Why Fixing The Gut Is The Key To Healing Chronic Disease with Dr. Todd LePine

Coming up on this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Most of your immune system is in your gut. Yeah. So when you disrupt that ecosystem, that rainforest inside of you, you are disrupting the immune system.

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That's thrivemarket.com/heiman. I think you're going to love them as much as I do. I'm proud to have them as a sponsor and be an investor in their company. All right, let's get back to the episode. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy with an F. F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. and if you've struggled with any chronic illness, this is the conversation you need to listen to because it's with one of the leading experts in the world on how to deal with chronic disease, which is my colleague here at the Ultra Wellness Center, Dr. Todd LePine. Now, Todd and I go way back. In fact, Todd knew about functional medicine before I even heard about it way back at Canyon Ranch in the 1990s. That's right, 1990s. We are old, but we look young. And he was way ahead of the curve. And he still is. He's still really one of the most brilliant minds in functional medicine. He teaches everywhere. He's certified by the Institute for Functional Medicine in functional medicine, obviously. He worked with me at Canyon Ranch for 10 years, and now he's worked here for a decade at the Ultra Wellness Center. And collectively, we have literally probably five decades worth of experience in functional medicine between the two of us. Seeing so many thousands of patients who struggled for so long with so many issues, when they finally get here, they find there's a new way of thinking about disease and it gives them an opportunity to actually get healthy again. And we're just so grateful to be able to have you here at the Ultra Wellness Center and you will do the work we do. You really help work on some of the most leading edge concepts in medicine around detoxification, systemic inflammation, GI health, neurobiology of mood and cognitive disorders. He's given lectures all around the world at age management conferences at American College for the Advancement of Medicine. He's taught at the University of Miami Integrated Medicine Conference at Cripalo. And he's on the Scientific Advisory Board of Designs for Health and consults with Diagnostic Solutions Lab. And he's very active. He skis, he kayaks, he hikes, he camps, he golfs. He loves the Berkshires. And yeah, he's just been an extraordinary.

Addition to our center.

So welcome, Dr. Todd Lapeen.

Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Mark. That was really nice.

Okay, so you start off your career working as a resident at a VA hospital.

Yes.

And best.

Best. Best learning experience ever. Yeah.

Pretty much. You see everything. See everything. And you get to do everything.

Exactly. You've been there, you know, and I have.

Well, I have. And I. And I. You had this patient who has. I had a problem that gives a lot of insight into functional medicine, which is called hepatic encephalopathy, which in English means that when your liver fails, you can't detoxify and all your normal metabolic toxins makes you delirious and can even put you in a coma and gives you all these brain symptoms. So what happened when you treated him with the typical treatment? And tell us what that is because it's kind of an unusual treatment for a brain problem.

Right, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, so the story is I was a resident and I was, you know, wet behind the ears and I had a patient at the VA and a lot of patients at the VA, there were some that had alcohol and tobacco abuse and he had liver failure and he came in in a coma with hepatic encephalopathy.

By the way, just to decide there, it used to be the most common source of liver failure was alcohol. Now it's sugar. Which is a big reason for liver transplants. Keep going, sorry, I had to interrupt you now.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so he comes in completely in a coma. I mean, he could stick a pin in him and he wouldn't move. And so we worked him up and I had to sort of learn about hepatic encephalopathy because I didn't really know what it was. And so we treated him and I found out that it was related to his liver not being able to detoxify and he had also had a high protein meal intake and the protein gets digested by the gut bacteria. And all the blood from the liver goes, or all the blood from the gut has to get filtered through the liver before it goes into systemic circulation. So what we did with him is we basically treated him with a nothing by mouth. We gave him antibiotics. I believe it was neomycin. You stopped feeding the bacteria.

Yeah, we just, yeah, we just, exactly.

So we just, we clean, we basically, we cleaned out the food for the bad bacteria in the gut. we sort of gave his gut a rest, gave him antibiotics and neomycin intravenously, also gave him laxatives, specifically lactulose at the time. I don't know if you've heard.

Yeah, lactulose and neomycin orally, though.

Don't you give the neomycin orally? We actually, I'm trying, you know, it might have been or it might have been orally. It might be actually, it might have been orally. You're right. It could very well have been orally. So we gave him lactulose and we also actually believe or not, gave him probiotics. And within 24 hours, this guy who was in a complete coma completely woke up just like, you know, the proverbial Lazarus. And it was like, It was amazing to me. So I've been looking at it and I'm saying, that'll wake you up. Exactly. That'll wake you up. And I said, you know, this guy can't, you know, woke up from the dead. And I was like, it actually left an indelible impression on my experience as a physician saying, there is a huge connection between the gut and the brain. And then that has led me on the quest that I've gone on for all these years and seeing the connection how our internal ecosystem, the microbiome, and the food that we eat and the food that we feed the bugs affects our health in good ways or bad ways.

Yeah, it's so true. And I remember learning about that disease and I was like, how come doctors don't connect the dots with the gut and everything else that goes wrong in the body?

Right.

Because the treatment for this coma that's caused by liver failure is essentially giving antibiotics that aren't absorbed. You kill all the bugs in the gut that are producing these toxins that make them crazy or make them in a coma. And then you give them a lot of laxatives to make them poop everything out. And that's just kind of a miracle happens, right? It was a miracle.

Wake them from the dead. Wake them from the dead, exactly.

And that led you to kind of understand the interconnectedness of everything.

Right. And then, you know, when we see patients all the time, a lot of patients come into us and say, Doc, I've got brain fog. That is low grade, you know, hypothyroidism. But it's the same thing. Yeah, you're a zombie. I call it zombie, you're living dead, you're walking around but you're not really there. Your brain is being affected by some of these chemicals and there's a lot of different chemicals that are produced by gut bacteria. Some of them are putrescine and cadaverine. You know what cadaverine is? You don't want a whole lot of.

Cadaverine unless you're a cadaver. Right, right. Those sound like terrible things, putrescine and.

Cadaverine, those are the toxins that get released from bad digestion, right? Yeah, and that, well even one of the compounds that we measure now in the office here is TMAO, primethylamine oxide. It's the same type of bacterial byproduct of metabolism of certain food products. So certain bacteria will eat certain foods and produce these compounds which have psychoactive properties or anti or actually inflammatory properties. 'Cause TMAO is one of the risk factors for heart disease.

So one of the central ideas of functional medicine is you start with the gut. It's almost what you start with with anybody who's got anything, which is kind of a weird thing 'cause like how can you treat everything with one thing? It actually is a foundation of our health. And when our microbiome is out of balance, it leads to a whole host of problems, right?

Absolutely, yeah. And the big thing that, you know, I don't treat children with autism, but the biggest thing that I think that is affecting this country is the microbiome that we're not inheriting from our mothers. Because what happens so often now is that when mothers go into the hospital, they're getting antibiotics beforehand. Half of them, 40%, 50% are getting C-sections. So we are destroying our- Then we don't breastfeed. Don't breastfeed, exactly. Then we give kids antibiotics. They give antibiotics and vaccinations on day one, you know, for hepatitis B. And this microbiome that we have literally inherited from generation to generation, 'cause it's something that's really passed down from the mothers to the daughters, to the granddaughters, is being lost. And the loss specifically of bifidobacterium infantis, it's actually been in, I think it was in the New York Times that it was talking about this loss of this one of many beneficial bacteria that we are losing in as part of the human species. And it's affecting our whole health. So let's back up a little bit.

And talk about this whole thing of the microbiome. 'Cause we started with functional medicine. There wasn't the word microbiome, but we still focused on normalizing the gut function. We talked about the 4R Program, which is a restoration program for the gut and how that can help so many different diseases. But what is the microbiome? Why is it important? What does it do? I mean, we thought it was just poop, and now it's like basically the holy grail for figuring everything out.

Yeah, so it's gold. It's gold, and actually, you know, in fact- Brown gold. Is it brown gold, right? So down in Boston, you know, so the microbiome is the sum total of all the organisms that we have and carry around inside of us, and that also can include viruses, it can also include fungi. And it's not necessarily, we call it good and bad, but it depends really upon the situation, 'cause like for example, all of us carry around C. Difficile bacteria. C. Difficile bacteria, when you take an antibiotic, it'll wipe out some of the good bacteria and then the bad guys, if you will, they'll sort of start.

To overgrow and then they can produce toxins.

It happened to me and I almost died from it. Exactly, it's very, yeah, exactly. And the treatment of choice for that is, you know, if you have a really bad case, the treatment of choice is a stool transplant, which is like an organ transplant. The interesting thing is that one of the companies that does this is Open Biome in Boston, which I think you're aware of, and they use freeze-dried stool. And that is one of the cures, literally, for a really messed up gut microbiome.

Because if you can get poop pills now.

Poop pills. Yeah, crap. Crapsels. Crapsels.

Crapsels. Right.

Crapsel.

I've never heard that. That's a good one. How many crapsels do you take? Right.

And so, and what it is is, and I always make analogies because that's how patients understand things. It's sort of like, you know, the ecosystem of the microbiome inside the body is like a rainforest. And at some point, some people's ecosystems are so disturbed and so messed up that it's like napalm has hit your rainforest. It's like a corn monocrop. Yeah, and so what you need to do is you need to repopulate the microbiome. Yeah, right. We're gonna get a little puns here. Yeah, you need to repopulate the microbiome. and you can't do that just with probiotics, although we use probiotics and we use prebiotics and we use those together, we call them synbiotics. And those are oftentimes very helpful, but for the really sick people who have things like refractory C. Diff stool transplant is the number one treatment.

Yeah, interesting. So you've got this whole ecosystem bacteria. It's been disturbed by all these reasons you talked about C-sections, antibiotic use, lack of breastfeeding and so on. and our diet also plays a huge role in the growth of good or bad bacteria. So you can feed it certain things and it makes it worse and some other things and it makes it better. So talk about that.

Yeah, so I always tell patients that when you're eating food, you wanna be choosing your food not just for you, what you like, the things that are pleasurable for you, but you also wanna be feeding the good bacteria. And we talked earlier about the Akkermansia muciniphila. that's a specific bacteria that is in the body and that you wanna have on high levels. And when we do the testing, we can actually determine do you have high levels of it or do you have low levels or do you have no levels or very low levels. And there are certain foods which you can incorporate into your diet, things like pomegranate and maca and acacia fiber, cranberries and things like that. These are foods which are basically prebiotics. and when you incorporate them into your diet, it's like putting Miracle Grow on that garden. They start to flourish, they start to take over, and they help balance out the whole ecosystem.

Yeah, I think it's one of the biggest advances in our thinking about gut. We've done give probiotics and that'll fix it. But you're giving 50 billion is a lot, right? But you have 100 trillion bacteria. So it's like a drop in the ocean. Exactly. And one of the big insights I had was actually from an experience I had last year where I developed colitis. It's a long story, but I had been sick for mold and I've told that story and I had a recurrence of my gut because I had the C. diff and that was kind of really messed me up. And I checked my stool and I had really low levels of this Akkermansia, which has been linked to autoimmune disease, been linked to poor response to immunotherapy for cancer, it's been linked to cardiometabolic disease and diabetes. and I'm like, whoa, this is not good. So I started to research it and created this cocktail of cranberry, pomegranate, green tea, acacia fiber, some probiotics, other prebiotics, and I took it and it literally within three weeks, I went from full-blown colitis to completely normal, perfect. And it was sort of a wake-up call for me, which was, you can't just get probiotics. You've got to feed the whole inner garden. And what it likes is certain foods and it likes all the polyphenols.

Yes.

And the polyphenols. The colorful dark rainbow color of chemicals that are in plant foods. Certain plant foods have more of them.

Like the berries and so forth. Absolutely. Yeah. The polyphenols are goal. And to me, I think that's actually probably one of the things that plays a role with the French paradox is the polyphenols that are found in red wine. Yeah. I think that's, you know, definitely what you're doing is you're actually feeding the, you know, patients love me because the two things that I always prescribe to.

My patients is chocolate and red wine.

All right. And they're high. I say people like wine drinking, but I wouldn't give it as an extra thing. No. Right. Right. But I'm just, I'm just, I'm just razing, but the polyphenols are the miracle food prebiotics for the gut, absolutely.

So tell us a story about a patient who had a screwed up microbiome and what you did and how they got better.

I've had multiple patients, for example, I just had a patient, I followed up today, 18-year-old with fatty liver disease and sort of pre-diabetes picture, and lo and behold, I did the testing for him and his acromesomia was almost undetectable. Fatty liver, typically like you said, we used to see this in patients who were drinking alcohol. What we're now finding out is that fatty liver is the thing that is being driven by disruption of the gut microbiome. So what's happening is when you destroy the protective mucus lining of the gut, some of those bad bacteria get into the body, get into the circulation, they go into the liver and causes systemic inflammation, which in turn causes fatty liver. And, there was just, I don't know if you saw the recent paper about this, about what is termed non-alcoholic fatty liver is actually from alcohol produced by gut bacteria. So, some bacteria will actually produce alcohol which in turn poisons the liver.

It ferments, right?

It ferments.

Ferments, it's like you get this bloating food baby. That's actually your bacteria fermenting the food you're eating and certain foods are more fermentable like starches and sugars.

Exactly. Yeah.

We actually have seen cases of patients who literally had elevated blood alcohol levels.

Yeah, auto brewery syndrome.

From the bacteria in their gut.

Yeah.

And they literally got pulled over and.

Found, you know, they had, like, for drunk driving. Exactly. And it actually, the auto brewery syndrome is, and I've had a couple of patients with that, and they, they typically that's usually been attributed to yeast overgrowth, but there also are cases specifically with bacteria that can also produce alcohol.

I mean, you're basically, it's like a.

It'S a brewery in your body. Yeah.

In your body.

Yeah.

You don't need a Budweiser.

No. this buds for you.

So the, so what happened when you have this patient and you, you.

Yeah. So, so, I mean, you basically you work on doing dietary.

Did you get better when you fix this or you just.

Well, this was just, I just, I was just offhand because I just had this patient this morning and I, it was a very interesting case because the thing that really stood out is that his protective anchor means, he was quite low. He was also a, a vegan, which, you know, we can discuss, you know, what is the best diet? I don't believe that veganism is actually the best thing. I think we're omnivores. And, you know, I come from a family of dentists, so I always talk to my patients. See that? See that thing right there? That's a. That's a canine tooth. And a canine tooth is designed to chew meat and to chew fish. And we have specific enzymes in the body, which are pancreatic elastase and proteases, which are designed to digest protein. Yeah. So we are, you know, like Michael Pollan said it best, eat plants, eat food, real food, mostly plants, not too much. So a plant-based diet with healthy amounts of fish and lean meat on occasion is really probably the best type of diet. And I think some of my most difficult patients are the ones who are sort of strict vegans for whatever reason, ethical or spiritual or whatever religious can oftentimes get into really difficult situations because it's like a cat chasing their tail. They don't have the specific nutrients to patch up and, and heal the body.

Doesn't all that plant stuff help the microbiome?

It does. Absolutely. It's going to help the microbiome.

But he was, he was. Well, he had almost no Omega-3s. It was really nutritionally deficient.

Right. Unless people are supplementing, they get super nutrition. Well, exactly. You can have a person like, it was just in the, it was just in the news recently. It was a 22 year old, I.

Think it was over in England, who.

Was living on potato chips. white bread and french fries and went blind.

There's no vitamin A. Yeah, went blind.

So, you can be walking and talking and you can be severely malnourished because there's about 40 nutrients that your body needs on a regular basis. And, I like to also make the analogy to my patients is like your body is like a house that's being built and broken down 24/7. you need all those building materials to make that house. You may need carpeting, you need wood, you need glass, you need all these materials. And if those materials aren't there, then the structure may still be standing, but if you don't have glass, the wind comes in, the rain comes in, the snow comes in, and then you're going to have problems with your problem.

The problem with traditional medicine is they don't look for those building blocks. They don't test for them. And that's what's different here at the Ultra Wellness Center. We actually look for these things. We find them. When was the last time a doctor looked for acromegaly in someone with fatty liver? Probably never, right? Other than us here, some functional medicine doctors.

Or check their omega-3s or check their.

Vitamin D. Exactly, yeah, right. And so those kinds of diagnostics are available and help us really think differently about treating disease. I mean, most doctors understand hepatic encephalopathy, but most doctors who are treating fatty liver don't actually think about what's going.

On in the gut microbiome or how to treat it. They don't even know how to, fix it. Well, you know, the thing that one of my pet peeves, Mark, and I'm sure you've heard this, too, is that patients will go see the expert endocrinologist for their diabetes and the expert gastroenterologist, and they tell the patients to eat anything they want.

That is absolutely.

You mean food has something to do with our health?

It does. Oh, my God.

What a radical idea.

My favorite. My favorite was once I was at Canyon Ranch, I was playing basketball. at lunch because they used to have these basketball pickup games. And there was one of these people there was playing and he was a gastroenterologist. And I said to him, you know, you ever thought of like how, you know, food might impact what's happening in the gut? Because you're putting literally pounds of this stuff through that tube every day. You think it might have something to do with why people have digestive symptoms? He was like, gee, you know, I never thought of that. That seems so interesting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm like, Holy crap. You know, but yeah, I mean, your microbiome is dependent on what you feed it, how you grow your inner garden depends on what you're eating. And you can create a nasty garden with weeds and toxins and bad stuff and poisonous plants, or you can create a really flourishing, rich garden that actually takes care of you.

Yeah, absolutely. And then also the other thing that a lot of even physicians aren't even aware of is that most of your immune system is in your gut. So when you disrupt that ecosystem, that rainforest inside of you, you are disrupting the immune system. And we're talking about fecal transplants. There's a recent study that showed that children with autism who got stool transplants had a marked improvement up to two years out from just replacing the gut microbiome. I mean, that's pretty powerful. So there is no pharmacology.

Autism is like an encephalopathy. It's a metabolic.

To some degree, absolutely.

Hepatic encephalopathy.

Yeah, I mean, to me, that's sort of the canary in the coal mine. in our environment today, you know, that with, we have what, one in 68 kids having autism now, depending on where you are living in America and around the world, that is a big, big issue. And what we're finding out is there's more and more connection to the microbiome.

Yeah. I mean, so 60% of our immune system is in the gut. And essentially, there's a sewer that's on the other side of the lining of your gut, which is only one cell thick. And on the other side is your immune system. And there's a breakdown which can come from having C-sections antibiotics, acid blocking drugs, stress, poor diet, all that stuff damages the gut, creates a sleeky gut, gluten, dairy, all those things. Then you get this inflammation. So we treat a lot of people autoimmune disease here at the Ultra Juana Center. And, and often the place we start is the gut. So, tell us how that works and about some patients you might have had with autoimmune disease and how working on their gut helped them.

Yeah, so I mean, 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, you know, 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. Or any disease, exactly, 'cause the body will manifest it in only certain inflammatory pathways. But, and then, 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, B12 deficiency, 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 in 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? Absolutely. 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. Yeah. You know, 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? you know, like the 4R.

It's like being Dr. House, right?

It's like medical detective. Yeah, like medical detective, exactly. And, you know, I think, you know, 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. Absolutely. And when? And when? Exactly. And sometimes I just have to sort of bite my mouth because you want to always interrupt patients, say, oh, what about this? 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 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. 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 the kidney stone treatment. It's a protocol. It's like you just look at the nurse, you go, heart attack, okay. 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 being trained in traditional medicine and also in a functional medicine approach, there's definitely if you're having a heart attack, I want a thrombolytic.

Absolutely, I want that.

Now we'll blow out your knee, you need a knee surgery. I want you to follow the protocol that has been shown to work. But for chronic conditions, acute care medicine, which is basically the scalpel or the prescription pad, are probably some of the more toxic things that you can have. A lot of what I see in my patients here is Iatrogenica Imperfecta. All right, which basically means the doctor did it. 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 are causing acid blockers. Acid blockers. Yeah, the acid blockers, they're causing calcium deficiency, mineral deficiency, B12 deficiency. So there's, you know, there's these, these drugs have their, their, their risk benefit. And the, 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 it's. 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 in 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 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 dermatologists. 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 psoriasis and they develop psoriatic arthritis, which is arthritis in addition to the skin condition, 'cause 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 and my intestine, I'm still on the same surface. So oftentimes, and you know this, Mark.

Is that- that's true.

I never thought of that. Yeah, it's, yeah. It'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. It's your gut. Yeah, it's true. I mean, when I have a patient with psoriasis, eczema, acne, rosacea, I treat their gut.

Yeah.

And I don't put stuff all over their face or on their body.

Exactly.

To suppress the inflammation, I get rid of that. And it's like a. It's like really an American miracle.

I mean, it is.

I mean, 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 is 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 going to get better? And if I have a patient who thinks they're going to get better, then together we're going to 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. You 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, it's really amazing. there's an intelligence in the body that we, you know, we haven't, you know, as much as we know about the body, there's a lot more that we don't know. And I, you know, 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, it's really, really complex. But, but there's so much that we can do for patients that, you know, they've gone to, you know, the Mayo Clinic, they've gone to Mass General, they've gone to, you know, X, Y, and.

Z everywhere else, and they, you know.

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 I think it was Sid Baker, I think, who made the analogy, or maybe it was Jeff Blan, is that if you have a dime 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 search light. to find that doctor.

Absolutely. That's such a key point because 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 going to 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.

And I think what you alluded to before was really important, which is that functional medicine is about getting rid of the things that impair health and putting in the things that help the body thrive, and then the body can take over and with this amazing intelligence can repair and heal from all sorts of things. Oh, totally, yeah. And that's what we do. So one of the complaints we see a lot is fatigue. Everybody's tired, right? And in functional medicine, we talk a lot about something called the mitochondria, which you're really an expert in. And it's something that is really the one of the keys to solving many problems and puzzles in chronic disease, whether it's Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or diabetes or obviously fatigue issues, so forth. Fibromyalgia, tell us about what are these mitochondria? How do we look at them? and, you know, what do we do about it?

Okay, so for, for those who don't know about mitochondria, it really, it's, it's another area of mine that is, I was really a fascinating sort of interest of mine. So our mitochondria are actually ancient bacteria.

See? Poop bacteria.

You're in the same track.

Absolutely. Right.

Right. So, so people want track mine. Right. And, and I'll never forget, I went to a lecture given by Jeff Bland, and he was talking about how antibiotics which are designed to kill bacteria can oftentimes affect mitochondria because our mitochondria, which are the power plants of our bodies, are actually way back when were ancient bacteria that became engulfed in our cells and are now the power plants of our cells.

And, they have different DNA.

They have totally different DNA. In fact, Lynn Margulis who was married to Carl Sagan, I had the opportunity to meet her and have lunch with her. Yeah, it was amazing. For those who don't know, she's sort.

Of an icon in the world of biology who first described this whole phenomena.

Yes, exactly. So, it was right during the 60s, everyone was studying the nuclear DNA, which is the double helix DNA, and she made an observation that there's DNA in the cell in a circular form. And she goes, what does that mean? Where did that come from? And she was actually what do you call a protist? She studied small ancient bacteria and she realized that that DNA reminded her of the ancient bacteria. And then she came up the hypothesis that eukaryotic cells, which are the cells that we have actually way back when those little bacteria came and sort of created this symbiotic relationship where you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. Yeah. And, and that's really, you know, how we have mitochondria. And mitochondria are so important. And this I always tell patients is that you take cyanide, you will die in a matter of minutes. And, the reason for that is cyanide flips the switch on your mitochondria.

Turns them off. Turns them off like that. Yeah, basically that's what happens when you die.

You have no energy anymore.

Lights out. And, lights are out. And, yet there's varying forms of lights out with mitochondria that are really common.

Whether it's autism or finding now Alzheimer's, Parkinson's. Right, and the interesting thing about it is there's a thing called the bottleneck.

Theory of mitochondria, which is that, you know, let's see before you go on, so mitochondria, there are these little tiny things inside your cells. There can be hundreds to thousands of them. And they basically take oxygen that you breathe and the food that you eat and they burn them like an engine and outside and outcomes energy, which is what runs your body in the form of ATTP. So that's what has to happen every day, every minute for you to run every chemical reaction in your body, to run everything that you're doing. Everything.

And when that process gets bunged up, you get sick. Exactly. That's very well put. Exactly. You get bunged, especially the highly metabolic tissue. So things like the brain. Things like the heart are the highly dense mitochondria. And then the other thing which is new in the medical world is brown fat. So brown fat is highly packed with mitochondria. When you look at it under a microscope, it actually looks brown. And brown fat is the type of fat that we have that generates heat. And in order to activate our brown fat, we need to be cold. And how many people nowadays ever get really cold? Because we always like that thermostat right at 70 degrees. It goes to sleep.

I go on the ice bath every day.

Yeah, so it's right. the temperature goes to 71, we turn on the air conditioning, goes below, we turn on the heat. We give them this thermonuclear zone and we never actually activate our brown fat and activating our brown fat by being in the cold. In fact, this past weekend, I was at Omega Institute and I actually camped out and it's a long story, but I brought my tent and my tent didn't have the poles to it, so I had to sleep on the ground in my sleeping bag. and fortunately, the sleep bag was a warm sleep bag, but I got cold at night.

But guess what? I slept great. Yeah, I slept great. It's true. The best sleep I've had in years was when I went backcountry skiing with my daughter last spring, and we literally climbed six miles, six hours straight up to this yurt, which was literally six feet under the snow. We had to dig it out.

And I slept my sleeping bag there.

It was freezing, and I slept the.

Best I slept ever.

Yeah. You're like in a semi-hibernation yeah. I actually. I actually bought something called a chili pad.

Yeah.

Which is essentially a cooling pad that you put on your mattress. So I can turn it down to like 63 degrees at night because my wife likes it hot and I like it cold.

I think she did a little podcast about that. She did.

She did. My wife is a comedian. You can look her up at @mymialux on Instagram. And you can watch that funny spoof on how she has to wear a winter coat to bed with me, which is not quite true. But yes.

Yeah, so mitochondria, and then how do we test for mitochondria? When you go to most doctors, most doctors don't even remember mitochondria in their training, nor do they ever test for it. So we test for organic acids for it. You can also- It's a urine test.

It's easy to do.

Urine test. Yeah, relatively easy to do. And you can also do genetic testing for mitochondria. There are some labs out there. Cortagen was one of the labs that we used to use, but they're no longer around. There's another one called GeneSavvy that does testing for mitochondria. And when you get an inherited mitochondrial issue, that's where, you know, maybe seeing something serious. Yeah, that's much more serious. But you can also have a lot of acquired mitochondrial issues. And the good news is, is that we can heal our mitochondria when we.

Actually go through a period.

Well, before you get to what you.

Have, what messes them up?

What messes them up?

Yeah.

What messes them up? Well, excessive oxidative stress will do it. So infections. Yeah. Yeah. So excess amounts of free radicals, oxidative stress, because your your mitochondria is like a fireplace. You throw logs into your fireplace, which is food, and you give off sparks. And you throw too much food logs in the fireplace, you get too much.

Sparks and you get too much free radicals.

Too many calories.

Too many bad calories.

Too many bad calories. Exactly. Sugar and starch. And too many bad calories not compensated by enough dietary antioxidants is another potential source. Antibiotics are huge. Yeah. Especially the phloxins. I mean, that's a whole topic unto itself is being floxed. which I'm sure you've seen patients with that because they definitely are. And bactericidal antibiotics are definitely poisonous to mitochondria and statin medications. The ones that the muscle aching that.

People get is because their mitochondria are getting injured.

So the cardiologist handed out like Pez candy. Right, Mark? Yeah. It should be in the water. Right. We should just, you know, they wanted.

To sell it at McDonald's. Yeah. Right. have them with your big Mac. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. But they are and they do cause.

Muscle damage and some people are more susceptible to it. Absolutely. And there's genetic variations in how people respond to statins and that's probably has to do with their mitochondrial function. But it's for sure. So toxins also like heavy metals and pesticides are poisonous, too much sugar and starch and calories, oxidative stress that comes from inflammation. I mean, that's why when you have the viral flu, you feel achy and tired and sore. 'cause your mitochondria are getting nuked, right? Nutritional deficiencies, right? We need all sorts of nutrients like carnitine, CoQ10, B vitamins, all play a big role in the mitochondrial function.

And phosphatidylcholine for the membranes of the mitochondria. The other thing that's also really important, and as you're well aware of that, is the concept of doing fasting periodically. And I find this actually quite fascinating because a lot of religions have fasting as part of their their religious belief system. And when you actually look at that, giving your gut a time period of rest and when you go through these periods of fasting, your body starts eating up the bad mitochondria. That's autophagy. We call that the self, the body's eating itself.

So when garbage truck coming, cleaning up all the waste from your cells, which helps you renew and repair and regenerate.

Exactly.

And actually get younger.

And intermittent fasting can do amazing, amazing things. of the body.

And what is that? That's like when you eat between a eight hour window?

Yeah, there's multiple ways to do that. You can eat like, you know, 16 hours without food, eat during an eight hour window, or maybe on the weekends just have water or juice fast or something like that. There's different ways of doing that. But when you cut back on your calories dramatically and you do that for an extended period of time, your body goes into what's called ketosis, as you well know, and then your body also starts to generate increased antioxidant enzyme systems. and it also starts to clean up and sweep the house, gets rid of all the bad stuff.

Eating snacking and eating all the way till bed and waking up and having breakfast, that's the worst thing. No, exactly.

Well, it's great unless you're like a teenager and you're like your metabolism has gone wild and you need to be fed all the time because you're just growing all the time. But, you know, three meals a day.

With snacks is probably not the best thing. I mean, that's an important thing because, you know, a lot of people have mitochondrial issues and I personally had severe mitochondrial issues because I got chronic fatigue syndrome from mercury. And my muscle enzymes went way up and I had severe muscle aches and fatigue. And it was, it was really working on my mitochondria by getting rid of the metals and fixing my gut and.

Giving myself a lot of mitochondrial nutrients that really helped me recover from that. Yeah. Yeah. And, and the, I mean, they're actually working on some of the nutrients, like the, the nutrients that increase the NAD plus in the body, or even intravenous NAD, which is another, uh, it's for IV therapies that's been shown to be quite helpful for brain issues, trauma of.

The brain and cognitive disorders.

Yeah, very, very powerful. And actually even for people who are phloxed, that's actually one of the treatments.

Yeah. So what you're talking about is providing a lot of the nutrients. So one, you have to stop doing all the bad things that caused to be a problem. And two, you have to provide the basic support to help them work better.

Yeah. Right.

So whether it's intermittent fasting or calorie restriction for periods of time or days of fasting, whether it's these nutrients like NAD, which you can now take orally, CoQ10, and these are the kinds of things we look at in functional medicine. And at the Ultra Wellness Center, we can test for these things. We can see what's not working. And unless you look, you don't know what's going on. And that's really the beauty of this approach, because we might not see, quote, a disease, but we might see a dysfunction. And I've had patients with Parkinson's disease who, I mean, everyone now, I've had 10 years of Parkinson's, and he's doing amazing and hasn't progressed, in fact, got better from where he was by working on all these things.

Yeah, Parkinson's is tough. It depends where you catch them, but the big thing is to try to arrest the progression and try to reverse it if you can.

Yeah, and it's absolutely. A lot of it is a mitochondrial disease. We know well that CoQ10 and other things help with Parkinson's and it's actually.

A mitochondrial problem like many diseases. Well, also the interesting thing is that they're also finding a direct connection with the gut microbiome in Parkinson's. Actually, interestingly, there were some patients, Dr. Baradit, he had some patients who had C. Difficile colitis. The patient also had Parkinson's, they got a stool transplant for their C. Difficile colitis. Guess what?

The Parkinson's got better. Hey, wow.

Yes.

Actually, I remember reading a study that people who had constipation have a 300%.

Increased risk of Parkinson's.

The constipation is not benign, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I had a guy today who was like, how often do you go? Like every three or four days? I'm like, that's not normal. He says, no, for me, I go every three or four days. I'm like, no, you should go twice a day. He's like, twice a day, what are you smoking? I think that is not what people really think of as normal, but it really is. Right. And I think it connects the dots, the gut, the immune system, the mitochondria, it's all one system. Everything is connected to everything else. It's sort of like the knee bones connected to the thigh bone and all that, but it's actually true in the body. and we treat people in all these silos with all these specialties.

Yes.

And unfortunately, it doesn't help them get to the issues that can really help them get better.

Yeah. And I think, I think the other, the other thing that's also, I think, really important. I've learned this as I, as, you know, the, the, the more experienced I get is I, I always go into each patient with what I call a Zen mind, very open-minded I don't really, you know, I just sort of listen and I don't have any preconceived notions of what's going on. And if I just, you know, listen to them, make notes, you know, and try to then connect the dots. And that way there's no, you know, preconceived. I think. I think you have this, or I think you have that. You can even do that in functional medicine. Like, I think you have leaky gut, or I think you have gluten. Well, guess what? There is no leaky gut. There is no gluten. Let's got to look somewhere else. Maybe, you know, maybe you've had a tick bite, you know, maybe you have pesticide poisoning exposure, maybe your glyphosate, glyphosate toxin.

I mean, there's all different pathways that you can go down.

And it does require playing detective.

Yeah, I remember I had a patient who grew up in the Bronx and was very poor and she lived in an apartment complex where cockroaches- They get sprayed, yeah. Were crawling all over her and she hated pests. So, she moved to the suburbs and she would have the exterminator come every month to spray inside and outside her house and she had an entire barrel, like a 50 gallon barrel of chlorinated, which is now banned in this country and was exposed to this over and over and over. And she got Parkinson's at 50 years old. And we helped her by detoxifying her, by working on her mitochondria and doing all those things we talked about.

It's interesting you say that because I distinctly remember reading an article that was looking at Japanese men and they had a higher incidence of Parkinson's as they ate more fruits and vegetables. So the logical conclusion is eat fruits and vegetables, get Parkinson's wrong. Those are pesticides.

Exactly. Pesticide laden fruits and vegetables. I mean, farmers are one of the worst.

The farm workers are one of the worst exposed to pesticides and the highest rates of Parkinson's. And then we are talking about the herbicide roundup with glyphosate and the effects on the gut microbiome. That's another big one. to me is probably one of the big elephants in the room. It's true. Modern day society. Yeah, glyphosate.

I mean, we actually test for glyphosate and I was like, oh, I'm gonna test it. I don't probably have any because I eat organic and I don't avoid pesticides and I'm really careful what I eat. But, the truth is I travel half the time so I don't always have control. And, I checked my ear and I was like, holy crap, I'm probably in the 50th percentile for glyphosate.

I thought it'd be in the 10th percentile. Yeah.

And I'm like, this is not good.

Yes, exactly. And, and the other thing that's, that it's been touted is that, you know, that glyphosate is safe because it doesn't affect any of the biochemical pathways in the body. Well, lo and behold, it actually affects the shikimate pathway, which is actually how the bacteria have their metabolism. So when you're using glyphosate, you're actually messing up the metabolic pathways of bacteria, especially gut bacteria.

Yeah. It also affects glutathione and other things. Oh, there's transgenerational effects. Oh, it's, yeah.

Yeah.

So that's one of the things we do here as well. We deal with a lot with, with understanding how toxins affect the body, how to help the body detoxify and, and doing in a way which actually creates profound results.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, what, what are, what are the biggest things you think about when you think about toxins and how do we, how do we sort of look at those in our practice and what do we, what do we do and see?

Well, it's, you know, there's, there, I, I was, I actually given talks on, on toxins with God rest his soul, Walter Crinnian. He was a big...

He died?

Yes, he died. Yeah, he died. And so, and there was a, we used to talk together about this seminal article, I believe it was in Science. It was called the exposome, which is the sum total of all the different toxins that we get exposed to.

Everything, it's our diet, stress, your microbiome.

All those are disposed of.

Exactly.

And to some degree, you know, there is a little bit of survival of the fittest. So, people who can detoxify well will actually survive in modern society better? It's sort of like the cockroaches that are resistant to DDT.

I mean, that's- that's not me. I'm susceptible.

So, the toxins that we're exposed to are probably one of the biggest sources is pharmaceutical industry. I consider pharmaceuticals as toxins. Yes, they're toxins, but just like if you know what to give at the right, you know, poison at the right dose at the right thing. That dose makes the poison. Dose makes the poison, exactly. And, and what the, the big dirty secret is that these chemicals, you know, get peed out and pooped out and they go into the water systems and no water systems are actually checking for some of these chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, pharmaceuticals. There's been studies on this. Totally. Totally. And, and I believe without question that the Pharmaceuticals, which are, are everywhere. When you look at, you know, people are, you know, taking, you know, handfuls of different pharmaceuticals, these are getting into the water system. And I believe they're actually probably affecting us in some way. So having clean water, clean food are some of the ways that which we can, you know, help with our exposure to toxins. Yeah.

And the environmental working group.

Clean air. Yeah, exactly. Environmental working group is a good resource.

They have all this of how to avoid toxins and your seafood and your meat and your vegetables and your household cleaning products and your personal care products. It's a great resource.

EWG.org. Yeah, EWG, exactly. Yeah. And just being aware of it is important. And I talked earlier jokingly about red wine. Well, the dirty secret about California and all the wines in the United States is they're filled with pesticides, fungicides, and glyphosate. And arsenic. Yeah. So, if you're going to have wine, you want to make sure it's organic or from Europe because they don't allow to the same degree that we have in the states.

I saw this guy had a wine filter the other day, like a water filter.

I was like, wow, that's. I don't know if it'll actually filter all that. I don't know. I'm gonna try it. But, but, and again, you know, you know, they've shown that, you know, Cheerios and all these food products, you know, I have glyphosate in them.

Yeah. Even some of the things are, quote unquote, organic.

Yeah.

You can find glyphosate in them. So, yeah, I just read that the Impossible Burger, which is this plant-based healthy, quote, soy burger, which is GMO soy has 11 times the glyphosate levels of the Beyond Meat, which is made from pea protein because soy beans are sprayed with glyphosate. Wow. That's striking.

Yeah.

And so you're trying to do something healthy and then you're ending up poisoning.

Yourself with glyphosate by eating a soy burger. Right, right. Yeah. And, and I think that, you know, people, people, right. People are trying to be healthy, but sometimes they're, they're making the wrong choice or sort of you know, like, I had this one guy who thought, though, you know, well, you know, being a vegetarian is good and eating soy is good. So, the guy was eating soy burgers, tofu burgers and all the soy stuff. The guy literally grew breasts. He was starting to have gynecomastia from.

All the estrogen effect of the. It's mostly the processed soy. Yeah. Because the whole soy traditionally, if you're.

Eating it in reasonable amounts, won't do that. Right, right, right.

But, yeah, there was all the process. Exactly. Highly processed.

Exactly.

Which we think is going to health food, like a tofu, I mean a turkey soy thing or a turkey or soy bacon or a soy burger.

Yeah, they're all Frankenfoods.

Yeah, they're Frankenfoods. They're still highly processed and it's not a whole food plant-based diet, you know? Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so you know, just kind of the mitochondria going back to it for a minute. I was just remembering a patient I had who had heart failure. Now, we think of heart failure as this, you know, one weight street. You know, you get it, it gets worse, you try to manage it. with a lot of medication, but it turns out that it's a mitochondrial problem and you can actually treat it with mitochondrial nutrients. And I recently had a guy who was a healthy-ish 70-year-old guy who developed heart failure. And he had a number of things going on with him that we treated that were underlying inflammation, but I gave him a bunch of support for his mitochondria, ribose and carnitine and CoQ10 and magnesium and a bunch of stuff, and his ejection fraction, which is the strength of which you can pump blood out of your heart, went from like 30%, which is a few steps away from a heart failure, to over 50%, which is pretty much normal, which is pretty amazing when you see that. And it's, again, not something traditional cardiologists will look, oh, let me see your mitochondria. They don't know how to think about.

It or test it or look at it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And obviously, your heart doesn't rest, right? Even when you're sleeping, your heart's pumping. so mitochondria is really important for, for the heart. And absolutely, you can, there are, there are cases of patients having improvements of heart failure and reversal of heart failure with a mitochondrial nutrient support.

I have many of those cases. It's pretty amazing. So one of the things that we do also here at the Ultra Wellness Center is intravenous nutrition. Can you talk about, you know, why that's important, what it does and who it's good for?

Well, sure. I mean, there's, you know, intravenous nutrition is a catch-all term for giving nutrients through the veins and sort of bypassing the gut for absorption. And there are some patients that, in them, for whatever reason, they may not be absorbing their nutrients as well. So some of the things that we use here would include things like the Myers cocktail. We might also use.

And what's in that?

B vitamins, magnesium, and, you know, B vitamins are very, very, you know, Bruce Ames is the one who brought my attention to the B vitamins because a lot of people have subclinical genetic deficiencies where they need higher levels of B vitamins. So giving B vitamins actually supports mitochondrial function. So when you give these B vitamins and magnesium, you can boost the effect of mitochondria through the augmented effects. And then glutathione intravenously is also a fantastic tool. IV vitamin C. We use that for a host of different things.

And you mentioned the IV NAD.

Yeah. IV NAD. Yeah. That, that, that I think is actually, that's really amazing stuff. It's really, really cool. And it's, it's. So there are patients who do need, I, I don't say that everybody walks through the door needs an IV, but if you want to support and people who are sicker, people have more unexplained fatigue, you can definitely do that. It was a study with IV vitamin C and sepsis. So this is a really interesting thing. So, IV vitamin C, we use it here for patients who have potential cancer, chronic infections, Epsom Bar virus, Etc. Flu, whatever. And so at high levels, vitamin C is actually a pro-oxidant it's not actually an antioxidant, it's actually a pro-oxidant and the interesting thing is that there are some studies out now that if you go into a hospital and you have septic shock, your mortality, which is normally about 40% of people who die in the hospital, if you give them IV vitamin C along with, I think, steroids and a little bit of thiamine, the mortality went from 40% to 9%. Wow. So it's a four-fold decrease in death.

That's unbelievable.

Yeah.

And there's no drug that can do Exactly. Yeah.

So you go from like 10% to or 40% down to about less than 10% mortality. Pretty amazing. It is pretty powerful stuff. And it's cheap.

Yeah, it's very cheap.

Yeah. So you're not going to see a lot of research with that with big pharma because they're not going to make money on it.

It's true. There's a gap in research. A lot of things we do know work clinically, we've all had experience with for decades. Doesn't get the funding because the NIH isn't funding it and neither is drug companies. so we're kind of stuck having to look at smaller studies or small groups that people are studying this. So we're doing all these things we talked about here at the UltraWANO Center. It's a really unique practice. We have, you know, four physicians, two physicians assistants, four nutritionists, a whole bunch of nurses, and we're taking care of people in a team approach where people come in, they get this full evaluation where the medical detectives we find problems that most people have struggled to solve for decades and often very quickly we know what to do. And we support them over time with coaching and with encouragement and follow-up visits. And it's really a pretty unique center here at the UlTrawna Center. And collectively, we've had probably 60 years of collective experience in practicing functional medicine, which is, I think, pretty unique in the world. We're getting older, but we're just getting smarter. and, you know, we've all personally had challenges with our health, and we've used this model to really help recover. And I remember when I was really sick, you and Dr. Bone came over to my house and, you know, helped me think through what was going on because my brain wasn't.

Working, because my gut wasn't working. Yeah.

Exactly. And it's, it's just so rewarding to see these patients. You had, you had a recent case.

That you wanted to share about Alzheimer's, right? Yeah. A fantastic case. It was a patient who I saw who came down from up North in Canada and was given a diagnosis up there of having Alzheimer's and was pretty much sold, you know, you know, get.

Your affairs in order.

Get your affairs in order. Exactly. And there's not much we can do for you. So he came down.

The treatment for Alzheimer's is a lawyer.

It's a lawyer. Yeah. Right. And a rabbi or priest. Right. Yeah. So the patient came down and she, I saw her with her husband and did a complete workup. And as you know, through some of writings of Dale Bredesen and also a functional medicine approach is that Alzheimer's-- called.

The UltraMind Solution was really good.

Yeah, UltraMind. But that wasn't about Alzheimer's.

No, but it was a lot of.

Alzheimer's cases with the brain. Yeah, right. Yeah. So, and I love the analogy. I wrote that, by the way. The analogy of Alzheimer's is like a roof with 32 holes in it. And, you know, you're not going to fix it, but just, you know, doing one hole. So, I did a full workup on the patient. And the other thing, which most doctors and even dentists aren't aware, is the role of the oral bacteria. Yeah. There's actually some really interesting studies that when you have bad bacteria in your mouth, specifically gum disease, gingivitis, periodontal disease, porphyromonas gingivalis, it highly causes systemic inflammation, which in turn affects the brain and causes brain inflammation and brain deterioration over time. So her workup included checking for heavy metals, checking for herpes viruses, because herpes simplex is also associated with with that, checking for the ApoE4 genotype.

It predisposes you but doesn't predestine you. Exactly.

Just because you have it doesn't mean you're gonna get it, but you're one of those people who has a more robust immune response so you have more inflammation, which is great on a short-term but on a long-term basis, you don't want chronic inflammation. So, she had a whole bunch of things. She had some mercury, she had some oral bacteria, she had some gut bacteria, she had some gluten issues. she had a herpes simplex, she had the APOE4 genotype. So I sort of worked on all of those things who also changed her diet. And within a matter of months, her husband said, I have my wife back. Wow. Yeah. She was now able to converse, to talk. She can drive by herself now.

So you literally stopped and reverse the effects of Alzheimer's.

Right. Exactly.

Yeah.

It was pretty, pretty.

And what do you think it was of all those things that you did? or was it all the holes?

It was all the holes. Exactly. And we talk about root cause. It's actually root causes. So, I think there's often sometimes there's one big one, but then there's all these other things that are supporting that also play a role. So, I just addressed all of them in like a checklist fashion.

You know, it's interesting you say that because traditional medicine, there's sort of the joke about neurology is diagnose and adios. You know, here's what you got. nothing to do, I'll see you later. And I think it's certainly the approach now with Alzheimer's because we've spent billions of dollars on hundreds and hundreds of studies with nothing to show for it. It's because we've been looking down the wrong path. Right, because we've been looking at amyloid.

Plaques, which are a hallmark of actual inflammation slash infection in the brain. Just like cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease. Cholesterol does not cause heart disease. Inflammation causes heart disease. Cholesterol is a bystander. Yes. Trying to repair that inflammatory process. Like the body's band-aid.

Right.

So beta amyloid in the brain is actually an antimicrobial peptide. It tells you that the body is trying to fight off some type of infection, be it a spirochete from Lyme disease, syphilis, a virus or a fungi. Yeah. So that's, you know, so yeah, beta.

Amyloid, you know, we've been saying, well, if we get rid of the beta amyloid, find a drug to remove the beta amyloid. It's the wrong thinking is the problem. and in functional medicine here at the UltraWellness Center, we do a different kind of thinking, which is what are all the treatable things that we can find that could help this patient's health get better in general? And that also helps the brain get better. So it's not to say that we can come in here and cure all cases of Alzheimer's. That's not true. But we can certainly, I mean, especially if you're far advanced, but we can certainly, if we get it early enough, we can help to slow it down and maybe even reverse some of the effects by using this approach. And absolutely. not only have you found this, I found this and dozens and dozens of other doctors doing this approach across the country have done this. And yet it's still in the outside of healthcare.

Well, you know, it's also really interesting is I'm seeing more and more doctors and nurses who are in mainstream medicine coming to see me because and they're in the they're in like some of the best hospitals, best centers, because they can't get help in their system.

Oh, for sure. I mean, it's true.

A lot of our patients are health care professionals. Exactly. Yeah. And, and I think, I think, you know, when a, a, a physician has either themself or a close family member or spouse or whatever get a condition and you're, and you're butting your head against the wall with the mainstream approach, that's where you start, you know, you, you sort of fall into functional medicine because this stuff's not working. I gotta, I gotta find more, put more tools in my tool bag.

Yeah, well that's the thing here at the Ultra Wellness Center. We have a lot of tools, we have a different way of thinking, we work as a team and we've been doing it for a long time. So if you're listening and you've suffered with some chronic thing that hasn't gotten better or you have any one of those diseases or conditions we talked about or pretty much anything, we can really make a difference in helping people find the root cause, be medical detectives and help people create a pathway that gets them back to health. And that's really the goal here.

Yeah. And the other thing is, you know, so many practices have what I call protocols. And the protocols are sort of like you do the same thing over and over for everyone. And we don't really have protocols here. We have certain things that we do use other than a lot of patients. We have an approach. We have an approach, but we don't have a rubber stamp. You know, you're not going to come in at the Ultra Wellness Center and.

Everybody gets the same treatment.

That doesn't work. Right. Not a. Exactly. Because it's different for everybody. It's, it's, it's, yeah, ours is very much personalized and proactive and a deep dive into nutritional biochemical genetic toxic biology. Yeah, and as you mentioned with that.

Case with MS, that's one case with MS. Another case might be very different. And I think what you saw that patient with Alzheimer's, someone else with Alzheimer's might need a very different approach. Exactly. So that's really the beauty of functional medicine and you are one of the pioneers. You are a leader and it's so great to have you here at the Ultra Wellness Center. Todd, thank you for joining us on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

All right, thanks Mark, enjoyed it.

So if you've heard anything that piqued your interest or you know anybody who's suffering or you're suffering, you can find out more about our center at the ultrawellnesscenter.com that's just ultrawellnesscenter.com and if you love this podcast, we'd love to hear from you again, leave a comment, share with your friends and family on social media and subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Thank you Mark.

Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman, So two quick things. Number one, thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast. It really means a lot to me. If you love the podcast, I'd really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family. Second, I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called Mark's Picks. Every week, I'm going to send out a list of a few things that I've been using to take my own health to the next level. This could be books, podcasts, research that I found, supplement recommendations, recipes, or even gadgets. I use a few of those. And if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list, all you have to do is visit drhyman.com/picks. That's drhyman.com/picks. I'll only email you once a week, I promise, and I'll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations. So just go to drhyman.com/picks. That's P-I-C-K-S to sign up free today. Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.

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