Using Diet And Lifestyle To Reverse Symptoms Of MS

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

You took all these drugs, they didn't work. But when you use food as a drug, as medicine, it actually worked faster and better.

Very fast. Food is the most powerful medicine.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now, I know there are a lot of functional medicine practitioners out there like I am, and we're all trying to get the best data we can to help our patients optimize their health. And that means we're often looking at things like hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and more to help us find the most effective path to health and healing. But it usually means having to order multiple tests from multiple different labs, which makes the whole process of ordering, tracking, and compiling lab results really difficult and time consuming. And that is where Rupa Health can help. Rupa Health is a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty tests from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. They make the process of ordering labs simple and fast, allowing you to cut down on the paperwork and giving you more time to spend with your patients. This is a much needed option in the functional medicine space. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com that's R-U-P-A-H-E-A-L-T-H.com Some days it seems like I'm on the go from the time I get up to the time I go to bed. Sometimes it feels like every day. But it's not just me feeling like I'm busy. My patients notice it too because they often ask me how I juggle multiple jobs, frequent travel, spending time with my family while focusing on my health. To be honest, it's hard. I have to put a lot of planning and systems in place to ensure that I don't really sacrifice my health for my schedule, and eating well is no exception. That is what makes paleo valley beef sticks so great. I keep a stash of them at the house and in the office so that whenever I find myself in a food emergency, I have a healthy and delicious option to keep me on track and get to my goals. They're a great protein snack that's whole 30, keto and paleo approved. Plus, they're individually wrapped in 100% recyclable plastic, making them portable and good for the environment. Paleo Valley beef sticks last a long time too, so you don't have to worry about them going bad in your emergency stash. Most companies promote a long shelf life by using GMO corn-based citric acid encapsulated in hydridated oils to process their products. But Paleo Valley uses natural fermentation without these chemicals or questionable ingredients. Thanks to this process, each beef stick contains naturally occurring probiotics, making them the perfect gut-friendly snack. So if you're looking for a delicious protein option to add to your list of healthy snacks, check out Paleo Valley Beef Sticks. And right now, Paleo Valley is offering my listeners 15% off your entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hymen to check out their clean Paleo products and take advantage of this deal. That's paleovalley.com/hymen.

And now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hi, this is Lauren F. One of.

The producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast.

Functional medicine approaches disease by taking a.

Deep dive into the root cause of illness. In health and medicine, we must always be willing to look deeper. We can't give up on looking for healing solutions just because we've been told that disease is progressive or incurable.

In today's episode, we feature three conversations.

From the Doctor's Pharmacy on using functional medicine to reverse multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Terry Wahls about her personal overcoming multiple sclerosis symptoms by increasing her vegetable intake, with Dr. Tod Lapin about a case study of a patient who healed her gut and changed her life, and again with Dr. Terry Wahls on taking a holistic approach to healing that includes cold water therapy and meditation. Let's jump in. In 2000, I was diagnosed with MS. 18 years ago. 18 years ago. But in retrospect, my symptoms began during medical school in 1980. with episodes of electrical face pain, which I stoically put up with. I could figure out that they were worse with stress and gradually more frequent, more severe. In 2000, I had a weakness in my left leg, got a big workup, including MRIs of my brain, spinal cord, spinal tap, and they said, well, this is relapsing-remitting MS. and being like all-.

It's a very bad diagnosis.

A bad diagnosis. And I looked at the literature and saw that within 10 years, half have difficulty walking, needing a cane, walker, or wheelchair. And half won't be able to work due to severe fatigue. So I wanted to treat my disease aggressively. I sought out the best center doing research here in the Midwest. That was the Cleveland Clinic. saw the best people, took the newest drugs, and within three years I needed a tilt recline wheelchair.

That's good progress.

Yeah, so definitely it was not going in the right direction. And that's when I started researching. I started reading PubMed. I would begin experimenting myself. I adopted the paleo diet, basically on the recommendation of my Cleveland Clinic physicians.

Really?

So that was pretty interesting. I continued to go downhill. I took Tizanidine, continued to go downhill. I switched to Celcept. I continued to go downhill.

These are powerful immune suppressing drugs.

Very powerful. But I was happy to take them because I knew I was headed towards becoming bedridden, possibly demented. I was having more and more trouble with severe pain that was very difficult to control. So I was thrilled to take these drugs and attempt to stave all of that off. As I read PubMed, I started experimenting with supplements and would eventually figure out that supplements targeting my mitochondria helped my fatigue somewhat, although, and I was slowing the speed of my decline. So I'm thrilled, I'm grateful, and I'm really excited about reading PubMed.

Grateful from a wheelchair.

Very grateful from a wheelchair. Very, very grateful. And then, you know, by the summer.

Of '07- I'm a glass half full person, clearly.

Clearly, clearly. You know, by the summer of '07, I was so weak I could not sit up in a regular chair. I had a zero gravity chair. I'm fully reclined or I'm in bed. I'm struggling to walk 10 feet using two walking sticks. My boss calls me in and tells me he's assigned me to the traumatic brain injury clinic. In six months, I'll be seeing patients without residents. And I know that, of course, that means-- what he's really saying is, Terry, we are done redesigning your job for you, and I'll be forced to take medical disability finally at that time.

Yeah.

So that's a difficult summer. But two months later, I discover on one of my Google searches, the Institute for Functional Medicine. And I took the course on neuroprotection in the midst of my brain fog. So this was a bit challenging, but I got through it. I had a longer list of supplements, a little deeper understanding of the things I could be doing for my mitochondria and for my brain. And I added that. And then I had another really, really big aha moment, like, I should take this list of supplements and redesign my Paleo diet to maximize the nutritional intake. So, I redesigned my diet.

You're gonna be eating paleo cookies all day and that's not exactly right.

And that's not the right thing. So, I restructured my diet and within a month, my fatigue was markedly reduced, my mental clarity was clearly improving. In three months, I get up and I'm walking with a cane.

You got out of your wheelchair.

I'm out of my wheelchair, walking around with a cane. And in nine months, I'm on my bike and I pedal around the block for the first time in six years. And in 12 months, I do a 20-mile bike ride with my family.

Unbelievable. So it was a year.

A year.

Now, take us a little bit slower through what you did, 'cause you ate the paleo diet, then you did the drugs, but then you went to this neuroprotection Module from IFM and you learn from there what you could do to optimize your systems.

So I optimize my system. I also add in there, I added in electrical stimulation of my muscles. That was a technique that athletes have been doing for decades to speed the recovery from athletic injuries. So my physical therapist had agreed to let me add that. So I was doing that. I had gone back to adding meditation at night. So I added that back. And then I had this very intensive nutrition. So I had ramped up my vegetables to like nine cups of vegetables a day.

Which is 18 servings.

18 servings.

Not the five to nine.

Yeah, 18 servings. And so a small amount of meat, lots and lots of vegetables.

And very specific groups of vegetables.

Very specific groups.

Very specific medicinal effects that you talked about.

Exactly. It's all designed very intentionally around my mitochondria, around detox, around myelin production, around brain structures, neurotransmitters, based on science in a very methodical way. And I did all this, Marc, not to get better, because I had completely accepted what my neurologist, primary care docs had told me for years. It's a one-way street. It's a one-way street. Functions once lost with progressive MS are permanently gone. So I was doing all this so I could have the limited function that I had a little bit longer.

Get worse.

And not get worse. So I was thrilled to do all of that to not get worse. And then the other thing that's really interesting, Marcus, as I was getting remarkably better, As part of having a progressive neurodegenerative disease, you get to a point where you take every day as it comes, one day at a time, no expectations about what it means. So I'm remarkably better. I'm thinking more clearly. My pain is gone, which is a huge deal for me.

Pain is a big symptom in MS.

Pain is a huge symptom. It was a huge problem for me as well. So my pain is gone. I'm walking, I'm thinking. I'm biking. Actually, it wasn't until I biked that I realized, you know, I think I'm getting better. Because until then, I was just taking it one day at a time. Yeah.

Amazing.

You know, the day that I biked, it was on Mother's Day, you know, and I'm crying, my wife's crying, my kids are crying. And that's when I understood that who knew what the future would hold. That clearly neurology has it wrong. Clearly neurology has it wrong. And who knew how much recovery might be possible?

It's a very hopeful story and I think I'd love to know what exactly you're eating. People are probably listening to what are the 19 or 18 servings of vegetables you ate and what groups were they and what do they do?

Okay. First, and I think the most powerful one is all these greens. So I was having tons and tons of green leafy vegetables. So I was probably having six to, actually six to nine cups measured raw.

Collards, kale.

Collards, kale, a little bit of spinach. I really craved kale in a huge way. But I have collards, I would have, Swiss chard, had lots and lots of salads, would have some cooked greens. I was very big into cabbage family vegetables. So cabbage, broccoli, turnips, rutabagas, lots of it raw, some cooked, but it's also very, very big into raw. Garlics, lots of garlic, shallots, onions.

'Cause they have sulfur, they believe.

Sulfur, sulfur, Boosts the detox, boosts your ability to make gamma-aminobutyric acid, intracellular glutathione, and then very much into mushrooms. Mushrooms stimulate and prime adaptive and innate immune cells. They also stimulate your ability to make nerve growth factors.

Yeah, medicinal mushrooms are powerful.

Very powerful.

They have all kinds of amazing ingredients in other foods.

And garlic and mushrooms are medicinal foods across many, many cultures across all the continents. So these are medicinal foods with a lot of ancient cultural wisdom.

So greens, brassicas, garlic and onions.

And then color. And then color. So the polyphenols are a marker for color, and the polyphenols, again, and study after study, the more color you have, the lower the rates of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer. So you want color. And furthermore, blue, purple, black, a lot of studies showing you can have measurable improvement in cognition in as little as 16 weeks. Using just a cup of blueberries as in placebo double-blind crossover trials. That's hardly any time at all.

No, that's amazing. Not Skittles though.

Not Skittles.

Those are colorful.

Those are the wrong kind of color, my friend. So again, three cups of deeply pigmented stuff. And then fats, you know, fats have a critical role all of our cells are wrapped in fat. They're fat wrappers, the cell membranes. And our brain is 60 to 70% fat.

So your nerve coverings, which you get destroyed in MS, are also fat.

Fat. And they need arachidonic acid, they need eicosapentaenoic acid, they need docosahexaenoic acid, they need omega-6 and omega-3 fats. And so, I needed to have more fat in the diet.

Did you use saturated fat?

No, actually I did. So I used lots of fat. So we'd have flax oil, hemp oil in the dressings that I'd use. And then we would cook in saturated fat. I'd use coconut oil, I'd use bacon fat, duck fat. My vets, because I, you know, for years I worked at the vet, so I'd, We teach the vets, my favorite recipe was bacon and greens. You cook up some bacon, take the bacon out, leave the bacon fat, dump in the greens, stir 'em around till they're wilted, add the bacon back. If you didn't like it, just double the bacon the next time you make it. And my vets would go like, oh my God, you mean I can eat bacon? That actually tastes, you know, sounds like it would taste wonderful. And we have lots of avocados as well, get into nuts and seeds. And so what is remarkable was the speed at which I could see the difference in 30 days. So it was-- well, think about it.

You took all these drugs, they didn't work. But when you use food as a drug, as medicine, it actually worked faster and better.

Very fast. And that's exactly what I saw in clinic. I was able to teach my residents in clinic as well. that food is the most powerful medicine. And it works amazingly well. It's better and cheaper than most drugs.

And it's a-- Yes, it's an amazing substance. And when people understand it's not just calories, as we learn in functional medicine, it's information. And they can go, wait a minute, I can upgrade my biology by putting better information in.

Into your body, absolutely.

Absolutely. So besides the food, that's powerful, and the stimulation, and the meditation, you also probably did other things. Were there diagnostic tests that you did on yourself, but you discovered anything that was off for out of balance?

So into my recovery, so two years into my recovery, I thought, well, I'm sure toxic load was a big issue in all of this. So keep in mind, I've been walking around, hiking now, I've been biking, very little pain. So I'm in great shape. And I finally did a, 24-hour heavy metals challenge test. And I was diffusely toxic in everything.

Yeah.

Everything.

All your metals were high.

All my metals were high. I think there were only four that were not high. I was even high in uranium, thorium, thallium.

Thallium is, you know, kale is now in California, the ground has thallium in it.

So we have so poisoned our soils that with many of our fertilizers are relatively toxic. So yes, unfortunately, many of our foods are toxic. And now the other thing that I should tell you, I repeated all of that four years later and everything is gone.

Amazing.

So who knows, like how incredibly toxic I was in the very beginning. In the very beginning.

How did you get rid of them all?

Well, when I designed my protocol, I designed it around Bucill, the detox enzyme. So that's why I stressed the greens, the sulfur, the color. I added in there some anacystin and some algae as well.

And binders to get the metals out.

As well. And then the other thing, six months into my recovery, I was able to overcome my heat intolerance. And so I got a sauna and I've been saunaing ever since.

Amazing. So it's basically food, supplements, electrolytes.

And very basic supplements. B vitamins, N-acetyl cysteine, and algae. That's it.

That's it. No vitamin D?

Well, yes, there's vitamin D there, of course.

Because there's evidence around vitamin D. Yeah.

Plenty of vitamin D. And I also use sunlight.

Sunlight.

You know, sunlight is more effective than vitamin D.

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Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. I had one patient in particular who I saw, who came in, it was a great story. She came in and she was having MS as her diagnosis. She also had- Autoimmune disease. Autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis, and she also had infertility. And, I did a complete workup on her. She had dysbiosis, had bacterial and yeast overgrowth, also had sensitivity to gluten, and had also some, not a heavy, not a big level, but some level of mercury in the body. so I worked on a diet, worked on both prebiotics and probiotics to clean up the gut, got her completely off of gluten, and lo and behold, guess what? Her multiple sclerosis went away. Amazing. Disappeared. All right.

Not to say that.

And you got her metals out, too.

Yeah.

Not to say that all cases of multiple sclerosis are due to that, but there are many pathways to multiple sclerosis, just that there are many pathways to Alzheimer's disease or any disease. Aromatic disease. Exactly, because the body will manifest it in only certain inflammatory pathways. So ultimately, she got off of her medications, her MS to this day is in complete remission. She has no symptoms on no meds, and as a side effect, she got pregnant. Wow, that's a good side effect.

Yeah, and she was happy.

So that's an amazing story.

And I think, you know, for people who are listening, functional medicine is a new way of thinking about disease. It's not based on the label. MS, it's based on the cause. And you can have one disease that has many causes, like MS, which can be caused by heavy metals, by Lyme disease, by Epstein-Barr, by the gut microbiome, by gluten, you know, like B12 deficiency, right? You can have so many things that are driving this same syndrome. And the personalization of medicine is what functional medicine is all about. And that's really what's different here about how we practice medicine at the Ultra Wellness Center, because we're looking at each person as an individual, we're creating personalized medicine and personalized health, which is a radically new way of thinking. And we just lump everybody with the same symptoms into the same categories, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cause. And I always say, just because you know the name of your disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you. Right? And that's what we do through very detailed histories here, through very advanced diagnostic.

Testing to look at some of these things. Oh, absolutely. And I think the enjoyable thing that I'm sure that you experience yourself is that every patient is unique. I've never treated two patients the same way from a functional approach.

No.

Completely different, even in the same family. Everyone is, and that's actually the fun part about it is the, I call it, the person comes in with their own genetic uniqueness, their own personality, makeup, their own story, all of these things that you can paint the picture of where were they when they got sick, where are they now and what are the things that we can remove? It's sort of like being Dr. House, right?

It's like medical detective.

Yeah, like medical detective, exactly. And I think one of the most important things that I always tell people who are training in medicine is to listen to the patient.

Yeah, they'll tell you what's wrong. And when and what?

Exactly, and sometimes I just have to sort of bite my mouth because you want to always interrupt patients and say, well, what about this and what about that? I just sort of let patients talk more and I just sort of listen and then I'll ask the questions later. And when you really do that and let the patients tell their story in their own way, in their own terms and get that out, you really find out all the little details and you can play house and play detective to try to, you know, piece the pieces of the puzzle together.

Yeah, you know, we, in regular medicine, we are trained to create an exclusive history. In other words, someone comes in with a symptom, Let's say they have heartburn or reflux or chest pain. We don't want to know anything else about them except about that. We want all the details about that. We don't know if they have a rash, are their fingernails cracked, do they have eczema, is their butt itch? Don't talk to me about any of that because that's not relevant. And in functional medicine, all of it's relevant because it's a clue that could give you a clue to what's actually happening for that patient. And that's what's so beautiful about this process. You know, I think I used to work in the emergency room. I think you did, too. It's boring. It's boring because someone comes in and he's like, okay, it's the heart attack treatment. It's the asthma treatment. It's a kidney stone. It's a protocol. It's like you just look at the nurse, you go, heart attack. Okay. They don't, they know what the orders are. They know what to do. You just barely write it out. And it's like rote and boring.

It's a formula, like a recipe. In functional medicine, there is no recipe. There's actually having to think every time you see a patient. Right, right. And, you know, being trained in traditional medicine and also in a functional medicine approach. There's definitely, you know, if you're having a heart attack, you know, I want a thrombolytic. Absolutely. I want you to blow out your knee. You need a knee surgery. Right. I want you to follow the protocol that has been shown to work. But for chronic conditions, you know, acute care medicine, which is basically the scalpel or the prescription pad, are probably, probably some of the more toxic things that you can have. A lot of what I see in, in, in my patients here is iatrogenic imperfecta. All right, which basically- Translate that, doctor. Translate that, which basically means the doctor did it, right? So the patient comes in and they're on a whole laundry list of medications and these are interacting, you know, they're on proton pump inhibitors, they're causing acid blockers. Acid blockers. Yeah, the acid blockers, they're causing calcium deficiency, mineral deficiency, B12 deficiency. So there's, you know, these drugs have.

Their risk benefit and the less drugs you use in medicine, the better off the patient is. yeah, it's hard because that's what we know how to do. It's what we're trained to do. It's like we don't know how to treat people with food as medicine. We don't know how to restore a gut from a messed up gut to a healthy gut.

And that's really what we do in functional medicine.

Yeah.

And I also, the other important thing that it's important for Physicians out there who are new to functional medicine, also for patients, is to realize these things don't happen overnight. It can take time. But usually sometimes you can see a difference in, in, you know, days to weeks.

Sometimes it could takes months and sometimes it takes years. It depends. Depends on what's going on.

So true.

I mean, I, sometimes it's like, it's almost miraculous. And you go, like, it's hard to believe. I remember when I first started practicing, I would, like, go, okay, do these things. Take this, eat this. And then they'd call back a few weeks later, or, you know, a month later, I'm like, how you doing? Well, I'm all better. I'm like, what? You're better from that? Because it was so, it was such a contradiction to everything I learned. But then I started to trust it, and I started to expect it. And I just remember this one patient. She had psoriatic arthritis, which is a horrible condition where you're, you've got psoriasis, but your joints are being deformed, and destroyed. You're in pain all the time. But she had a bunch of other stuff, which, quote, was unrelated. She had depression, she had insomnia, she was overweight, she had terrible reflux and heartburn, and she was having bloating and SIBO and irritable bowel. And I'm like, okay, well, let's see. She's inflamed. Everything that she's got is inflamed. The weight is inflamed. Depression's an inflammation in the brain. Her gut symptoms are about inflammation. The gut, you know, everything is related to inflammation. So why don't we sort just start simple and clear out things that are causing potential inflammation. So we got rid of gluten and dairy in your diet and sugar and starch and all processed food. We got her gut cleaned up. I gave her an antibiotic and antifungal and a little gut program and a couple of nutrients to help her fight some inflammation that she was suffering from. And six weeks later, she came back. Her psoriasis was gone, her arthritis was gone, her reflux and irritable bowel was gone, her depression was gone. She lost 20 pounds. I'm like, and she got off all her medications, even the one that was costing 50 grand a year to suppress her immune system from the psoriasis. And it seems like a miracle, but it really isn't when you follow this methodology. And that's what we've been doing here for decades, practicing functional medicine up in.

The Berkshire, in the middle of nowhere. It's pretty amazing. Well, it's really interesting because most of the patients who have psoriasis are going to see a dermatologist. And most dermatologists do not have a clue about the gut microbiome, nor they test it or thinking about it. And then if they get psoriatic arthritis, which is arthritis in addition to the skin condition, because I always tell patients is the skin is contiguous with the gut. So if I draw a line on the skin and I keep drawing a line and go down my tongue and I go into my esophagus, down to my stomach, into my intestine, I'm still on the same surface. Yeah. So oftentimes, and you know this, Mark, is that's true. I never thought of that. Yeah, it's.

Yeah.

That's kind of a cool thought. That's how I explain to patients. So the skin is contiguous with the gut.

It's an ectodermal tissue. And when their skin issues think gut. It's really a tube. It's outside your body. Here's your gut. It's true. I mean, when I have a patient with psoriasis, eczema, acne, rosacea, I treat their gut. And I don't put stuff all over their face or on their body to suppress the inflammation. I get rid of that. And it's like really an American miracle.

It is.

Dermatology is not something that I'm an expert in, although I was trained as a family doctor in dermatology. But I feel like we get the most amazing results just for something as simple as fixing the gut and changing the diet.

Absolutely, yeah, exactly. The body's this interconnected, complex, self-healing organism. I mean, that's the big thing is I often ask patients, I mean, do you think you're gonna get better? And if I have a patient who thinks they're gonna get better, then together we're gonna get better. But if I have a patient who doesn't think they're going to get better, then I try to get them to change their mindset. Because somebody, even though somebody comes to.

Me, they really almost believe I'm not.

Going to get better.

Well, that's what they've been taught. Exactly.

You have to live with this.

Exactly.

We have to manage your disease.

Right.

And I don't want to manage it. I want to get rid of it. And the body's ability to self-heal is amazing, as you know, Izumi, it's really amazing. There's an intelligence in the body that we, you know, as much as we know about the body, there's a lot more that we don't know. and the more I practice medicine, I think the more humble I become because I realize how little I know. It's how complex it is. It's really, really complex. But there's so much that we can do for patients that they've gone to the Mayo Clinic, they've gone to Mass General, they've gone to X, Y, and Z everywhere else. And as you say, the resort medicine, we come here for last resort.

I mean, I literally just walked from my office to here after seeing a patient who went to the Mayo Clinic who had chronic dizziness, chronic constipation, fatigue, insomnia, all these different symptoms that they couldn't find, quote, anything wrong with him. And I'm like, well, I know what's wrong with you. You've got this, this and this and this based on looking at it through.

The functional medicine lens.

Yeah.

Well, and the other thing is, is, you know, I think it was a Sid Baker, I think, who made the analogy. It was in, or maybe it was Jeff Blan, is that, you know, if you have a dime and you, it's a, it's on, and you're on a dark street and you lose your dime over there and the street lights over here. and you're looking under the street light, which is where you're testing. So most of the testing is basically looking where the dime isn't.

Yeah.

All right. So the type of testing that we do here, which is nutritional metabolic toxic genomic testing, is spreading out the searchlight.

To find that dime. Absolutely. That's such a key point because, you know, you go to the doctor and they say, well, we've tested everything and all your results are normal. And the implication is it's all in your head. But I would say I don't agree with that because either two things are true. One, the patient's crazy or the doctor's missing something and I'm gonna bet on the doctor's missing something. Because when we start to look, we find all sorts of stuff in places that nobody's looked before because they're looking under the street lamp instead of actually.

Where the problem really is.

Exactly. That's exactly right. Why do we develop an autoimmune process? Why does my innate immune system get overly activated? Why do I begin to develop autoantibodies against specific structures in my body. And so there's only a few basic reasons why that's going to happen. If I don't, if I have an autoimmune disease and I take disease modifying drugs, but I don't address the root causes that led to the autoimmune process, people will develop another autoimmune diagnosis. Right. about every five to 10 years. And so, and I certainly see that, you know, in my tribe, people come in, they see me, and they've had several autoimmune diagnoses. And as we work with them, they, they get better control of all of their conditions. So, so because the, the walls protocol, well, I, I designed it, obviously, for myself, and it's focused a lot on the brain, it addresses the root causes of why these autoimmune processes are developing. So it helps psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, allergies, asthma, Myasthenia Gravis, MS. Frankly, people reach out to me. tell me that they have, you know, a disease that I have to look up because I've never heard of it. And their physicians had given up hope and they had stumbled on my work, implemented my work, and are steadily improving.

Yeah.

And I've also had people with genetic disorders, muscular dystrophy, for example.

Yeah. Tell us about that.

Who, you know, found my work. It actually has been coming to my seminar since the very first one. And he talks about, yep, he still has muscular dystrophy. but he's far more functional since implementing the Wahls Protocol, and he's not getting worse.

I think it's important to understand from people that, you know, that people can get better from all sorts of things when they change their diet. And, you know, I've seen this across the spectrum in my practice. So what you're speaking to is such an important fundamental principle.

People with cystic fibrosis, people with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease.

Yeah.

It makes a lot of sense that if you have the standard American diet, standard American lifestyle, you're going to accelerate the damage from those genetic diseases. If we help you address diet and lifestyle, gentle hormesis, you will have the best quality of life and best function given your genetic circumstances.

I think that's right. I mean, Terry, I think we think of Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy, these intractable progressive conditions which are autosomal dominant inherited conditions that you can't really modify or change. If you have a, you know, Gene that affects folate metabolism or vitamin D metabolism, you can modify. These are called mild, you know, single nuclear type polymorphisms. They're just slight variations in our genes. They're not mutations. These are mutations, and they profoundly change your biology. But what I found again, like you, just observation in my practices, I've had many patients like this. So I don't know. Let's see if we can help you. Let's. do this. Let's look and see under the hood what's going on. What's often amazing is they have the worst metabolic health you can imagine. Their metabolic and biochemical pathways are all messed up and haywire that there are certain sort of, you know, functional things that go wrong that you can modify through understanding the biology of the disease. And whether it's a mass, whether it's, or whether, I mean, sorry, whether it's a muscular dystrophy, whether there's, you know, mitochondrial issues, or whether there's, you know, whether there's, you know, Down syndrome, whether it's huge insulin resistance and inflammatory pathways and methylation problems, you can really impact them by changing their diet, by certain types of supplementation. And it was striking to me to see that, you know, where people can have really dramatically improved quality of life. You're not curing Down syndrome or muscular.

Dystrophy, but you are modifying the course of the disease and you're actually improving their overall health and quality of life. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I spent a lot of time trying to tell people the goal is to have the best function that we can for you. And the way to do that is nutrition, sleep, stress management, and consistent gentle hormesis.

Absolutely. Absolutely. For people don't understand autoimmunity, as a single entity like MS or colitis or Crohn's or Hashimoto's, it's common, but It doesn't add up to massive numbers when we look at it all together. So when you look at all autoimmune diseases together, it's 80 million people, which is more than people almost that have cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined. Okay, there's a lot of people. And the question for you today, Terry, to start with is, how has your thinking changed since we last talked? How has your regimen changed? Do you incorporate the same principles? Are you adding new things? What's different about it? your approach now.

So we're adding new things. And I also have learned just how critical it is to deal with the mental, emotional, spiritual, so that people are willing to do the work. Because, you know, creating new habits, creating new daily practices, yeah, it takes effort. And for people to go on this journey with me, I need to spend more time on that mental, emotional, spiritual side. So I spend more time there. And then, yes, we have created this really wonderful, robust process, process mark, the walls behavior change model that actually has 15-16 steps to help people make these changes step by achievable step. And we personalize the diet and lifestyle recommendations to match what they're willing and ready to do.

That's amazing. And, Terri, what have you noticed about your own health? You know, working with us over the last, I don't know how many years it is now, over a decade, right?

Yeah.

What have you learned? What has changed? What are things have you changed in your own routine?

Well, you know, I spend a lot more time thinking about hormesis, so that mild to moderate stress. And I do it in a wide variety of ways. I do temperature hormesis.

So talk about hormesis. What is that?

So hormesis is a time where you have a mild to moderate stress on your physiology covered by, followed by sufficient time for your physiology to repair, get back to homeostasis, and rebuild itself. So this is why strength training is so powerful. This is why high intensity interval training can be powerful. but you have to allow enough time to fully recover. It's also why temperature training is so powerful. So I take saunas probably six to seven days a week and I'll take them up to, and now this will shock your listeners, I could take a sauna up to 125 degrees comfortably, 140 degrees comfortably, even 160. But then of course I follow that with a cold shower. and I do cold showers in for five minutes. And in the evenings, I'll do an ice bath.

Ah, sounds fun.

Yeah.

So, you know, it's a relaxing way.

To go to bed. Just jump in an ice bath.

You know, what's interesting, Mark, is you do that ice bath. Yeah, it is the fastest way to fall asleep. I have the deepest sleep on the days that I do an ice bath.

Really? And you don't follow it with like a warm thing and before you go to bed, you get in bed freezing.

I get in bed freezing. But you know, my wife does complain about the cold legs.

Well, you're saying is kind of heresy in some ways because we always learn with multiple sclerosis that you never put people in a sauna, you avoid the heat. It's really bad for them, right?

Well, that it's better to fall asleep.

With a hot bath.

So you need to very gradually increase your temperature stress. so many people with serious autoimmune diseases conditions have difficulty with autonomic dysfunction and they'll have a lot of difficulty with temperature hormesis. So they'll have to come at this very, very slowly. And as they heal and recover, lower their inflammation and lower the inflammation in their brain, they'll find that they can increase their temperature hormesis. And so we start with a room temperature bath and a slightly cooler bath or slightly warmer bath and gradually expand the temperature with which they can tolerate. But absolutely, you can't put people immediately into a cold shower or an ice bath or immediately into a sauna if they have a neuroimmune condition. They will not tolerate it. yeah.

But after, over time, they can. You see, for you now, it's help. Yeah. I think it's interesting. You know, we talk about hormesis. It's, it's not a concept that most doctors know about, most people know about. I certainly hadn't heard about it until the last decade or so. And, and essentially what you're talking about is a, is a stress to the body. It's sort of like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, which is how intermittent fasting works or prolonged fasting or exercise. When you exercise, you're creating a stress to the body. Those actually help sort of cause a trauma or a stress, which then creates a healing response in the body.

And that's what you're as long as long as you have sufficient time to fully recover, you know, and for years when I was an athlete, you know, because I did long distance running, I did martial arts. I did not spend enough time in recovery. So and many athletes do this. We train so hard, we don't spend sufficient time in recovery. And actually we probably would have made faster gains if we would pay a lot more attention to recovery as well.

What does recovery look like?

So in my patients, we talk a lot about this, that I want them to have their stress of their exercise or their temperature stress, but then they have to have a sufficient duration of the recovery before they can go back to that stress again. So many of my patients, you know, they're severely disabled. So for them, a two-minute exercise may be all they can do and still function for the rest of the day. And so We discussed, you do the gentle exercise and can you function normally later in the day? How long does it take for you to recover? And then gradually increase their exercise.

Interesting. Now, Terry, you know, we talk a lot about the food is medicine. We're going to get into that a little bit more, but you sort of touched on it a little bit about stress and how that played a role particularly in your case of getting MS. Can you talk more about that and the stress of medical school? and what happened to you? Well, you know, my.

My trigeminal neuralgia began during medical school. And yet, looking back, you know, I grew up on a farm, physically very active, lots of vitamin D, probably really a very good diet. Went into medical school, became a vegetarian, went very low fat, was no longer outside. So my vitamin D levels plummeted. I was certainly not taking supplements. I was not sleeping at night very much. We certainly had enormous amounts of stress in going through those clinical rotations. It was during my third year of medical school that I started getting my facial pains, the zingers, as I call them. And I would have them for the next 20 years. And they were gradually getting worse. and, you know, that was during my clinical practice. I was very ambitious. I I was in a physician leadership again, a high stress job. My zingers were getting worse, and then I developed motor symptoms and had weakness in my left legs.

Wow. And the stress.

Clearly, stress was. Was. Was always there and was a big driver. that was happening just before the onset of my zingers. And then, you know, I had a transient episode of dim vision in my left eye. Again, that was associated with stress. And I had some severe work stress just before the onset of my left leg weakness.

Ah, and so you feel like how have you dealt with stress in a different way and how has that helped you with your MS?

It's interesting. During college, I learned how to do transcendental meditation. and during medical school, I quit that. And, you know, when I was diagnosed with MS, even though I knew that stress was a big factor, I did not go back to meditation. Oh, it was not until, you know, as in the wheelchair, I went back to reading the basic science. I was working on my diet again, discovered functional medicine. And then it's like, you know, I got to do everything. and that's when I went back to meditation. I thoughtfully redesigned my paleo diet. I discovered electrical stimulation. And I think it was the combination of doing all of that. And so now my routine, Marc, is I get up in the morning, I do my meditations, then I'll do my exercise. then I do my sauna, then I do my cold shower. In that routine.

In the morning. How long does that take you?

It takes me about two hours to do all that. And I learned to put that in my schedule. And then in the evening, most evenings, I will again do a round of meditation and a ice bath.

Oh, really? Wow. Yeah.

And sometimes I.

So you don't do a hot bath first? You just do the ice bath alone?

I do an ice bath.

And that's Brave. I like to do a sauna first. Yeah.

And sometimes saunas, they're really very nice. But, you know, the reason I. I keep going back to the ice bath is the quality of my sleep is. Is better.

Oh, really?

Wow. I'm gonna try that. So you just. You just get in a cold bath and how long you stay there.

Well, I. I set my timer and I read for 20 minutes.

20 minutes, but not like ice. Ice bath.

So when you first start doing this, Mark, I just do a cool bath. And then, after you've done that for a few days, just run only cold water. Do a cold bath. And then. So now you're comfortable with the cold bath. Then you have a bucket of ice. So you're in your bathtub with the cold bath. You dump your ice in. and then I'll freeze solid, you know, liter bottles of ice. So I have, because that keeps the ice longer when it's solid.

So do you use the Wim Hof breathing method? How do you get ready for going to the ice?

Yeah, I'll do a cycle of the deep breathing and I just get in it. After you do it for a while, it's really very comfortable. I step in, I let my feet get used to it, then I settle down into the bath and, you know, grab my book and I start reading.

Wow. Okay, then I'm gonna try that. Maybe I'm gonna try. I like the ice bath after the sauna. And 20 minutes is a long time. It's a long time. Well, you get.

You get comfortable really quite quickly. And, you know, I. I quit, but, you know, the quality of my sleep is so much. better when I do the cold bath, the ice bath. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us.

A rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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