomized and had folks who got the steady diet or were randomized to not get the steady diet for 12 weeks, and then they got the steady diet. We're able to show once again that fatigue severity was statistically and clinically significantly reduced in people who had the steady diet compared to the control. Function in the hands improved both dominant and non-dominant hand, and walking ability. improved and how far I can walk in six minutes improved. Then we got some more money. We're able to go back and analyze. I have lots of data from that first group of progressive MS folks. So we're able to analyze the change in mood and cognition. So we're able to show that again in progressive MS we don't expect anybody to improve their thinking or their mood because they have a progressive disease. We're able to show that anxiety scores diminished so they were less anxious, depression scores diminished so they were less depressed, and that verbal and non-verbal reasoning scores improved. Again, very surprising in a progressive disease. We have MRI data in this group that we are working on analyzing. So I'm hoping to have that available. We have our videos that we have. Before and after. And we had videos of their walking every three months. And we have that analyzed. I have that paper in press. And I'm hoping that that press, it'll finally be out probably in either June or July. And what would be very nice about that, Marc, is the videos, because I put it in Open Access Paper, the public will be able to see those videos now too.

That's amazing. That's so impressive. So what are the other factors like stress and how do those impact in sleep and exercise? Can you talk about those and how they're part of your program?

So in the program we talk about how important it is to address stress. And I'm gonna step back a little bit. For years I ran a therapeutic lifestyle clinic. In that clinic we took all comers, you know, MS, neurological disease, mental health disease, medical problems. And I do a, see them in a group, and we do a timeline. And one of the most common things that I saw, Mark, was stress was the trigger that made people be symptomatic. And so I learned that we need to teach people how to engage in a stress-reducing practice. so I saw that in all disease states. Now, when we went back and analyzed it, as I said, we had a little more data so we could look at the mood and cognition data. We looked at the associations between the diet, the foods that we wanted them to eat, the foods we told them to exclude, the stress reducing practice, the exercise, and electrical stimulation. The strongest associations were between Not eating the stuff I told you to not eat, eating all those vegetables that I told you to eat. And then stress reduction, and they were very strongly core, had very strong association, P values of less than 0.0001. Stress reduction was slightly associated, but it was still more important than either the exercise or the sleep. And I was actually quite surprised with it. I had fully expected that exercise in Eastin would be most beneficial.

So what was the stretching tools you gave to the patients?

It was incredibly simple. We taught them how to do a self-massage of their face, hands, and feet.

That was it?

So that was one, and the other was a mantra-based meditation, sort of soft belly, focusing on the word soft and belly as they inhaled, and exhale in that they were visualizing the flow of air through their nostrils in and out.

Yeah.

They're probably getting a whopping five to seven minutes of a stress-reducing activity every day.

Unbelievable. So they did 20 minutes, then who knows what would happen, right?

Correct. But keep in mind, I was asking people to do a lot of stuff. So we had taken away the food that they loved, had them eat foods they didn't know how to eat before. we taught them how to eat vegetables. We were having them do e-stim and we were having them exercise. And so they were spending hours a day doing everything that we asked them to do.

Now let's talk about the diet part of it because I think that it's going to be surprising to most people what you recommend because it's contrary to the most commonly given advice around diet. And yet it's profound and it seems to be impacting only MS but Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease. all kinds of neurologic issues. So tell us about that though.

Sure. So, you know, as I was going downhill, my Cleveland Clinic docs told me about Lauren Cordain's work in the Paleo diet.

They did?

So in 2002, Lyle Stone mentioned that to me. I don't think she quite understood what it was that she had said. So I went to the websites, read the book, like, okay. So after 20 years of being a vegetarian, I gave up all grain, all legumes, all dairy, a lot of prayer and meditation. I went back to eating meat and continued to go downhill. But I stayed with it because I was doing something. And I thought, okay, who knows how long this takes to recover? And I've been going downhill for a long time. At least I'm doing something. I'm adding the vitamins and the supplements and Eventually, after getting a little more comprehensive understanding with functional medicine, I had this insight like, I should take this long list of nutrients that I'm taking in pill form and figure out where they are in the food supply. Instead of focusing on what not to eat from the paleo world, I should focus on what I need to be eating to feed my brain. Then I was on this mission to, okay, what are the micronutrients that my brain needs? And ultimately, again, more research to get that sorted out, so that takes several more months. And the program is lots of vegetables.

Oh my God.

Lots and lots of vegetables.

Did you research that to make sure it was safe?

Well, you know, what's funny is when I did my clinical studies, I did have to show the IRB that this crazy diet that I was advocating was safe because it was so different than the USDA My Healthy Plate diet. And so I was required to do a safety study to show that nine cups of vegetables was safe.

Unbelievable.

So yeah, so we did do that and the dietician who... and so I had to keep these detailed food records of what I was eating for a week. We did these analyses. and the dietician who did those analyses for us, who had been doing dietary research for, you know, I think 25 years, said, you know, Terry, this is the most nutrient dense diet I have ever analyzed. And so we're like two to eight times more nutrient dense than the average American intake for these various vitamins and toxins and minerals.

And you found out that there were, you know, certain things in food that make a huge difference, like sulfur and iodine. Yeah. analyze the food and figure out what to eat to give you those nutrients.

Correct, correct. And so I designed this as I was constructing the diet, I decided like, okay, I gotta chase these nutrients, figure out what my brain needs. I also had the insight like, you know, biotransformation is probably really important to help resuscitate my mitochondria and help me get rid of whatever toxins I have from all of my toxic exposures growing.

Up on the farm, et cetera. And biotransformation means.

The processing, right, processing, eliminating of the heavy metals, the lead, mercury, arsenic, the atrazine that I'm sure is in the groundwater from the farm and all the years of pesticide and the formaldehyde, you know, and the mercury that had been in my mouth for all those years. So, whereas I was researching what my brain needs in my mitochondria need, I also researched what can I do to maximize the efficiency of my detoxification enzymes, particularly phase one, phase two. Brassica family, so the organic sulfur in the cabbage family, that's vegetables, in the onion family vegetables were a big part of that protocol.

Yeah, they can handle a lot of stuff. Iodine you mentioned is in fish.

Yeah, fish and seaweed. And so, seed was big, as very big on fermented foods, again, for the microbiome aspect. And the ancestral health folks had gotten me keen, you know, pretty fired up about organ meats. And as I'm, you know, understanding the dietary needs of the brain more, one of the things I discovered is like, you know, vitamin K, which you and I learned was all about blood clotting. But vitamin K2 is all about myelin in the brain. Well, if you got a problem with MS, you need a lot more myelin. So I need vitamin K2. And where do you get K2? You get it from liver. And you get it from eating a lot of greens. And the bacteria in your bowels have to convert that vitamin K from the and divide them into K2 and K7 that your small bowel will absorb them.

And you need the right bacteria to- you- need the right bacteria to synthesize vitamin K and you can get it from food, but it's really important.

And the way to sort out do you have the right bacteria, actually I sort of laugh about this, we have pooping class in my lifestyle class because we talk about how important it is to look at your poop and know oh, are you pooping rocks? Are you pooping snakes? Are you pooping pudding? Are you pooping tea? So we all sit in our chairs. It's very graphic. We poop together, then we stand up, we turn around, we look into our toilet chairs, and take turns talking to each other about our poop and what.

To do if you want to.

Why don't you just take pictures of it?

Well, it's group poop.

I don't know. Well, we do have the Bristol stool chart. heart, so we have that in five minutes as well.

I don't know, group poop is a.

Therapy, I don't know. Oh, well, we try to have a lot of laughter and fun in some of these group pooping classes. People are laughing pretty hard.

Very impressive, very impressive, Dr. Wells. You must be a compelling salesman for that. Yes, you mentioned vitamin K, you mentioned sulfur, you mentioned iodine. Vitamin D seems be a big factor in MS. Yeah, vitamin D is really important.

Vitamin D, so if we look at the north-south gradation, the further you get from the equator, the higher the rates of vitamin, the higher the rates of MS in Alzheimer's, by the way. And part of the assumption is that our vitamin D levels are declining the further we get from the equator. And of course, So some studies have shown epidemiologically that is your vitamin D level is lower, your rates of MS are higher. There are other studies that have shown if you treat people with vitamin D, the rates of relapse are lower. So that's certainly a factor. And you know, vitamin D also speaks to over a thousand genes. and your brain is filled with vitamin D receptors. So yeah, we want people to fix their vitamin D. And in all of our studies, we give them vitamin D and we monitor their levels and I tell them, please go out and get a tan without a sunburn. Because when light hits your skin, yes, you do make vitamin D, but it is also an immune modulator. independent of your vitamin D level. So I still think there's utility in having sun exposure.

So you might not get a MS, but you get wrinkles.

You may get wrinkles, yes. But you'll get far fewer wrinkles if you're having bone broth and lots of vegetables.

So bone broth, what is that and why should we be drinking it?

So, you know, this was a very traditional food that It's bones, a little vinegar, some sea salt, and we like to put in a little seaweed and we simmer it all day long. The vinegar helps draw the minerals out, so it's going to be a very nice mineral-rich concoction. If you put in things like chicken feet, great source of collagen and gelatin, which can help heal your gut and help Give your cells more of the collagen. And collagen is a very basic stratus compound that is a structure that is ubiquitous in our connective tissue. So it's a very basic structure.

That's gut healing too, right?

Very good, very good part.

Great. So you created something called the Walls Protocol. Can you tell us what the steps of that are and what that is? Because I think people are interested in learning about how to implement this.

When I devised my diet and lifestyle program, I did all of that to try and slow my decline. I had no hope of recovery. And then when I had this unexpected side effect of recovery, it certainly changed how I practiced. And after a few months, I decided to call our local food co-op. I said, you know, how about give a talk? And it was a huge success. And as I began teaching the public, I realized that there's this, the public was hungry for all this. And so I ended up deciding to create a book and to teach these concepts. As I was teaching the concepts, I realized that I couldn't just have these lists of food stuffs in my mind. I needed to have a teachable method so I could teach my patients in my clinics and I could teach the public. And so I codified that into what I call the Wahl's Protocol. So we have the diet, the foods that you need to eat, so lots of vegetables, greens, sulfur, color.

So there are three categories, right? Three big categories.

Dark green leafy vegetables. Green leafy vegetables to get all that vitamin K going and the carotenoids and magnesium, so great source there. The sulfur-rich vegetables, cabbage family, onion family, mushroom family. And that helps with detoxification, it helps with intracellular glutathione, it helps with making neurotransmitters, and then the deeply pigmented, and pigment's a great source of a good market for antioxidants.

So eat the rainbow.

Eat the rainbow.

Yeah. The other aspects of the protocol besides the colorful fruits and vegetables?

So we remove things that are particularly inflammatory, so the gluten containing grains, so wheat, rye, barley. We remove the dairy protein. You can have clarified butter, but all other forms of dairy we take out. And I also take out eggs because eggs are probably the third most common unrecognized food sensitivity. So that's the food part.

So it's also a very high fat diet and a low carb diet.

Yeah, so the average American has about 250 grams of carbs. My diet, depending on which level you're at, may be 100 grams down to 50 grams of carbs. And these are pretty non-starchy carbs. So we have less carbs and I want people to have more fat. I want them to have omega-3 fats, Flax seed, hemp oil would be fine. Avocados would be great. If you're more ketogenic, then I encourage things like coconut oil or medium chain triglycerides. Clarified butter is good.

Or ghee, right?

Ghee, yeah. That's great. And I'm okay with people eating chicken skin. I'm okay with having fat cuts of meat. Because our cells, and membrane, the cell membrane wraps around the axons for the nerve wiring to make myelin. 70% of that cell membrane is saturated fat and cholesterol. So cholesterol has gotten this terrible rap, but we need it to make our hormones, including vitamin D, and we need it to make our cell membranes, so we need it to make myelin.

I had a neurosurgeon at Cleveland Clinic once tell me, I don't know why anybody would take statins if you're a neurosurgeon, you know what it does to the myelin and to the nerve cells and sheets.

Yeah, you know, I'm very, very uncomfortable with people having fat. I think it's a very critical part of brain health is to have enough fat.

So one of the other aspects of the protocol is to have three different categories of veggies, the good fats, the.

Good fats, the sugar and carbs. And want to be sure that there's enough protein. You know, and while Many people don't have enough protein in their diet. You know, as a vegetarian vegan for many years, clearly not enough protein, probably low in B12 as well. So I prefer that people have some fish or poultry. I do have some strategies for vegetarian vegans because I do recognize that there are vegetarian vegans for spiritual beliefs and religious beliefs. so we have some separate programs for them to help them do that more safely. We are very keen on fermented foods again to help populate the gut with a diverse set of microbes. And if you have fermented foods, you get many more different species of microbes than you're gonna get in your probiotic capsule. So much better to learn how to make your own.

Like sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut, kimchi, Kombucha. I teach people how to make fermented chia seed pudding, how to take, oh actually it's quite delicious. And then we get coconut milk and we show people how to make fermented coconut milk cheese, fermented yogurt, fermented kefir, you know, and fermented beets, fermented carrots, fermented radishes, so lots of ways to have fermented foods and that can be fun and easy. I encourage them to begin using seaweed. Our ancestors would have traveled great distances to have seaweed or would have traded to get seaweed and they certainly recognized that it was very important for the reproductive health of the plant that the young Men and women who they wanted to have kids got the seaweed.

Because of iodine and you get your thyroid and if your thyroid's not working you can't get pregnant.

Exactly, exactly. So we have those things. And then I also talk about the benefits of ketosis and why that is something to consider. And so we have some strategies to get people into ketosis.

Which is not eating much carbs. and actually-- Having more fat. More fat and burning the fat instead of the carbs for fuel.

Correct, correct. Now, you know, the ketogenic diet is very-- has a long history. It's been used to treat epilepsy. It started, I think, about 1919 out of the Mayo Clinic. And Johns Hopkins got it going again in the 1960s. But they have a dairy-based ketogenic diet. with only 20 grams of carbs and wreck people's microbiome. They wreck their hormonal balance. They have to use a lot of supplements because it's so nutritionally unsound. And unfortunately, a lot of people are using the ketogenic diet, dairy-based, again, with only 20 grams of carbs. And they have a lot of health benefits initially, but now I have concerns that over time they'll develop nutritional deficiencies, the hormonal imbalance gets to be a problem. So I'd much rather they use a medium chain triglyceride based, like coconut oil, coconut milk, or so you can do that. If you don't like coconut or coconut disagrees with you, you can do it using olive oil, but then you're going to have to restrict your calories. And so this is a lot tougher. So now you're eating once a day, or every other day. You know, and once you're in ketosis, eating every other day, that really is actually pretty comfortable. And I'll eat once a day or every other day when I'm in ketosis, and it's very comfortable. I'll sometimes eat every three days for a longer fast. But that is not easy in the beginning. You have to, you know, very gradually ease your way into it.

Not eating, does this sound fun?

No, no, no. So I think for most people it's easier to do it with a medium-chain triglyceride on a ketogenic diet.

Powerful. And so you can be on a ketogenic diet if it's more well-designed so that you don't end up with it.

Right.

So you don't necessarily have to become nutritionally deficient.

You can do a healthy version of it. You know, and when I designed my diets, so I have level one, two, and three. Level three is the ketogenic diet. We went back and did nutritional analysis of each level to verify it was nutritionally sound. They do have enough fiber, you can maintain a healthy microbiome. And so, yes, you certainly can if you're following our protocol. If you're doing a dairy-based ketogenic diet, I think you're at definite risk of long-term problems.

So the other thing I want to cover is what your experience is with the resistance to your ideas. because you did a TED Talk and had some challenges around that, as you mentioned. And I think that you've been able to work in a major university to implement this, which is a huge breakthrough, but there's still a lot of resistance. And can you talk about why that is and what kind of resistance you've encountered with this groundbreaking idea?

Well, I sort of had lots of resistance. And I think Some of the reasons I'm successful is one is I'm a little socially not attuned. So I've always been sort of into, I do my own thing, I just do what I think is right, and I can let the world roll off my back. So I think that was critical to my success. Early on, when I had this transformation, I had gotten assigned to the traumatic brain injury clinic, which by the way, I was I'm sure it was an attempt to force me to take medical retirement because I was assigned to that in 2007 and I went home, told my family and my spouse, there's no way you can do that job. And I knew there was no way I could do that job because I was going to be seeing traumatic brain injury patients without residents and I just physically would not be able to do that. And instead I started that in the end of January 2008. as it turned out by the end of January 2008, I could do that job. And so I'm helping in the Trent Granger clinic, but unlike my colleagues who were saying, well, there's nothing you can do, I'm like, well, as a matter of fact, there is a lot you can do. We can teach you how to eat a more nutrient dense diet. We're gonna teach you how to meditate. I'm gonna talk to you about exercise. I'm gonna have you do Epsom salts baths, get a pedometer and start walking. And my chief of staff calls me and says, Terry, People are really upset. What are you doing?

Yeah, and so... Can you please not help them?

So, I took down 85 different papers to say, okay, this is what I'm doing and why. And he's like, well, but it's still not FDA approved. And I'm like, well, okay. And I'm happy to do only what's FDA approved. If you'll send out an email to all of my partners, here at the university that that's the only way that we can treat our patients is using FDA approved treatment protocols so we can no longer use the latest science. Right. And I stopped and smiled and then he goes, okay, I see you have a point. And he actually would become a huge fan of mine. He started telling folks who were criticizing me saying, okay, if Terry harms somebody, we'll do a peer review, we'll see what's going on. But vegetables are not a problem. Meditation are not a problem. Exercise is not a problem.

Is meditation FDA approved?

No, that's the whole point. He became a huge fan and in fact he then a couple years later would give me two unfunded days to do my research. So my chief of staff became very, very supportive. The chair of medicine at the university, when he saw my recovery, he gave me the job of writing a case report, which write a case report on yourself is not an easy task, but I got it done and we got it published. And then he called me back and said, okay, we need to do a little clinical trial. And so that took about a year to get that through and got that going. And I could not get it through the IRB because there's no safety data other than me. I and he had become the dean of the medical school. And so he facilitated behind the scenes to let the IRB know that work with walls and the physical therapeutics committee, she needs to be able to do this study. So then I met with the head of pharmacy therapeutics and we identified what were all the labs that have to do, who I'd have to exclude to be able to safely do this study. you got that study up and going. Then the next thing I started doing was lecturing the public. And again, I get warned like, you can't be doing this. You don't have any studies saying that this is really safe. So I got some coaching on how to more carefully talk about it. This is my experience. This is a scientific rationale. And you could talk to your personal physician, and if this makes sense, try it out and see how you respond. So I had to learn how to talk about it in a way that was culturally acceptable. Yeah.

Well, what an extraordinary story. You know, you've gone from someone who's basically debilitated almost on disability to someone who's healed herself, to someone who's begun an initiative that educates patients and consumers to being a research scientist, proving the concepts over and over again.

We had our little pilot studies going, and it was small private foundations that funded our work. So we're doing the little stuff in the university, giving me PhD students and some grad students to work for free in my lab. And so, and I'm writing grants to the NIH and the MS Society, and they're giving me scathing reviews, like, Clearly, Dr. Wahls has no understanding about the pathophysiology of MS, but I keep writing anyway. And finally, we're having some preliminary data, and I still get these strange reviews, but I published my book, the Wahls Protocol, which creates a firestorm in the MS world and drives a huge consumer interest in diet and lifestyle, which causes the MS Society to take notice. and rearrange their research priorities. Yeah.

I talked to them a decade ago and it was just like talking to a wall.

Well, you know, I was a band speaker because I was creating false hope.

So there is no such thing.

As false hope.

Hope is a medicine.

Hope is a medicine. But, you know, I was a band speaker and my book comes out in 2014. And then in the fall of 2014, I get an email from the MS Society that they want me to come to their wellness meeting. And I'm a pulmonary speaker at another event that same day. But I'm thinking, okay, well, that sounds sort of interesting. So I call the MS Society and say, Do you know who you're inviting? I'm a banned speaker. And so they were very apologetic. No, no, yes, we know about you. We know about your work. We know we banned you. We're very apologetic. We really want you to come. So I rearranged with that other organization. So I spoke on a different day and I went and helped them see the light.

Amazing. Well, thank you for your work and inspiration for so many people. And I'm sure we're gonna see a lot more of what you're doing and it's gonna change how we think.

It's very exciting.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Because I think if we had really good tests all the time, all along, we'd realize that most everybody has parasites. and they're there for their inner gut for a reason. They really become a problem because there are some that are more pathogenic than others. But the real trick and trigger is, and I think why we see more parasitic based chronic disease is the immune system. If you have a hampered immune system, if your immune system is suppressed in any way or is out of balance, you're going to start to feel the impact of those parasites. And so why do we have them? Because they're part of the biologic ecosystem that works for plants and animals and for humans as well. It's when you get a big dose of a pathogenic organism, you happen to be immune compromised at that period of time, and give you that opportunity for that parasite to take hold in your intestine, and now you're going to have either an acute illness. Most people have experienced parasitic illness as acute, like, you know, Campylobacter, Giardia, you know, Shigella, you know, Salmonella, you have- those are bacteria though. Those aren't parasitic. Well, yeah, those are bacteria, but your Giardia is your- and to me, it's about the Entamoeba histolytica. Those are like two of the major ones. Yeah, amoebas, those three. And those are the ones that people have experienced the most. And, but, the diagnosis to get to Giardia or Entamoeba histolytica, it can take months to years.

Years.

To years for somebody to figure out your chronic diarrhea is caused by one of those two or three parasites. Yeah, I mean, I had a woman.

Who had chronic fatigue, terrible about food sensitivity. She was like miserable. And she was like an extremely well-connected wealthy woman who had access to the best medical care. And she had Giardia that she picked up somewhere and she was miserable and.

No one found it. And it was very hard to find. I mean, you know, you have to, you know, one of the standard ways that it used to be used and now I think they use capsules to go in and look for it, but they used to, you know, go down into the intestine and they'd be almost like fishing for the Giardia and see if they could pull any Giardia out and do biopsies. Very difficult to diagnose, but we have new tests. We'll talk about that.

Yeah, and people get parasites from water, from food. What kind of food and water.

Yeah. So, yeah, you get water food, you can get it from meats, uncooked meats, and you can get it from your pets. So, you know, if you have a cat who's going out, it has to be, happens to be an outdoor cat that likes to, you know, kill things. They're going to get parasites from the rodents and the small creatures that they eat. They're going to bring it back. And if you're not careful cleaning their litter box, then you're going to be at risk for, for getting a parasite with cats. It's toxoplasmosis. I actually have a patient. who has schizophrenia and I just did, you know, because they, I'm trying to find out a root cause, I did testing and I tested him for toxoplasmosis antibodies and he had very high antibodies of toxoplasmosis and there's a link between toxoplasmosis and mental health disease, particularly schizophrenia.

Incredible.

Right, even if it's treated, the inflammation and the antigenic nature of the toxoplasmosis has an ongoing impact on the brain in such a way that it can lead to the symptoms of schizophrenia. So it was interesting. It was an interesting case.

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. So that sort of brings together, you know, like a different train of thinking, which is these parasites are in your gut, but they can cause problems that have nothing to do with your seemingly have nothing to do with your gut. And I remember one kid with autism who was really quite sick, but had a lot of gut issues and a lot of kids with autism have.

Oh, yeah.

And we're like, oh, well, we'll treat as Lymes disease, Giardia. And we treated that and literally the kids autism dramatically improved, started talking. I was like, whoa, the whole, yeah, there's a, yeah. So talk about the ways in which these parasites are common and what are the most common ones we see and how do we sort of start to think about what they're doing in the body. Because in a way, you can make a devil's advocate argument and say, well, we all grew up in nature and we weren't living in a sanitized hygiene world and we all were exposed to parasites and we all had worms and amoebas and bacteria. Maybe they have a role in our health.

Right.

Are they all bad?

Yeah, so they're not all bad. And so, since you brought it up, that's the hygiene hypothesis. The hygiene hypothesis says that industrialized countries where we have sanitized everything, including our food, we have lost some of the important elements of our gut microbiome, particularly parasites. And there's mounting evidence that parasites actually have a important role in modulating in a positive way the immune system. That when you, there are particular parasites that will, there's a balance in your immune system. and there's an inflammatory side and anti-inflammatory side. And the parasites that are in our body actually produce certain proteins and long chain carbohydrates and fat molecules that will balance out the immune response so that there's the T helper cells that are more inflammatory are shut down. And so that can limit autoimmunity. And we know that autoimmune illnesses and autoimmunity is the base of many of our chronic diseases. And so there's more and more evidence that having a healthy microbiome that includes some parasites can be very helpful. And I know we're probably gonna talk about this, but it's called Helmin Therapy. And although you don't hear a lot about it, it is becoming- that's a worm. Yeah, Helminth is a worm. And they're being used to modulate the immune system. And we'll talk, I have a case that we'll talk about later in which I've used Helminth therapy. So that question mark about, can parasites, are they good or are they bad? They're both.

It depends. I mean, there's a really a couple of good books. One is called Missing Microbes. which is about the damage to our microbiome and the lack of the right bugs that keeps us healthy. And then what's it called? The Epidemic of Absence. Right. Which is a brilliant book where this guy literally went to South America, Mexico, and was suffering from allergies and asthma and autoimmune issues and treated himself with worms and actually got better. It was fascinating. But, you know, this is such a crazy idea that people are like, wow, treating people with worms, that sounds like we want to get rid of the parasites. Right. But, but it's a mixed bag, and you have to sort of figure out what's going on with the patient. So let's talk about what are the, I mean, obviously digestive symptoms, right?

If you, if you have a parasite, you have diarrhea, you can have bloating, you have gas, cramping, cramping, all that stuff.

Right.

You're gonna have increased appetite. You feel like you're never full. You're gonna have muscle, egg, joint pain. You're gonna have skin rashes, itching hives, you're gonna have brain fog, fatigue, and in real severe cases, when you have a 35-foot tapeworm hanging out in your gut, you could be anemic. You know, significantly anemic. Iron deficiency.

It would be an iron deficiency. Nutritional deficiencies. I've even seen cystic acne. Yes. Parasites. So they're common and they cause a lot of issues and they can lead to all these autoimmune issues you mentioned. And, and, you know, there, there's a lot of bugs in your gut, right? There's. bacteria, there's viruses, there's fungi, there's parasites, there's worms. Did I forget anything? Prions probably or something. You know, and I think the, it's a complex subject. It's a look at the ecosystem in a gut. So essentially it's like if you're a functional medicine doctor, it's like you're being a rainforest ecologist.

Yeah.

There's all these different interactions and all these dynamic connections. But the problem is really common and the diagnosis is often missed. so, but, but, but often when I see parasites, I feel like they really need to be treated.

Absolutely.

And so tell me about how do we go about diagnosing this? What is wrong with traditional diagnosis?

Right.

How do we start to diagnosis?

Yeah.

So, you know, I just, I just go back to that one comment you made because I think it's really, it's really profound. And I just want to just really just make the last statement on this is that when you see parasites, you should be thinking immune system and you should be thinking, you know, something is amiss in the immune system. But you should also be thinking about the fact that there's the good side and that we need to have a diverse microbiome that includes bacterial diversity, that includes parasitic diversity, because that those organisms have evolved with us. They make compounds for us and they educate our immune system. See, if we don't have parasites and we don't have bacteria, then our immune system doesn't know. It doesn't know what to respond to. And so when you now have a sterile diet and without the nutrients that you should have and you're not getting, you're not eating fresh vegetables and you're not eating grass-fed beef, you're not going to get the full complement of bacteria and even parasites that will educate your immune system. What will happen then is your immune system will then over respond. It's been in isolation all these years. It almost has agoraphobia. It's afraid to go out of the house. And it goes out of the house and all of a sudden it's a Gillette Stadium and it's completely having a panic attack. And when it does that, it over responds. You get these autoimmune and inflammatory responses that lead to chronic disease. And so it's really important to understand that we need to eat our food from really healthy soil. We need to eat whole food and vegetables that have these organisms on it, 'cause that's gonna help us have a diverse gut microbiome that has an abundance of good bacteria that helps protect us. And parasites are part of that. that's the good side, right? Now, on the bad side, when you do have that problem, we talked about some of the signs and symptoms. How do you get to that diagnosis when that person's had chronic diarrhea or they've had this itching and this bloating and now you're suspecting, okay, they've had all this testing done and I can't and nobody's figured it out. See, that is an advantage we have because we are oftentimes the doctors of last resort. And so I get to look at everything that's been done and I get to say, you know what, they did this and that, but oftentimes, in 20 years of practicing conventional medicine, I think I had one positive O&P test. Yeah, one. Right, right. GI doctors, chronic diarrhea, let's do an O&P. So what the O&P is basically is you have somebody in a lab looking under a microscope at multiple slides of somebody's poop. you have to look at hundreds of slides to capture one-- yeah, and then.

Good luck if you might not recognize the guy's not trained.

And what if they're-- and you're right about that not trained. It's, you know, there are fewer and fewer lab techs that, you know, like we don't, like if you and I saw, you know, well, we'll probably get it, but if we wouldn't recognize smallpox 'cause we've never seen it, right? So most of the techs these days when they're trained, it's all on biochemical assays and they're not getting the microscope training to, and they don't see- and it may not be as common like.

Then some of the bugs might not be as common here. So if you're an Indian, you're like a pathologist, you're looking, you probably see.

Thousands of the, oh, I recognize that. So using an OMP, so if somebody comes here and- Open parasite test. I've had an open parasite test, I've had three of them and I've been told I have no open parasites. Well, there's new technology called quantitative PCR. so what that does, it's going to look at the DNA material, look for DNA material of parasites, and it's going to be able to multiply it until you can measure it. That's what the pcr does. It's a polymerase chain reaction. So you get this dna.

We use for covet, right?

Yeah, exactly. For diagnosing the acute phase of COVID.

So.

That test is very effective and it's in part of one of the tests that we do. Look at the gut microbiome. I use this one particular lab. and they do the quantitative PCR and they're very, very sensitive. And they pick up parasites.

It's like 6,000 times more sensitive than looking at poop and the microscope.

It is, it is six, it is.

Exactly. That's crazy, right?

Okay, so we have that diagnostic tool.

So let's talk about the approach to looking at parasites. We use a special test. We use what we call GI effects test here.

It's a GI map.

GI map.

I do, I use, I like the GI map because of its quantitative PCR. It's very sensitive, almost too sensitive.

Yeah, it can pick up things that may not be actually.

But, you know, you get that with.

You know, also, yeah, there's a difference between sensitivity and specificity in medicine. Sensitivity means if you have it, it will for sure find it.

Right.

But it can over, over report it. Sensitivity means if you have this, it's for sure there.

It's that thing.

So, you know, I kind of might over diagnose stuff on some of these PCR tests because you may have like a fragment of something or it passes through.

It may not be a real problem. You use your clinical judgment and what's going on with the patient to really, then that's how you, that's the cognitive process that we go through all the time and We don't treat tests, we treat patients. But we use tests so we don't guess. So that's how it works.

Let's talk about then how we would really approach dealing with someone with chronic parasite infections. And then I want to get into talking about worms, because parasites and worms are quite different. I normally wouldn't give someone a parasite, but we sometimes in medicine are now giving people worms to treat them.

Helminthic therapy.

So talk about what is our approach? We do the diagnostic tests. what is our approach to treating a chronic parasitic infection? And we find them through these tests where other people don't find them. So.

You know, we've gone through the process now, patient comes in, we've clued into the fact that they have a parasite, we did great testing, we did the GI map, we found our parasite, and now what are we gonna do? So there are, of course, in medicine, there are some drugs that you can use, but they are very potent and they have lots of side effects to them and they like, you get more diarrhea, you can get more cramping, you can have hepatotoxicity with them. So you got to be really careful. They're, they can be effective and I've used. Flagyl or Flagyl, Flagyl, Flagyl, Flagyl. So, but what we, what I, the two things I think about when I'm dealing with the parasite is there is a, if they have a symptomatic parasite, then their gut microbiome is significantly disordered. And you usually see not only the parasite, but you're also going to see other markers of disorder. You're going to see an overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria. You're going to see Candida, because those are the markers of a disordered microbiome that will allow a parasite to really take hold and become pathogenic. I think first off, you know, it's the five R's. So I need to get rid of the parasite. So we use botanicals. So the botanicals that are really helpful are oregano, herbs, yeah, herbs. So we use oregano, we use garlic, we use black walnut, we use wormwood. So I use berberine, berberine extract. And you can use them individually. Yeah, and you can use them in combination. There are some great combo treatments out there that will cover a host of your parasites and also treat those dysbiotic or pathogenic organisms. So the first thing I want to do is I want to start them on a therapy that's going to finally get rid of that organism. So it's a direct attack on the organism. But then we have to look at.

The entire- Before you do that, I just wanted to share a story. I was once giving a talk at at Yale and it was through a bunch of doctors and naturopaths and we were talking about the gut and I mentioned a parasite, particular patient.

And.

This naturopath got up because I was saying, I tend to use these drugs and because I kind of tend to use drugs more for parasites. And he starts going on and on about all the herbs and how these herbs work against parasites. and the minute later, this other guy got up who was a naturopath as well, but he was an older guy.

Yeah.

He's like, you know, the truth is, I'm a naturopath and I primarily use herbs, but often they don't work as well as the medications. So you can try herbs, but I wouldn't be afraid of the medications. This is a short-term thing that deals with the cause.

Yeah.

And it's amazing. I mean, I. I mean, ear and bowel is so prevalent and it's such a big problem for people. Yeah. and there's many causes of it, but sometimes it is a parasite. I had a patient recently who was a very famous lady and she was really struggling with chronic gut issues and we treated a parasite and boom she was instantly better.

Yeah, so yeah, so again, Blastocystis hominis, which is a parasite, and another one called Entamoeba histolytica, they've both been implicated in IBS as triggers for IBS. Yeah, so if you can't find a reason for somebody's IBS and you should be looking for one, IBS is just not the diagnosis, there's a trigger for it. You should, you know, and you haven't been able to get to the bottom of it, you should be looking for those two parasites.

Unbelievable.

So we're treating, so we're treating, you know, I will start with herbal therapies and then I will advance to using pharmaceutical agents if necessary. But then I wanna make sure the rest of their gut is working. So we look at their digestive processes and oftentimes why do we have the parasite? because their digestive processes aren't working well. They're not making enough HCl in their stomach because they're under chronic stress. They might not be producing enough pancreatic enzymes. They may have some issues with their gallbladder that's limiting or and their liver that is limiting their production of bile or release of bile. So we want to make sure they have all their digestive enzymes, want to make sure that their gut immune system is working well. So we want to create that environment. Besides treating, I'm going to want to make sure that they're getting the types of foods and supplements in their diet that will support a healthy gut microbiome. Good prebiotic foods, the cruciferous vegetables, I want them to make sure they're getting things like broccoli and asparagus and Brussels sprouts and dandelions. My dad was Greek and we lived in a suburban community. and in the springtime, my dad would go around the yard and he'd get all the dandelions and he'd bring them in the house and he'd steam them up and boil them and he'd mix them up with garlic and oregano and garlic and oregano and dandelions. Right? What are we doing? We're giving our gut great prebiotics to feed the good bacteria and giving natural, natural herbs and botanicals to make sure that we keep a healthy gut microbiome. So Dandelion's really good, artichoke's really good, konjac root with glucomannan is really good prebiotic. So I wanna not just treat the organism, I wanna create a really healthy gut microbiome that has a healthy immune system that will prevent further disease down the road.

Yeah, so really it's about not only killing the bug, 'cause I've been in traditional medicine, we're like, Just kill it. Kill the bug, okay, carpet bomb it and let's move on. Forget it, and the problem is that most people's gut don't get back to normal on their own. and I often see this even with celiac patients, they will be told, oh, you have celiac, don't eat gluten, but they still struggle for years with all kinds of digestive issues that they cannot handle certain foods or they have bloating or gas. And it's even after they've eliminated gluten. So, you really have to go through this whole gut restoration program. We've talked a lot about on the podcast, but it's such a key part of functional medicine, this five-hour program where we get rid of the bad stuff, foods, bugs, whatever. And then we kind of put in the good stuff and help the body.

Kind of repair and heal.

Yeah.

So that's really an incredible approach. And we've seen patient after patient have had amazing. And I've seen, I've come across really crazy things. I've seen people with Shistosomiasis from Africa, and I've seen people with Endomyasisolica, and I've seen a lot of parasites. Blastocystis is one of the most common ones. Yeah. And it's often thought to be not a pathogenic one, so it's not bad. Yeah. But it often does cause symptoms. And if people have symptoms and they have Blastocystis and they have Irritable Bowel, I tend to treat it. Treat it, absolutely. Do you want to know my secret for living a long and happy and healthy life? Well, all I have to do is check out my weekly newsletter, Mark's Picks, where I share my favorite tips for health, longevity, well-being, and lots more. Check it out and link below. So, let's sort of jump to this final topic because I think that it's.

Such an interesting topic.

Right.

And it has to do with worms.

Yeah.

So, like look, we all co-evolve with living with all these bugs. And we had them and they lived with us. What's interesting is that, you know, in the advent of sort of modern civilization, we've become over sanitized and we've lost the contact with the natural world. And I, you know, I think we've seen this uptick in allergies, in asthma, in autoimmune diseases, in inflammatory diseases. MS, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, and all these diseases. And the question is why? Because when you go to like the developing world, you go to a hunter-gatherer culture, they don't have them.

No.

Like, there's just no allergies, no asthma. And I was seeing by the other day, like, I grew up every summer spending three months on a ranch with horses and poop and outside and being dirty all the time. Absolutely. Dirt and sleeping outside. And, you know, like, being outside. And I don't have a single allergy or anything. And I think, you know, there's this whole phenomena where you see what the kids who grew up on farms don't.

Get allergies and autoimmunity. Oh, my. I mean, if mothers today saw what you and I were doing when we were kids, mucking around in creeks, holding on to salamanders, you know, feeding, you know, we had a horse farm near us and, you know, I would feed the horses, you know, apples through the fence and they're licking my hand and, you know.

Yeah, yeah, Mother's Day would be like freaked. Right, exactly. So, so we, we've sort of over sanitized ourselves and there's a number of books like the epidemic, epidemic of absence, you mentioned, really talks about this and There's a really good science behind using worms, reintroducing worms into the body. And when you look at the part of the immune system that has us deal with worms, it's the same part of the immune system that helps us deal with allergy or asthma, which is fascinating to me because it's like, oh, it has nothing better to do because it's supposed to be fighting the worms all the time and keeping everything under control. But, if you don't have the worms to fight, all of a sudden, the directing gets turned on you and your body starts dealing with attacking- Exactly. -becoming more allergic or autoimmune related.

So, there's an interesting observation. There's an observational study that looked at people with autoimmune diseases in sub-Saharan Africa and in underdeveloped countries. and they looked at those in regards to the severity of disease, progression of disease, and response to treatment compared to developed countries like the US. And they found that those patients in sub-Saharan and they compared it along the lines of the load of parasites. And they found that the patients in sub-Saharan Africa And the hypothesis is that it's because of the parasites, they have their disease, their rheumatoid arthritis is less severe. It progresses more slowly and it responds better to therapy versus developed countries where there's less parasites. And we have this, you know, the operation of the hygiene hypothesis where we just live in too sterile of an environment that our immune systems just like you said, are going to get confused and they're more likely to have an autoimmune response to something that's coming through the system that they maybe should not even respond to. That's called immune tolerance. Your body actually has to have immune tolerance. You have to tolerate your own antigens, but you have to tolerate the antigens of other organisms. Because if you're responding to everything that comes to your body, then you're gonna be constantly inflamed. So your immune system has to have a mechanism by which it can appropriately tolerate organisms. And in that particular setting, those organisms that are being tolerated may be doing something good for us. So if we're having immune tolerance for a parasite that isn't harming us, it's getting some benefit, but it's creating compounds that actually modulate and balance our immune system, that's a win-win.

Yeah.

So I know this sounds completely wacky, right?

But it's true.

Dr. Hyman and Dr. George are giving patients worms.

Well, you know what?

Are they quacks or what's going on here?

I will bring in a patient and she will sit here and tell you that she is a believer in Helmin therapy because she had severe psoriatic arthritis and we worked on everything and her goal was to be able to either come off of or greatly reduce her need for her immunosuppressive Humira. When she came to see me, aches and pains in all of her joints, tired, fatigued, really having difficulties. And I did all of the things that we do and we've talked about on this podcast and functional medicine, but one thing I brought up, you know, we've, I put her on a lot of things that could impact your immune system, Helman therapy. So, I started her on Helmin Therapy a year and a half ago when she was in the worst, well, she was actually getting better from her pain, but she could not get beyond two and a half weeks without needing her next Humira. Started on Helmin Therapy, helping her to get to that goal. She's now, she can go every six weeks before she needs a Humira shot. And that started once she started the Helmin Therapy. so she's getting parasites, she's getting helmets, she's getting these worms, she takes them in capsules. We get them from a really, you know, high, high level company, and it really does work.

It does. You know, I, I would say I've been shocked, and I use it very selectively, and I have patients who are really struggling, and the usual functional medicine stuff doesn't work. And I think that I've been shocked at some of the things I've seen. I had this one kid who was on the autistic spectrum.

Yeah.

But he was also extremely allergic. And he had really high levels of IgE, which is the antibody against sort of allergens when you have allergies, like asthma allergies. And I'm like, I told them, I said, look, I don't know if it's gonna work. I think the risk is very low. We use rat tapeworms, which sounds gross, but they don't actually. get take up residence and they don't actually cause any real problems long term. They just pass through, but they can help regulate immunity on the way in. You want to try them? She's like, Sure. Was it really a miracle? This kid not only had reduction in all his symptoms and allergies and everything, but his IgE levels, which normally should be under 100, were 1000. and it came down to normal. Wow. On this therapy.

Wow.

And I've had other people that have autoimmune diseases, or just kids. It's really quite striking. So there's something to it. You have to pick the right patient.

Absolutely.

And we'll figure it out.

But I just think that in functional medicine, the idea is that, you know, it's not like, you know, we just decided, oh, you know what? There's nothing else to do. Let's just, you know. I heard about witch doctors in Africa using helms, I think I'll try that. There's a lot of research. I think we pride ourselves here at the Ultra Wellness Center in getting to the root cause, but really combing the literature for real data that says it helps us find new therapies that are going to be beneficial. We do that and there is a lot of studies that support Helmin therapy in reducing the severity of symptoms and response to medication in people with rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, MS, and asthma.

If you loved that last video, you should check out the next one for sure on getting to the root cause of all disease.

We're in this complex living environment where nutrition matters, where environmental toxins, I mean, this is 20 years ago.

Yeah.

And they probably wrote that.