This Is Causing Disease! - How To End Inflammation & Fix Your Gut Health | Dr. Mark Hyman

Every single thing with the brain that we get, depression, anxiety, OCD, autism, ADD, these are all inflammatory diseases of the brain.

We got some fantastic questions and the first one we're going to tee up here is from Whitney who has a question about OCD and the gut microbiome. So here's our first question from Whitney.

Hi, Dr. Hyman.

My name is Whitney and I'm from Oregon.

My question to you is how does OCD and your gut play a role.

In each other and what can you.

Do to help with your OCD?

Thank you.

Wow, Drew, that is the best question I've heard in a long time. Thank you, Whitney. And the reason is it reminded me of a story of a patient I had years ago that blew my mind that I wrote about in my UltraMind Solution, which is about how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first. And this patient had severe OCD. I mean, I mean, she wouldn't, move anything off the floor in her house. She wouldn't clean her house. I mean, it was a disaster area. It really was a public health menace. And she was, you know, very smart woman. You could talk to her. She thinks she's totally fine, but she had some weird pathological thing going on where she would not clean her house and just stuff piled up and piled up. And it was the disaster. And so I said, look, I, you know, let's see if we can just get you healthy and we'll start with, you know, looking at what's going on with your body. We ended up doing obviously a stool test and I did also test for bacterial overgrowth. We call this small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And also she had a very high level on her stool test of something called beta-glucuronidase. And she also had something high in her urine called DHPPA. Now these are markers of a particular bacteria called Clostridia. and they are not actually good for you. And there's a bad kind that I had a few years ago that caused me to have colitis. This is not that kind, but it's a bad kind of bacteria. And I said, let's try to just clean up your gut and reset your gut. So I literally, I gave her an antibiotic. I gave her any fungal. And it was like a miracle. Literally like a miracle juice. She said, my OCD is gone. I cleaned up my house. I don't know what happened. It's the first time I've done this in 20 years. I was like, holy cow, what is going on here? And this is, you know, almost a decade and a half ago, nobody was talking about the microbiome in the brain. Nobody barely was talking about food in the brain. So I think OCD can have many, many causes, just like any disease. In fact, you know, the problem with traditional medicine is that we think we know what's wrong with you when you get a diagnosis. Oh, we say you have OCD or you have depression or you have rheumatoid arthritis or you have diabetes or you have, let's say, migraines. Well, those just describe the name of the problem. They don't describe the cause. Functional medicine is about the root cause. And you can have one disease that has many, many causes. So, for example, OCD might be caused by your microbiome. And I think it's a very important step to do an elimination diet, to reset your gut, to actually look for fungal overgrowth, bacterial overgrowth, to do stool testing, urine organics testing, to find a functional medicine doctor to do that with you, and to treat what you find. And sometimes you might need an antibiotic, you might need antifungal, But the truth is you kind of got to get to the root. I'll tell you a couple of other stories about OCD that it's reminded me of, but the remarkable thing is that we actually can treat this and it may not be just an emotional disorder, it may be a biological disorder of the brain. And Drew, I don't know if I even told you this and I don't know if I shared this on the podcast, but I recently, and I'm going to do a podcast with this doctor from Harvard, Christopher Palmer, Dr. Christopher Palmer. He's a Harvard psychiatrist who works at McLean's, which is one of the top psychiatric hospitals in the world. And he wrote a book called Brain Energy. And he asked me for a quote and I read the book and I was like, Holy cow, this sounds very much like UltraMind Solution. So I said, you know, geez, I'm sure happy to help you. Why don't you go ahead and read my book just in case, you know, you might give you some insights about things you're interested in. And he sent me back this very sheepish email basically saying, Look, Dr. Hyman, I'm really sorry. I promise I did not plagiarize your book because he found all the same kinds of things that I found about the metabolic disorder of the brain. We call this metabolic encephalopathy. and when the brain is not working, it doesn't hurt like your joint hurts if you have arthritis, but it creates behavior problems, mood problems, attention problems, memory problems, and so it's really quite profound. And he had a patient where he discovered this by looking at a patient with schizophrenia. And this patient had severe schizophrenia, severe hallucinations, basically was in his apartment all the time, never went out, except to see his doctor gets medication every month. And he was on this medication. Unfortunately, a lot of the psychiatric medications for schizophrenia cause insulin resistance and diabetes and obesity, and he gained 150 pounds on the medication. And he was kind of sick of it. He's like, Doc, can you help me? And he knew he wasn't good. The doctor knew he was not going to go see a nutritionist, going to go see anybody. He said, well, I heard a ketogenic diet might be helpful to help you lose weight. You've got insulin resistance. So he tried it. not only did he lose 150 pounds, but his schizophrenia went away. Okay, this is not a treatable condition or a curable condition given traditional conventional psychiatry. I mean, you just have to give severe psychiatric medications like Thorazine. We call the Thorazine Shuffle because people are so sedated they can barely walk and modern versions of that drug. Another case, it just sort of woke him up to realize that the brain is actually dysfunctional. And most psychiatrists pay attention to the mind, but not the brain. And most neurologists pay attention to the brain, but not the mind. So they're kind of related. In order for your mind to work, your brain has to work. And he, by putting this guy on a ketogenic diet, he changed the metabolic health of the brain. He changed the inflammation. He got rid of gluten and lots of other inflammatory foods, and his schizophrenia went away. I had another case of a young boy who had severe OCD. and he was a nice kid. And from one day to the next, he developed a really severe OCD and nobody could figure it out. Turned out he had something called pandas. It's pediatric autoimmune neurologic psychiatric disorder. It's kind of what it stands for, something like that. And essentially what happens is you get strep, which is a bacteria, but that strep produces a toxin that affects the brain and causes OCD. And so for him, we had to treat him. And we found, in fact, he did have this problem. You can test it with laboratory testing. and we treated him with ozone. And again, it was like a miracle because ozone is one of the best germicidal agents on the planet and anti-inflammatory agents, and his OCD went away. So I have treated many, many patients with OCD by using functional medicine to get to the root cause. And for you, it might be your gut or your microbiome, or it might be something else. So I would encourage people to really dive deep with a good functional medicine doctor or a functional medicine psychiatrist. There's not enough of them out there, but there's a way to get to the answer to this. And I think it gives people hope when I tell these stories 'cause it's like, wow, Maybe my depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, OCD, schizophrenia, you name it, can be helped using an approach that deals with the root cause. It helps the body get back in balance. It takes away the bad stuff and puts in the good stuff.

Great answer, Mark. And I think the thing that you mentioned at the end of your answer is that even if the gut microbiome isn't 100% of the story, it is still a major part of the story and for many people, Even it's not the whole 100% that is the solution, a lot of individuals see a significant improvement. So don't ignore that on your journey to get to the root of why inflammation is happening in the brain.

I agree. I didn't really go into it enough. I kind of glossed over it, but I think I always start whenever I'm treating anybody for any mental health issue or any issue that's inflammatory. By the way, every single thing with the brain that we get depression, anxiety, OCD, autism, ADD, what else is there? Schizophrenia, and obviously all the memory disorders, Parkinson's, these are all inflammatory diseases of the brain. And the number one, the number two, and the number three, and the number four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, sources of inflammation in the body are always the gut. Now, there are other things obviously like Lyme disease and mold and other things, but It's, you know, the one, two, three things that I think of are gut and I always start with the gut. I always start with elimination diet. I start with a gut reboot. I make sure I treat the SIBO, the SIFO, bacteria, fungus overgrowth. And I do a whole gut reboot and I actually drew because my gut was such a mess of years ago, we created this product called Gut Food, which is like a multivitamin for the gut that contains five highly researched ingredients that all work in synergy, prebiotics, probiotics, and polyphenols to reset the gut. And it's something that I take myself, I recommend it to all my family members and my patients. In fact, we give it to our entire staff in our company because it's so important for people to keep their gut healthy.

All right, Mark, let's tee up the next question. This one is from Tammy who has some big picture questions that she wants to ask about Lyme's disease with a family member.

Hey, Dr. Hyman. So my husband has Lyme disease. He's taken antibiotics for it a couple of times and it's still flaring up. Just looking for some advice. Tammy, you just open a can of worms or maybe a can of ticks. I don't know. This, if I could literally eliminate one condition from the planet Earth, it would be tick-borne illnesses. They are awful. I've had them. I've had Lyme disease. I've had Babesia. I've been sick from them. I get it. I promise you, and I've seen patient after patient who struggled not only for years, but often decades with chronic Lyme. And when I say chronic Lyme, I'm including every single tick-borne disease, Babesia, Ehrlichia, Babesiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, all the tick-borne diseases. And there's, even with Lyme disease, there's multiple strains of Lyme disease. And I spent a lot of my life studying it. both from a personal interest because I was really sick from it and from trying to help my patients and figuring out what works and what doesn't work. And if you go online, if you listen to read books, you're going to get a thousand different ideas. And I'm just going to share with you what I've come to understand is probably the best approach. But just for the caveat that you're going to hear a lot of other different opinions that it might be different from mine. I'm just going to share with you what I found really works for me and my patients and what I've been able to cull from working with this disease for a long time, looking at the scientific literature, looking at actually often things that aren't in the scientific literature that people are using that can work. So what is Lyme disease? Lyme disease, and again, it's all the rubric of all these different conditions, they're all manifest a little bit differently, but essentially it's a illness that you get from a tick bite. And the ticks carry these little spirochetes, these little nasty things, almost kind of like syphilis. And, you know, syphilis used to be the great masquerader. We called them great masquerader because it would cause all these problems. And, the same thing with chronic Lyme, autoimmune diseases, memory issues. I mean, Chris Christopherson had quote, dementia, but it was Lyme disease. It can cause heart disease, arthritis. It can cause all sorts of gut issues. It can cause skin problems and cause cognitive issues. It's just a huge problem. And essentially, you can also manifest this chronic fatigue syndrome and people can't figure it out. Now, Let's just talk a little bit about, I'm gonna go kind of down the rabbit hole here, 'cause you asked and I'm gonna say it. I don't really get a chance to talk about this much, but I think it's an important thing to talk about. Diagnostics is challenging. We have antibody tests. You've heard of coronavirus antibodies. They tell you if you had the infection. They don't necessarily tell you that you have the infection, they tell you that you've had the infection. And that's important to know for sure, but the question is, do you have an active infection? So a lot of our tests on antibody tests, you go to the regular doctor, they test you, they go, oh, you're fine, you don't have Lyme disease. they're really not that sensitive. Sensitive test means if you have it, it'll pick it up. In other words, if you have a bladder infection, you pee in a cup and you look under microscope, it's like 100%, you're gonna find it, right? But this kind of test, you may not, and it's hidden because they hide, these little sneaky ticks hide inside your cells and they're hard to detect. There's another level of testing called PCR testing, which is often helpful to look at fragments of the DNA you know about, Coronavirus, PCR testing, same thing. And so we can detect these tick infections through PCR testing. Now, I had a positive PCR and I definitely had it. And then when you have that, you have it for sure. It's active floating around your blood. But sometimes you don't have that. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. And then you can look at your immune response to Lyme. And that's more what I look at because these are tests that were developed in Germany and Europe. We now have labs in the United States that do them. and essentially it looks at how do your white blood cells respond in real time to some tick that they give in the laboratory. And that is called the lymphocyte response assay, and that's very helpful. And we call it an LE spot test, and we use that a lot. And I find that really helpful to detect how your immune system's reacting. We look at your interferons, we look at all kinds of cytokines, you know about cytokines from the cytokine storm, we can tell like, for example, natural killer cells go down, CD-57, it's one of the immune cells goes down. So we have ways of looking at this indirectly. Sometimes you can't really tell for sure, even with all these tests, so you have to kind of go on a clinical diagnosis. And Dr. Horowitz, Richard Horowitz is one of the Lyme experts, he's written a lot of books on this. A friend of mine, he's really quite brilliant about this. And he developed a Lyme questionnaire, which I encourage you to check it out. It's called MSIDS, M-S-I-D-S, and you can download it, it's free. and you can see, you know, if you score high on this, it's likely you might have Lyme. Now you might never know you got a tick bite. I don't remember ever getting a tick bite. I don't remember pulling a tick off me. I don't remember having a rash. I don't remember having anything, but I had full-blown Lyme disease. So, and it's like that for a lot of patients. They might not know. Now, if you live in the desert somewhere, and, you know, Australia, probably you don't have Lyme disease, but, you know, pretty much everywhere in America, there's some degree of tick-borne illness. So then you got the diagnosis. Let's say we find you have it. but you know most doctors just look for Lyme. They don't look for Babesia or Leishmania or Bartonella or many of the other infectious agents that come with ticks or they don't look for different strains. So it's really important to do a cast a wide net when you suspect it. So let's say you have it, then what do you do? Well, traditionally you give three weeks of antibiotics and you're done. But that doesn't work unless you really have acute Lyme. If you have acute Lyme for sure, you get a tick bite, you notice it, you have a rash, you go in the emergency room, you get a doxycycline for three weeks, that usually knocks it out for most people. But when you have chronic Lyme, it doesn't. And I'm just going to take you through a number of different frameworks that people are using. One, which I'm going to sort of tell you what they are and then I'll tell you what I generally do, what I think is the most effective and the least harmful. One is long-term chronic antibiotics. Some people put them on, some doctors put people on antibiotics for three months, for three years. That's a problem. because those antibiotics are not benign. They cause gut issues and many other problems. You get a lot of secondary issues. They may control the symptoms somewhat, but they're not, no magic bullet, and it's, it's just a rough road. So I'm not a big fan of that. I'm okay sometimes with a short course, six weeks, hit them hard, you know, and hit the different forms, because there's a lot of different forms along. There's a cyst form, intracellular form. So you've got to hit all the forms of different drugs to get them to go away and different. different ticks need different drugs. So it's not like one size fits all. Sometimes you usually have not one infection, you might have two or three. Like I had Lyme and Babesia. Some people have Lyme and Bartonella. So you kind of have to go through all the right treatments for each one. We use a lot of herbs. That's another category. There's a lot of people who use herbs, Dr. Jang herbs, Byron White herbs, there's the Cowden protocol. So there's a lot of protocols and herbal protocols that often can be very effective. I had a patient, for example, who had chronic Lyme and used the Jang herbs, which are from Dr. Jang, who's a Chinese physician, Chinese medicine physician, and one of the herbs there is garlic. Now, garlic we know is a very powerful antimicrobial. It works, but you smell pretty bad and you want to be friends while you're taking the drug. I'm taking the herb. So herbal protocols can be helpful. I use it often as an adjunct. And then we go down a different rabbit hole. so there's a long-term antibiotics, there's short-term antibiotics, there's the herbs, and then there's all the stuff that I think actually works, which is way off the grid. Unfortunately, it's not easily found for most people. It's not accessible to a lot of people, and it can be expensive. But I think these are some of the most effective treatments. One is ozone therapy. And ozone therapy doesn't have to be that expensive. You can actually do rectal ozone. You can buy a machine for $800. You can do it at home. You can do it every day. And that's, that's kind of a very inexpensive way to get ozone on your own every day. And, for people who have Lyme, I do recommend that and it can help but it takes a little longer than doing the IV version. And then, there's intravenous ozone, we call it multipass or 10-pass ozone. I think that is one of the most important foundations of tick-borne illness treatment and many other illnesses.

But, that they would have to do just to jump in, Mark, that they would have to do with practitioner.

For sure.

And, even in general with ozone, They should really be maybe trained by somebody or go through some sort of onboarding.

For sure, for sure. You need to find a physician. You need to be a doctor. You can't just, you know, kind of wing it and you need to get intravenous ozone by a trained physician. And, there's training programs out there. And, in Europe it's very widespread and very popular. Here it's less so, but you can still find it. And, we can link in the show notes to a link of all the functional medicine docs and also all the the ozone trained doctors in America and you can see who's in your state. And so that's a good place to start.

The second thing I think that can.

Be very helpful are peptides. And peptides are these small molecular weight proteins that are like little mini proteins and that your body uses to regulate all kinds of things including your immune system. So thymosin alpha 1, thymosin beta 4 fragments and others can be really helpful. LL-37, I'm just kind of rattling them off. But there's a number of peptides out there that are antimicrobial peptides that are immune boosting pro, peptides. And that can be really helpful in helping people have their own immune system start to fight this. It's a little like immunotherapy. Think about, you know, cancer and immunotherapy, where they, they, these treatments actually use your own immune system to kill the cancer. And then, and then there's some things that have seen maybe a little far out, like hyperbaric oxygen therapy. That's essentially where you go in a, like a decompression chamber, which they use for scuba diving, and you go down under two atmospheres of pressure, more under 100%. oxygen. And guess what? Bugs don't like oxygen. What did one of the famous chief justices in the United States Supreme Court years ago said? The best disinfectant is sunlight. So, we need to, you know, oxygen is a great therapy. In fact, if you just go to PubMed, which is the National Library of Medicine research studies, you'll see an oxygen, intravenous oxygen, and you'll see it's actually been used in medical treatments for all kinds of things, including infections. so hyperbaric oxygen therapy can also be helpful. And that's an adjunct. I'll usually use herbs, I'll use antibiotics with that, and ozone. Sometimes combination of these therapies help. And then there's kind of a last resort therapy, which we use in patients who just don't get better. And this has often been a miracle for people who've been sick for 20 years. It's called hyperthermia. And essentially what it is, is it gives you a fever. You, under medical supervision with intravenous lines, under anesthesia, they heat up your body to about 107 degrees. Now that sounds crazy, and I've had it done twice. and I'm still alive. And I sent my patients down to Mexico, to Europe to do this. And often it's one of those treatments that they go, my God, Dr. Hyman, this just stopped it. This is the thing that worked. After 20 years of struggling, I got a little better from this, this and this, but this is what knocked it out. So I think there's all kinds of therapies out there. And of course, you have to also fix your gut and get rid of heavy metals and deal with mold and balance your hormones and get your mitochondria working and get your nutritional levels right and optimize. So it's a comprehensive functional medicine approach that has to be used to treat chronic Lyme, but it is treatable. And I'm a perfect example of someone who actually was pretty sick from it and I'm good as new now, better than new.

Just a follow-up question on the Lyme, is that do you see patients that feel like they're in great metabolic health, like their gut is working great, they work out regularly, they eat well, and they get, you know, one of these tick-borne infections and they also get wiped out the same way that somebody who may not be as healthy or as compromised?

So I think it's a great question. The answer is the more, like any infection, the more robust your health is, the less it's gonna affect you. Like COVID, COVID kills and hospitalizes those who are chronically ill, overweight, or old, all of which affect your immune system. We know that if you're malnourished, you're more likely to die from diarrhea or a respiratory infection. Right, so we do know that the host plays a big role. And so, in fact, there was a huge debate back in the 1800s between Louis Pasteur who came up with the germ theory of disease and his colleague Claude Bernard who argued about the host. He said the host was important. He called it the biological terrain. And it is really important to keep your biological terrain healthy so you can be resistant to infections. So just like with COVID and every other infection that we see, if you're healthy, it affects you less. Your immune system can handle it. So absolutely it's important to have your vitamin D levels optimized, your zinc levels, your vitamin A levels all optimized to be not inflamed from eating a sugary processed diet to make sure you're getting enough sleep. And the whole, all the things we talked about on the podcast and all the things I've done in my practice for 30 years. So yeah, absolutely it does not affect everybody the same. And the people who tend to get really sick from it are the ones who have underlying issues. They may have gut issues, they may have heavy metal toxins, they may have mold exposure. You know, for me, I'm, I had all of them. So I'm like an expert, even though I didn't want to be. But unfortunately, I had it. But fortunately, I learned about it and how to fix it. And so that's what I've dedicated my life to, is sharing what I've learned with my patients and with the world to try to give people a little bit of hope and suffer a little bit less.

All right, Mark, our next question is from Marilyn.

Hello, Dr. Hyman. My name is Marilyn, and I suffer from tinnitus or tinnitus. Not sure how you pronounce it. So if you know anything about it, I would love to have more information about the gut to ear connection beyond the gut to brain connection. Thanks, Marilyn. That was a great question. And the truth is, I don't know how to say it either. Tinnitus, tinnitus. I have no clue. And I'm a doctor, so don't feel bad. Maybe it's like you say tomato, I say tomato. I don't know. Anyway, this is an annoying problem. It's not a life threatening problem. It's not a serious problem, but it is a miserable problem to have because it essentially means ringing in your ears. It's like having ringing in your ears all the time and it can be very bad or it can be more mild. And the truth is we don't have a lot of understanding about what causes it. So like anything in functional medicine, I simply try to get the body in balance and see what happens. What we found is that there are certain things that actually can be really helpful. It can be, for example, acupuncture can be helpful. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy can be helpful. Let's say, what we were talking about earlier on the podcast where you go in a decompression chamber. And those things can be very helpful treating your methylation pathways. Often, homocysteine can be high with tinnitus. So, I think it's important to look at all those things. In terms of the microbiome, again, it may be partly inflammation. So, if you're thinking about anything that drives inflammation, you always have to look at your gut. You always have to start with what's going on in the microbiome. food sensitivities, leaky gut, and reboot the gut. And again, that's why, you know, I haven't really created many products, but I created this product, Gut Food, with my team to absolutely help everybody who has a gut, get their gut a little bit healthier, whose gut is really not working to get it really working again. Because we all in this country and increasingly around the world have gut issues because of our processed diet, because of increasing C-sections, antibiotic use, acid blocker use, environmental toxins like glyphosate, all these things drive huge problems for us. So it's really important to get your gut straight and to heal your gut. And that's what I really focus on with my patients first. And it's really why we created this product, gut food.

All right, Mark, our next question is from Jose.

Hey, Mark, my name is Jose. My question is, what's a good detox? And how many times a day do I do it?

Do I juice three times a day for three days?

I'm transitioning from unhealthy diet to a healthy diet, plant-based?

Thank you.

Wow, Jose, there's so many things in that question. First, you're trying to detox. We'll talk about that. And second, you say you're transitioning from an unhealthy diet to a healthy diet and you close with saying plant-based. And I'm going to talk about that because that might be a little bit misguided. So in terms of the approach to dealing with detoxification, there's many ways to do it. You can do a water fast for seven days. You can do a green juice fast for seven to 10 days. You can do 24 hour fast, a 36 hour fast. I find that often you don't have to go so extreme. Now, it is good to give your body a break from eating every day and eat breakfast. In other words, breaking the fast. We should not eat for at least 12 hours between dinner and breakfast, ideally 14 if you can stretch it out, which basically means if you eat at 6 o'clock at night, you can eat breakfast at 8 in the morning. It's not a big hardship. However, I have found that the most powerful healing my patients. And this is just really creating a broad net that works for most people most of the time. It's not what everybody needs for fixing everything, but it is going to hit the mark probably 80% of the time. And I created this years ago just as part of my medical practice. And I wrote a book about it called the 10-Day Detox Diet. Now, I call it 10 days because if I call it the 10-week diet or the 10-month diet or the 10-year diet, nobody would do it. But It's a diet that is eliminating most of the inflammatory foods from your diet. It eliminates sugar, alcohol, processed foods, grains, particularly gluten, dairy, and most sugary fruits stick with berries. It includes protein, vegetables, nuts and seeds. And it's a really optimally healthy diet. It can be protein from animal protein like like eggs or meat, grass-fed meat and so forth, pasture raised chicken. And the reason this diet works so well is it literally resets the gut, it reduces inflammation, and it helps optimize your nutritional intake of phytochemicals and phytonutrients and fiber. So it helps all the things you need to do to kind of reset the body. And it works so fast. It's amazing. Like within two or three days, I do these programs all over the world where I have people come, we spend a week doing this diet or five days doing it. and the average reduction in symptoms from all symptoms from all diseases in five days to seven days is 70%. That's huge. We did this with a thousand people online as a group. Again, same results, 70% reduction of all symptoms from all diseases in 10 days. Now, I'm not saying it's going to cure everything, but it works to kind of clean the slate and then see what's left over. If you have Lyme disease or mercury poisoning, it may not work or mold toxicity, you might feel better, but it's not going to fix the problem. You have to deal with those things. This one guy came to see me at Cleveland Clinic when I first started working there. He said, Dr. Hyman, I did your 10-day detox diet and my rheumatoid arthritis went away in 10 days. Is that possible? I'm like, yeah, it is. We had a woman from the Saddleback Church where we did the Daniel Plan, same diet with the same basic 10-day detox diet to start. She said, I've been in and out of psychiatric hospitals my whole life on medications. She's overweight. She said, Is it possible in three days my depression went away? In six weeks I lost 45 pounds and I feel like a different human being. I'm like, yeah, it's possible because food is medicine. And if you're eating the wrong food, it's poison. And if you're eating the right food, it's healing. So absolutely, you can heal so many things using a detoxification strategy. That means upregulating all the good stuff in your body, the phytochemicals, the fiber, the right nutrients, and taking out all the bad stuff. And you don't have to go super extreme like just two juices. And I see people do juice fasts. and they might eat carrot juice and beet juice and apple juice. I'm like, that's terrible because you're basically, you know, loading your body with sugar. So I, I think green juice can be fine. We gotta be careful. For example, kale, if you just juice kale all the time, that has goitrogens, which can affect your thyroid. So you wanna have celery, cucumber, parsley, cilantro, watercress, ginger, lemon. And I, I drink green juices a lot because I, I do that as a, as a sort of basic part of my wellness practice. and it's great to include in there, but you don't have to go so extreme. And I think the main thing people have to detox from is the most addictive drug in the world, which is sugar and starch. And so that's what the 10-day detox side is designed to do, to shift that switch in just a very short time. And I had a patient again, another patient at Cleveland Clinic who came into our group program and she had been diabetic on insulin for three days, I mean for 10 years, in three days she was off for insulin. Three days, okay? And then she was off all her medication in six weeks and had lost a ton of weight and had normalized her blood sugar. So these are not extraordinary stories. They're run of the mill stories if you know what to do. It's like that joke. I don't know if I told you, Drew, but the doctor takes out this patient's appendix and he sends him a bill. and he's like, the bill was $1,000 and the guy, the patient goes, Man, that's a very big bill for such a simple operation. And the doctor goes, you know, you're right, I'm going to send you a new bill. So he sends him a new bill and says, taking out your appendix, $1, knowing what that, what needs to be taken out, $999. So I think, you know, it's just about knowing how to kind of work with the body and get it to do what it's supposed to do.

Love it.

Awesome, Mark. We have like one or two more questions over here. This next one is from Bambi.

Hi, I have lupus and I wanted to get some advice for taking anti-inflammatory vitamins.

Yeah.

So thank you, Bambi, and I'm sorry you have lupus. It's a horrible condition. It is an autoimmune disease that affects the joints, the skin, your kidneys, lungs. I mean, it can be a very serious problem. However, again, like all autoimmune diseases, it can be treated very effectively by unloading all the things that create inflammation in your body and adding in the anti-inflammatory things. Now, you asked about supplements. They're called supplements for a reason. They're not replacements. So, I don't think that you can continue, for example, if you have gluten sensitivity or you have Lyme disease or you have mercury poisoning, to take a boatload of curcumin, for example, which is an anti-inflammatory supplement and expect the result. It's just not going to work. You have to deal with the root cause. Supplements can be helpful in the recovery and the repair and the activation of your healing systems and the renewal of your body for sure. And I take them every day. But I don't see them as replacements. It doesn't mean I'm going to, I mean, I was talking to some this weekend and they were on this powerful drug for cholesterol called Repatha, which is one of the new drugs. It's an injectable drug. And his wife's like, he just thinks he can take this drug and eat his cheeseburgers and french fries and he's fine. I'm like, it doesn't work like that. You can't continue to do all the bad stuff by taking a drug or a supplement and hope that you're gonna get better. So for autoimmune disease like lupus, it's always the same thought process in functional medicine. Look for the cause. It could be a toxin, environmental toxin, pesticide chemicals, heavy metals, It can be a mold toxin. It can be an allergen. It can be something like gluten. Dairy allergies are the most common. Eggs for some people. It can be a microbe, like we talked about tick infections. It can be your microbiome imbalance. It can be poor diet and inflammatory diet, which is typically what we all in America. It can be stress. So there's a lot of things that can be triggering it. Or it can be a lack of certain things like vitamin D. We know, for example, people who live in northern latitudes have more MS, multiple sclerosis. which is an autoimmune disease of the nervous system and the nerves, the coating on the nerves. Well, that's because they don't have any vitamin D because they live in Norway or they live in Canada. And we know this is true. This is not just a functional medicine concept. This is pretty standard medicine. So there's a lot of good evidence that if you don't have the good stuff and you have too much bad stuff, that you get an autoimmune disease.

So I would encourage you, Bambi, to look at that and not just focus on the supplements. Great, Mark. And to that, would you add in, you know, It's primarily for MS but there's a lot of people that go through the walls protocol as well. There's a whole kind of support community for that.

Yes, for sure. So there's a whole framework we call the autoimmune paleo diet. We talked about the 10-day detox diet. That is essentially autoimmune paleo except it includes nuts and seeds and eggs and nightshades. So it's a little more extreme. The autoimmune paleo diet takes out nuts seeds, eggs, and nightshades. and that's not saying those are bad foods, it's just they might be more inflammatory for some people with autoimmune disease. So it's not a bad place to start and then add them back and see how you do. Like you might eat, you know, cut out tomatoes and everything else, and then you might be better, and then you might add back the tomatoes. Oh, my God, my joints are killing me now. So you go, Tomatoes. Okay, nightshades are a problem for me. But if you're the 80 or 90, who it's not an issue for you, can go back to eating tomatoes. So I think the wall's protocol is fantastic. She also talks about eating a lot of organ meats. which I think are among the most nutrient dense foods on the planet. Now people go, oh, organ meats, liver, kidney, and heart. But actually those are the most nutritionally dense foods on the planet. If you Google, just Google liver nutrient density compared to broccoli or think about the most nutritionally dense plant-based food you could eat. Well, the liver is going to win out. by like 20 or 30 fold. It's pretty impressive actually. So now I love liver because I grew up on it, but I get people don't like it. So you might need to do more plant sources. But actually it's important to make sure you're getting the right density of nutrients through these various compounds that are in these foods that can help your body heal and repair and engage. And the Walls Protocol is a great place to start. Terry's a good friend. She uses a functional medicine Doctor, in fact, she was an MS patient who became a functional medicine doctor by hearing herself of MS using functional medicine and then started doing research on it. And now she's really taken off and done a lot of work in this.

Area that's really impressive. When you go into the medical literature in autoimmunity related to lupus, the Epstein-Barr virus is associated with seven different autoimmune conditions, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, type 1 diabetes, ulcerative colitis. So what happens is the virus, in some cases, patients will reactivate and it causes a stimulation of the immune system and the immune system will then start reacting to it. And then interestingly, I've always been curious about photosensitivity. Like why does photosensitivity happen in patients who have lupus? What's going on there? why is it when they get sunlight is it affecting them? And what I found out in the literature is that the virus causes the body to produce more interferon gamma. And interferon gamma is our body's one of the cytokines that help our bodies to fight off viruses. And when we have high levels of this interferon gamma, it sensitizes the body to sunlight. So that's why you get that sort of lupus-like photosensitivity, especially with exposure to sunlight.

And interferon is one of the treatments we're looking at for fighting COVID-19.

So, what they do is they have an overabundance and it may be a genetic predisposition. There may be some single nucleotide polymorphisms that certain lupus patients have and they produce lots of interferon gamma and that actually gets involved in the skin cells and it can make them more photosensitive. so it's an interesting phenomenon. And then the other thing about, you know, and I have seen this with a lot of regular mainstream doctors, they'll say, well, you can't really check for Epstein-Barr virus because everybody's, you know, if the antibodies are positive, it just means that you've been exposed to it. Well, that's true. But if you actually do specific testing for Epstein-Barr virus, so there's a panel that we do which checks for antibodies to the nuclear antigen and the cytoplasmic antigen and then also the early antigen. And then I'll also throw in the Epstein-Barr virus by PCR. So PCR is checking for the DNA of the virus.

You're actually seeing if there's live virus around circulating in your blood, not just your immune response.

Exactly. So typically in the panel that we use, if you have the three out of four antibodies that are positive, especially with the early with the PCR of the Epstein-Barr virus, you know, proof positive that the Epstein-Barr virus is reactive. Exactly reactive. And that's where then you have to ask yourself, well, what do I do to calm down that particular virus? So there's a lot of things that you have to look at.

Yeah, I mean, that's true. A functional medicine really has a different perspective and that's why we see so many patients here at the Ultra Wellness Center who've tried so many things and then they get better because we look at all the factors. So when I think of an autoimmune patient or just any disease in general, there are really only five main triggers. It's a toxin. So I've had patients with lupus have autoimmune disease triggered by heavy metals, for example. Could be an infection like lupus or it could be the microbiome changes. Yes, allergen, something they're eating like gluten. And it could be Poor diet, which is inflammatory and has, you know, for example, a lot of the emulsifiers in our food like Carrageenan and all these gums. Yes. They cause leaky gut, driving inflammation. And it also can be stress, like you said. And often it's many of those things together.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So for her, it was a few of those things. For her, it was stress and the virus. And also, her gut was a mess, too.

Yes.

Her gut was a mess. Yeah. So the other thing that that she noticed is that if she ate foods that were high in lectins, things like the nightshade family, that her symptoms actually got worse. And there's interesting some of the work by Peter D'Adamo, who was the author of the blood type diet. He's the guru of lectins. And what we find is that in certain individuals, when you have high lectins in your diet, and these are compounds that are found in plants, which actually act as a defense mechanism for the plant so that animals and insects are less likely to eat them. Lectins, there's a, in the medical literature, a case study of a hospital that thought they would have a healthy eating day so they served everybody red kidney beans in some type of a casserole or a soup and then everybody got sick from it because it was very high in lectins and it actually caused transient leaky gut. They had an immune response to the lectins lectins in the plants. And I've had a number of patients.

It'S not everybody will have that response to lectins. I mean, there's a lot of promotion.

Out there of lectin-free diets as the cure for everything.

Low lectins, low lectins. Yeah, it's impossible to get low lectin diet. And I think, I think it can be helpful for some specific patients. I think the thing is that everybody finds the latest fad and think it's the cure for everything. It's really not. And when you're in functional medicine, you get humbled by understanding how complex things are, how everybody's really different, how one person may tolerate gluten and another person may not. One person may be fine with lectins, another person may not. But if you have an autoimmune or inflammatory condition, it's something worth trying.

Absolutely, it is. And I'll interject here because this is an interesting finding. I stumbled upon this and again, this was actually by Peter D'Adamo who got me down this rabbit hole. I just recently had a patient who had five autoimmune conditions, including lupus. And I checked for a lab test called mannose binding lectin. Have you ever checked for it?

Actually, no, but I know about it.

Right.

It's one of those things. And he's the one who got me to understand this. So mannose binding lectin is a compound that our body makes to bind mannose. And a lot of that's sugar. It's just sugar. It's a mannose is a sugar. And what you find out is that that people who have mannose-binding lectin deficiency are at a higher risk for lupus. And hers was undetected.

Yeah, and I think the other thing.

I want to just point out is.

That, you know, you're talking about this patient with lupus and she had gluten, she had gut issues, she had stress, she had this virus, she had lectin sensitivity.

But that was her. If you take 10 other patients with lupus, they're all different. They're all different. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning in to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do. introducing you to all the experts that.

I know and I love and that.

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Problem with traditional thinking is that everybody with lupus gets the same treatment. Once you make the diagnosis, you stop thinking. And in functional medicine, when you have the diagnosis, that's when you start thinking. It's just the first step on solving the problem. It's like, okay, this is what your picture looks like. Okay, what are the potential factors that we need to think about to get to the root cause? And then we have to treat the cause, not the symptom. Yes. And that's the beauty of functional medicine. So for her, how did you treat.

The causes of her lupus and what well, for her, it was really focusing on. She already actually was doing very well. I actually tested her, even though she was. She said that she was eating clean diet. I made sure. So she said she was avoiding gluten, avoiding dairy, avoiding lectins, and her testing was negative for any reactions to gluten. So I said, you're doing a good job. Keep it up. It was negative for leaky gut. You're doing a great job. Let's. Let's do that. But what I did do, and she had never had done, is she did tell me that she had a bad case of mono when she was a teenager. And my theory with her is that she probably, when she went under this very stressful time period that the Epstein-Barr virus reactivated for whatever reason, and hers was, she had a positive PCR, so the DNA of the virus was floating around in her blood, and also she had positive antibodies. Three out of four of her antibodies were positive. That was, to me, a smoking gun that her Epstein-Barr virus was was really driving her lupus symptoms. So initially what I did is I treated her with some medicinal mushrooms, things like turkey tail. I used also lysine, which is an amino acid which can help, and I combined that also with some monolaurin.

Yeah, lysine is often something people take to prevent herpes outbreaks on their lip. It works quite well.

It works quite well.

It helps inactivate the virus and other foods that contain arginine, knots, which are good for you, but in this case, they have high arginine levels that actually can activate herpes virus.

Yeah, that's an interesting observation. So that was one of the ways in which I initially treated her. And she did get some improvement with that. And then another thing which I added to her regimen is low-dose naltrexone. And I'm sure you used that yourself, and I've been really amazed what is Naltrexone? So, Naltrexone, this is an interesting thing. So, Naltrexone is an opiate blocker. And, I'm not sure how they actually stumbled upon this, but if somebody takes too much opiates and they overdose, you can give Naltrexone to block the effect of the opiate.

Yeah, when someone has an overdose of heroin or narcotic, they give them Narcan, which is Naltrexone, and that stops them from dying.

Exactly. And it's theorized that when you give naltrexone at very low doses, what you do is you block the body's own opioid receptors and the body senses that and it starts producing more natural feel-good molecules, endorphins. These are our own body's pharmacy for the pain molecules, which in turn modulates the immune system. So when you upregulate opioids, you're actually modulating the immune system. And I've been, I used to use it primarily in patients with ulcerative colitis and multiple sclerosis, but now I'm using it in a lot more patients. And I find that it works really quite well in a whole host of autoimmune conditions. So I used it in her.

And it's very low toxic.

It's probably the safest thing.

It's very safe to use.

Yeah, you can have a couple of side effects in a people, but it's probably one of the safest medications that I prescribe. Absolutely. Very, very has to be compounded and you slowly work your way up on it.

What I experience with it is that it can help, but unless you deal with the root cause, again, it's a symptom manager.

So it can help mitigate the symptoms.

But it's not going to address the underlying biology. Exactly. You're actually true. It's not going to reverse the condition, but it's one of those things where the risk benefit is so good that it's worth in a lot of patients. So I actually added that to her. And then we went to the next level, which is that we tried the natural route and then she got some benefit but it wasn't really where she wanted to. So I said, well, let's go ahead and we'll give her an antiviral. So I actually gave her some Valtrex at high dose. I gave her two or I think three times a day. I think you probably have done that yourself. High dose Valtrex for Epstein-Barr virus. There is no simple one-size-fits-all treatment for Epstein-Barr virus. I've learned that. No. There really isn't. And she actually responded remarkably well to that. Within a couple of months, she was like 80% better using the Valtrex. And I've had a few patients that.

That was very, very of.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think, you know, it's interesting. The more you do this, the more you realize, you know, what works with one person may not work with another person. It's not the person that has Epstein-Barr, you can Valtrex, they may not do anything.

And I think I've had the same.

Experience with some patients, you know, you give them this relatively benign antiviral like Valtrex and it works well. Others don't respond to that. I've got other patients who use something called Valcyte, which is very expensive, has higher levels of toxicity, but it actually can be effective in select patients. But I think there's other therapies that she uses which are also important to mention because, you know, as I've gotten more experience in this, I'm more interested in how do I activate the body's own healing systems? How do I use therapies that are regenerative?

How do I use therapies that are.

Facilitating the body's own ability to fight things? And she ended up using one of these therapies. So can you talk about that?

Sure. Yeah.

Well, before I actually talk about that, the other thing that also I've used in patients is intravenous vitamin C. And that's actually in the medical literature. High B vitamin C at a fairly high dose is about 25 to 50 grams. it's been shown to be very effective also for Epstein-Barr virus. That's another thing.

In her particular- and by the way.

How does that work? How does that work? Well, at high levels, it actually works as a pro-oxidant.

So, we think of vitamin C as an antioxidant, but actually it's working as a pro-oxidant.

Which goes into the next her therapy.

Which is the therapy that's- and how does it do that?

Do you want to explain how it- well, it's a yin and a yang because there's Reduction, which is the adding of electrons and oxidation is the removing of electrons. It has to do with a coupling, coupling of the oxidative forces versus the reductive forces.

So it's a little bit like a magnetic pole. And at high doses, vitamin C increases the release of hydrogen peroxide from the white blood cells. So people don't understand this, but how does our white blood cell kill bugs?

We bleach them.

We bleach them.

It produces bleach. Hydrogen Peroxide and Ozone, which are all oxidants. So, that's exactly how our bodies kill things and it sometimes can't do the job and using these other therapies like high-dose Vitamin C can help actually increase the body's ability to kill infections.

Exactly.

And, they're actually studied in ICUs, they're using it in COVID-19.

You bring up a really interesting point which is that, you know, actually there's a term in medicine called Redox signaling molecules. And when you have these Redox signaling molecules, which of ozone will be one, it actually up regulates your body's own reparative forces.

So, talk about what she did with ozone.

Yeah, ozone was a game changer for her. She ended up using ozone and she said it was like a game changer for her, which is really interesting because it was the first time I had a patient who had lupus who responded to ozone in that way and was really quite quite amazing.

It was, how did she get the ozone?

She got it, she got it, actually she got it, it was administered by a local physician who she was seeing, because she was seeing me in consultation and she actually got it rectally and intravaginally. So not even intravenously. She didn't even get intravenously. Yeah, and she had that response. It was really quite, you can give.

It intravenously, you can give it in the muscle, you can give it rectally, vaginally, it gets absorbed, and it can be very, very effective. And rectal and vaginal treatments you can.

Do at home and you don't even.

Need a doctor to order it.

Yeah.

I mean, it's basically, it's oxygen on steroids.

That's really what it is. It's high dose oxygen and a little bit of ozone.

Right.

So if you ever go out after a thunderstorm and you go that, that, that nice clean smell afterwards, that's ozone in the air.

That's the lightning producing ozone.

It's, it's an, it's a special species of reactive species of oxygen. And it's one of those oxidative therapies just like MSC that it gives you a little bit of a stress, but it also activates your body's own anti-inflammatory mechanisms, antioxidant mechanisms. Absolutely. Yeah, it can be antiviral and kill bugs, which is powerful. So, I think it sounds like a wacky therapy, but it's something we do here at the Ultra Wellness Center. It's something that is, I know we were talking about earlier that when you both heard our patients talking about this, and I often heard this, Dr. Hyman, I tried everything and I did ozone therapy and it was the thing that made me better. and I was like, oh, that's interesting. And I, you know, had a little footnote in my head, but I was like, that's a little weird. I don't know about that. And when I got sick with mold toxicity and autoimmune and colitis, it was the thing that actually flipped my body into a healing response. And it doesn't treat any disease. It just activates your body's own healing mechanisms.

Yeah.

And that's what's very powerful. Very powerfully and very quickly. I mean, I, I had autoimmune disease, brain fog, and within a few days, it wasn't like it took weeks. It was in a few days, I.

Really turned around dramatically. Dr. Absolutely. The other thing which I'll mention as it relates to lupus in women, and I've found this, and actually, again, whenever I see something that's sort of out of the box thinking, I'll go into the medical literature, see if it's substantiated, and what I found is a pattern in patients who have lupus is their estrogen detoxification pathway. And when we check estrogen levels and hormone levels in patients, we don't just check your estrogen and maybe your progesterone. We check all of the hormones, and then we also check the metabolites of the hormones. And I found this pattern in not all lupus patients, but some lupus patients is they have a increased pathway for metabolism to what's called the four oxy estrogen. And, four hydroxy estrogen is not, you're not going to go to your regular.

Doctor or your ob-gyn.

They won't check that. They're not going to check that. It comes out in the urine.

It comes out in the urine, exactly.

It comes out in the urine and I learned about this through Jeffrey Bland. And, it's one of the things we test here at the UltraWellness Center. Exactly. And, Jeffrey Bland, he basically called this the dancing Shiva. And, in some individuals, because women's hormones go up and down and they have to be detoxified throughout the monthly cycle. And you oftentimes will see patients who have lupus, they'll flare with their cycles. And when you measure their 4-hydroxy estrogen, they're very high. And the 4-hydroxy estrogen is what's called a quinone adduct. So it damages DNA. And when you have a high level.

To this over time, it actually increases your risk for breast cancer.

This is why you think women might have a higher risk of lupus. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I've got actually I have a literature paper that cites this I've been doing it in my own little cohorts of patients and I oftentimes check it. And then a lot of patients, they have that.

And then the other thing that's so wait, wait, wait. Before you, I always want to unpack that because that was very powerful what you just said. What it is said is that there are some women who have trouble metabolizing estrogen and it goes down a pathway that produces a toxic estrogen that damages DNA, which is what we see in lupus. And that by fixing that, and we know how to fix that with functional medicine using food and various nutrients and herbs that actually help upregulate or fix those pathways, these patients can get better.

Absolutely, yes, absolutely. And the other thing that- so by.

The way, most traditional doctors would not.

Be looking at your hormones if you have lupus. Right, and then the other thing that we then do is we then look at the genetics. So we look at your genetic pathways. So there's a specific polymorphism called the 1B1 pathway. And when that has a variation, you are more prone towards producing the four hydroxy estrogen. So typically you start, you know, and how would you fix that? Well, what you do, and as interestingly, the particular snip that's involved in that particular pathway, that gets actually upregulated by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Basically, if you eat a lot of charcoal broiled food and barbecue, you're going to be upregulating that pathway. So a patient who's got lupus, they you don't want them either.

Whether you're grilling your vegetables or grilling.

Your steak, it's going to cause the same problem. Exactly. It's the ash. It's that, it's that those complex black and stuff. Exactly. That upregulates that enzyme. The other thing which you can do is by adding through your diet cruciferous vegetables, supplements like DIM helps to shift that pathway in a different direction. So, it's very, it's very, very powerful stuff. And when you start, you know, doing the testing and start looking at it from all different angles, you can really move the needle. And I had, I'll never forget this one patient where I first learned about this. The patient basically told me in her history that everything started after she got mono as a teenager. Her life changed after that, and she was never able to clear it. And when I checked her estrogen and estrogen detox pathways, she had the highest four hydroxy I've ever seen. She was very, very sick. That's where I sort of understood, okay, this may be playing a role with the sex differentiation between men and women and lupus because it's like nine times more prevalent in women.

Yeah.

So this is such a great example in a case of someone who has an autoimmune disease, which is so common that you acted like a medical detective and you found all the various things that were going on with her. She had sort of this chronic Epstein-Barr infection that was reactivated by stress. She had gut disturbances, she had lectin intolerance, she had gluten sensitivity, she had this hormonal dysfunction with abnormal estrogen metabolism.

And these are the kinds of things.

That we do here at Tel Aviv on us to help us navigate to how to treat each person as an individual. This is really personalized medicine, personalized nutrition, and it very sophisticated, it's very effective, and it's something that helps relieve suffering for so many people when they get stuck. And I feel like this is where we're going in medicine. It's where the science is going. Functional medicine is just an approach that helps us apply the science of systems medicine and network medicine today. Rather than waiting 10, 20, 30 years.

We actually know how, and we're learning every day. I mean, when I think about how.

Little we knew about the microbiome when we started this 25 years ago, and how much we know now, we were literally groping in the dark, but we.

Had the basic idea and we were.

Able to apply these principles and get people better even if we didn't quite understand what was happening.

If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. There's no such thing as dementia. There are dementias. and they're all different and they have different causes. Even, for example, Alzheimer's may have very different causes. Dale Bredesen, we've had on the podcast, has talked a lot about the various causes, whether it's inflammatory triggers.