Why Our Neglected Lymph System Is A Key To Optimal Health with Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Gerald Lemole

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

There are clearly connections between parts of our body that we don't understand with the traditional Western model that you and I, all three of us participated in. It doesn't mean they're not right. We haven't discovered them yet. We will one day, but why wait?

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Right. Wow.

So, so for those of you who don't know Dr. Oz, he's Dr. Oz, he won 10 Emmy Awards for his Dr. Oz Show. I've been on many times and he's an attending physician at New York Presbyterian Columbia Medical Center. He went to Harvard, got his MBA and MD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Wharton. I was obviously on the Oprah Winfrey Show, has won innumerable awards. His last book, Food Can Fix It, was amazing New York Times bestseller. And, he's got a new one out we're going to talk about. in a minute. He is being listed as one of the 100 most influential people by Time Magazine and Esquire Magazine named him 75 most influential people of the 21st century. And, he's just an awesome dude and I love him and he's helped me and really inspired me in so many ways. And, Dr. Gerald Lemole is also a cardiovascular surgeon and integrated physician. He was the chief of cardiovascular surgery at Christian Health Care Services from 1986 to 2006 and medical director for the Center for Integrative Health and Preventive Medicine and Rehabilitation Institute. And he's just done so many amazing things, including being a member of the surgical team that performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States. That's a big deal. He's a professor of surgery and just written hundreds of articles and written many books. In his latest book, Lymph and Longevity, the untapped secret to health was just released. We're going to talk about that. So welcome, Dr. Doctor.

Thank you. Thanks.

Well, welcome, Doctor.

This is such a treat for me because, you know, Mam, you've had me on your show so many times and helped me so much. And I'm just so grateful to have you on my show. And thank you. So let's start with lymph and longevity. First of all, Lymph is something that people barely understand, including most doctors. We don't really have a lymphologist as a specialty. And you have come upon the lymph system as one of those critically foundational systems that has to function in order for us to be healthy. And when it's not, we age quickly. So, Dr. Lamont, tell us about how you came to understand that this is true, that you know, that, you know, it's not just about our cardiovascular system or neurologic system or musculoskeletal system, that there's this whole other system in there that's pretty much ignored and we don't really have a lot of treatments for, but that actually responds to a lot of things that you talk about in your book that are available to everybody. So tell us, you know, how did we sort of miss this and why were you interested in lymph system and how it impacts every aspect of their health? I mean, you've called it the secret river of health. What do you mean?

Well, you know, when we were doing the heart transplants back, way back when then, I was involved in the first five and they became very personal friends because we stayed with them for months. We didn't know what the heck was going to, what to expect, what was going on. So within a short period of time, we had given these people good healthy hearts with wonderful blood vessels. within a short period, a year or two, year and a half, they developed all died from galloping atherosclerosis. Their vessels had turned to 90-year-old vessels. It was not only a professional failure, but a personal loss. It always stayed in the back of my mind. When I left Houston, I was chief at Temple University School of Medicine and we had a Professor of Pathology there, Betty Lausch, who was interested in foam cells. So we got together and did a project on rhesus monkeys. We ligated their lymphatics from their heart and sure enough they developed early atherosclerosis. So I always kept this in the back of my mind and I'd observe when we did coronary bypasses we'd have sclerotic little white vessels following along the veins. and so I biopsied them and they were sclerotic lymph vessels and they were not there in the aortic valve or the mitral valve with no coronary disease. So, but it's so hard to measure the lymphatics, you can't measure a level of something or it's a low pressure system, you can't, it's very difficult. So consequently for many years, you know, nobody really did a whole lot and up until the last 10 years or so, there was nothing really said about the lymphatics. But we, in 1981, I wrote a paper, I figured the best paper I knew was Society of Thoracic Surgeons. I should have been in some other journal, but because the surgeons weren't too interested. But we showed that there was reverse cholesterol transport, the relationship with the lymphatics was important, and that's how the actual cholesterol got out of the arterial wall into the venous system to the liver by way of the lymphatics. And that was 40 years ago.

So, your blood circulation and your lymph circulation are connected and they're interacting and moving things around like cholesterol all the time. And, if one's not working, the whole system kind of breaks down.

The whole beauty of the lymphatic system is that it is responsible for re-regulating our fluids because we lose about 10 or 15% of our fluid outside our vascular system into our interstitial or this tissue between the cells. So we have to get that back in. The lymphatics are responsible for getting it back in. The lymphatics are responsible for getting every fat molecule back into the system. They're responsible for getting large proteins. Things like, you know, when you have a leaky gut and you have, say, casein or gliadin, the only way it can get away from the sampling mucosa is to go through the lymphatics and get tested by a dendritic cell to see if it's good, bad, or ugly, you know? And, that's what it's all about. And, if we don't have the lymphatic system, it just doesn't happen.

Well, so essentially what you're saying is when you have all these molecules that run around your blood and they get in your tissue, then they go out in your tissues and your body has to clean it up and then it has to check that if it's okay or not and it gets back into.

Your lymph system and your blood system, then you can kind of regulate it. So it's very difficult to measure anything because it's a very low pressure system. So we can't measure like the arterial wall pressure or the lymphatic pressure. The flow depends completely on the motion of exercise, what your muscles are doing, squeezing them, the arterial pulsation, and its own innate pulsations. It has its own pulsation, it has smooth muscle in it, It has sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves. So it sends signals all throughout the body to have a general inflammatory response. And then the important thing, it has to shut off that inflammatory response. And if it doesn't shut it off, you get autoimmune or chronic inflammation. And that's what we're facing in a pandemic now.

Yeah, I want to get more into its functions. But for those of you who don't know what it is. I'd love Jerry for you to explain, you know, what is actually the lymph system? Where is it? How do we find it? What does it look like? What does it do? Give us a sort of a background because I think most people understand it. It's, you know, you have a liver and a kidney and a brain, but like, where is the lymph system?

That's exactly, that was the problem in the, in fact, that it really deserves. It's a system that deserves, but it's always used as an appendage to something. It says, oh, the lymphatics are with cancer. They think a lot of people that it gets attention because of the cancer. But it's a system of its own that usually lies between the artery and the vein. The lymph channel does. But when we were in medical school, we didn't talk about the lymphatic. We talked about nerve artery vein. That was the neurovascular bundle. But the lymphatics are in there and they have to, if they go into spasm, they are not clearing the toxins. They're not sending the messages of the immune system. They're not getting the signals of protein and fat that will send messages out to the body. And then the messages aren't going back that shut off, you know, that shut off the inflammatory response. The beginning of the response you want, acute inflammation is a good thing. It kills everything in sight. It also attacks the normal tissue as it's getting rid of the toxins. But at some point we have to send in cells and proteins to come in and stop that inflammation. And if it's delayed, there's more damage in the area. So, everything that causes it to delay is caused by the lymphatic system not either being stagnant, not getting good water supply, not being pulsatile, being dilated or being constricted. For example, if you smoke cigarettes, you will get sclerosis of the lymphatic systems and cortisol release does it. and adrenal release does it. So over the long haul, that's why stress and stress creates problems. And what's interesting to me is we always say when we do these studies, you say, oh, look, people do better if they exercise, they do better if they have stress management, they do better if they eat a lot of vegetables and fruits. Point of fact is all those three things increase lymphatic flow. the exercise goes to the thoracic duct and you breathe, the diaphragm sweeps it up, it's got one-way valves and it makes the fluid go into the venous system into the liver. Polyphenols and flavonoids are strong lymphogogues. I mean they suppress inflammatory markers, they do wonderful things and that's why we know that that, you know, vegetarian type plant-based diet is helpful in the same way with stress modification. If you're relaxing your body, you're not secreting this, the hormones that will cause sclerosis of the lymphatic vessels. So it's interesting to me that all these, all the three things that increase lymphatic flow are things that will help every chronic degenerative disease. Yeah. But it gives you an understanding and if you get that understanding, you'll be more apt to do what you're supposed to do because it's not a mystery then why does this happen? Because you can explain what happens with lymphatic flow when you do these things.

Well, so what you're saying is really striking that there's this system in the body that's been mostly neglected by medicine that is incredibly important for almost every function of the body. that's our waste disposal system, that's our part of our immune system, that's part of our cholesterol transport system that samples everything from the environment that we need to manage and determine if it's us or something else, and that there's no way to measure easily. There's no test really we can do to see how it's working. But from the science, we know how much it can be damaged by our lifestyle and by our diet and by smoking and by stress and all these things that that we don't really think about are related to our lymph system. I mean, we know if someone gets cancer and they have surgery and their lymph is taken out, they get the swelling and the big edema and it's kind of nasty or there's this thing called lymphedema where you can't clear all that. But most of us really have never really thought much about the lymph system other than, okay, well we have one and maybe we should be getting a massage once in a while. But what have you seen directly from the science? says that the lymph system is actually helping to prevent all these chronic diseases. It's not something that I think most people know. This book is really radical because nobody's really written a book about this before. I've looked for this information because I've been really interested in how, I mean, I was working on a book on food and trying to see how foods influence the lymph system. It was really hard to come up with a lot of information. You're really uncovering a treasure trove of wisdom about how to care for our bodies in a new way. that allows us to actually activate and heal our lymph system to create health and longevity.

Well, what I did was, you know, I recognized that the chronic degenerative diseases that we're most fearful of, for example, cardiac or cancer or neurologic diseases, all had a basis in the lymphatics. And going through researching the literature, I'm talking about the, you know, PubMed and the and the medical literature is very clear, at least in the research areas in the arenas, that you can create lymphatic spasm by oxidative stress. There's a paper like in 2014 by Taggart in New England Journal that showed that what happens to the macrophage can actually carry cholesterol through the arterial wall and when they get stressed with oxidative stress, the cytoskeleton of the macrophage actually freezes. And the way you can, so the way it used to sneak through was being very plastic and could work its way through the wall. But when it gets its cytoskeleton frozen by oxidative stress, it can't go anywhere and it just causes more inflammation in that tissue. what can obviate that is NAC. And it gets rid of that and they show at least in the research that these macrophages start moving again. And the research literature is replete with not these are researchers, not clinicians, and so consequently the next move has to be to move it from the research area into the clinical world. And the same thing with inflammatory bowel disease. They've shown the University of Washington has shown that actually there's lymphatic obstruction of the lymph channels coming from the colon or the gut that are blocked. And they actually can see that on the studies. And so it's getting into you know, our world, but it's still not there yet because it's hard to measure. It's a low pressure system and you can change it with many things. Same way with the lymphatics and the fat cells and the, you know, the adipose tissue is now an endocrine tissue and it works very, very closely in relation to the fat tissue. to the lymphatic tissue. And in the research labs, they found that diabetic mice, for example, you can get 130 times the amount of leakage in the lymphatic system. And how do you get a big gut and big belly? You get porous lymphatic and the triglycerides and the IGA and all the fat and stuff. Instead of going where it should be processed, goes into the fat and stays there and compresses the lymphatics and compresses it and creates a situation where you.

Have.

Bad hormones come out of the fat because they're in a chronic stage.

So what you're saying is super interesting because, you know, clinically we see people who are puffy, right? They feel on their face like puffy and they have fluid retention and they have puffy faces. and it's inflammation. But what we're really seeing is an example of how the lymph system isn't properly working to clear all the fluid in the tissues.

Is that right? That's exactly right. And once you get that concept, once you think about that in that way, you can't go back to the other way and say, well, what is it causing it? It becomes clear then you say, well, it's just not enough clearance of these toxins from the tissue. and then not enough response. For example, the hot, what looks like in the research is these resolving, you know, and protecting the fat that's coming in and blocking any of these inflammosomes. And the lymphatics, the articles, there's several articles that show the relationship between the inflammosome and the lymphatic clearance and the resolving and protecting. That's, you know, there's articles already written on that in the medical scientific literature.

So, basically, the system that turns on inflammation, turns off inflammation, is all regulated by the lymph system. Exactly. If that's dysregulated, you get puffy and swollen and you look in the mirror and you're like, why am I so puffy and swollen? Well, that's a big part of it. You know, I want to get into how we can help our lymph system, which nobody talks about. I'm sure you've done Mehmet on your show a little bit about this, but it's really a really obtuse area, which what do we eat? What are the nutrients? What are the supplements? What are the lifestyle factors? I want to get into that. But before we do, I want to talk about why this is so important for longevity and why it's in the title of your book, because I want to live to be 120. I don't know what you guys are shooting for. I'm maybe going to go a little longer if I can, if anything is working. Why is the lymph system so important to longevity?

Well, as you know, the longevity is related to how much damage you do in your local tissues. I mean, basically you measure the tips of the chromosomes and you say, well, if they're short, then I've had it. And so everybody's trying to extend the chromosomes. And the point is that the best way you can avoid trauma to the tissue and like, you know, autophagy and the idea of cleaning up the tissue, we now know and it's been shown in a lot of the journals that the dead cells don't go away, they just cause an inflammatory response.

Yeah.

It's up to the monocytes to come in. and pick those dead cells up and take that away by way of the lymphatics. Now, if the lymphatics don't have a signal and don't present that signal to the immune system, it's not going to be able to send anything in there. And the way they come in and out of it is through the lymphatic system. So if you keep your tissue in good shape and avoid the damaging that occurs over the years through chronic inflammation, you're going to be in good shape when it comes to 125.

All right, so basically it affects everything. And, so you mapped out how it affects the gut, how it affects the brain, how it affects their immune system and cancer, how it affects your heart disease risks. All of these things are things that we don't really include the lymphatic system as part part of our framework for thinking about it. But you're introducing this idea and saying we have to, right?

We didn't know, it's 10 years ago, that the brain had a lymphatic system. We thought, we were taught all in medical school, there was no lymphatic clear to the brain. We know now that there is a lymphatic system and goes through the, it's called glymphatics because it includes the microglial cells.

Those are the immune cells in the brain.

Immune cells in the brain, and they actually shrink along with the neuron cells so they can get more fluid into the interstitium, and they sweep away the beta amyloid, and it goes on the other side, it's picked up by the dura lymphatics, the dural lymphatics down the deep cervical lymph channels, and cleared that way. Now, if you sleep on your side, it clears better than if you sleep on your back, by the way, if you're a mouse. But there are ways, you know, there are ways that this can be ameliorated. And these are things we're just learning, you know, year by year and it's the whole thing is changing. So I think that people are going to get interested in the lymph system, but all these are interrelated.

Yeah, so you know, it reminds me when I was in Hawaii last year and I had moved to this house and the local garbage collectors had a rule which they wouldn't collect your garbage unless the lid was off the garbage can. And so, I had all these people over and I had so much garbage and I put it out with the lids on and they didn't come week after week. And, it was just, what happened was terrible. All the maggots came and everything started rotting and smelling. And, basically, your lymph system is like the garbage man.

Exactly.

And, it cleans up all the waste that's happening in your body, all the metabolic waste, autophagy is this important idea that we self-clean and we take all the old parts, we recycle them, we renew ourselves, and we get rid of all the garbage. But without your functioning limb system, you can't do that.

And have it.

Right?

Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Something I get more and more excited about every year is personalized medicine. When I began practicing functional medicine over 20 years ago, it was clear to me we have to look at how unique each body is. Now with the technology advancing in amazing ways, we can truly take that concept to the next level. One of the tools I recently discovered that can help us all do that from home is InsideTracker. Founded in 2009 by top scientists in aging genetics and biometric data from MIT, Tufts and Harvard, InsideTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. It's purpose built to help you live a longer, more productive life. Their cutting-edge technology analyzes your blood DNA and lifestyle to give you highly personalized recommendations. Then using the app, you can track your progress every day. InsideTracker tells you what to do and why, so your health goals are clear and actionable and most importantly based on exactly what your body needs. My team took InsideTracker for a spin and really loved it. They discovered some important things about their health that led them to stop procrastinating when it came to certain parts of their health, like for example finally taking vitamin D supplements after seeing they were deficient or eating more iron-rich foods due to low ferritin and hemoglobin, and making an effort to embrace stress reduction techniques after seeing high cortisol levels. Health is not black and white, and your wellness plan shouldn't be either. If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed into your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker. Right now, they're offering my community 25% off at insideTracker.com/healthpodcast. forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's Dr. Hyman, inside tracker.com, that's I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R dot com slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N, and you'll see the discount code in your cart. Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. So we're going to get into a little bit of the specifics of how do we create a healthy lymph system, but Dr. Oz, I want to ask you about your book for a minute because it connects to this. And you wrote a book called Yin Yang and you, which I love the title, or it should be Yin Yang and you. But anyway, you, you, we use the right Chinese tones. And by the way, Dr. Oz once had me do a Chinese speech in Chinese to a group of Chinese doctors. It was a lot of work, but I did it because I love you.

They were very impressed. I was impressed.

Everyone was.

You broke in the Mandarin by mistake. He lost himself for a moment.

Well, I was pretty fluent and then I forgot it a lot. I mean, I forgot a lot of it, but I still remember how to sort of the sound of it and how to speak it in the tone. So if I can read it, it sounds like I know what I'm talking about. But then people come up to me afterwards and start being fluently, fluently talking to me. I don't know what they're talking about. So anyway, so Chinese medicine is a system of healing that I've studied in college, not from an academic I mean, not from a clinical point of view, but an academic point of view. And it really has a framework for understanding all the dynamic systems of the body and how they interrelate and how they connect. And essentially what you're talking about, Dr. Lamola, is that the lymph system is this network that connects all the networks in the body and that we have to have those systems in balance and function to be healthy. So what was your insight in writing in Yang and you that helped you understand lymph from a Chinese medicine perspective because you also have that sort of Western biomedical perspective and you bring those together. I'm curious about what you thought about as you sort of learned your father-in-law's work and what you're doing.

Well, the big epiphany is that we give lots of health advice and we try to explain why these bits of advice make sense using whatever biomechanical models we have, like the heart's connected to the lungs, connected to your mouth and the air moves. All this stuff people who are listening to this podcast know about. But they're often bits of advice that are really important where we don't truly have that depth of insight. And it turns out that the lymph system, which is a forgotten system that's vitally important to the body, is a way of explaining it. But the Chinese had their own way of explaining it. A 5,000-year-old model developed by farmers long before we had deep insights into some of the mechanical structures that we have today. But it still seemed to work. I mean, after all, something works for 5,000 years. We got the bad stuff. yeah. And so in traditional Chinese medicine, they based it on five elements and basically five of everything, five seasons, you know, and the chakras would move around and you end up with this wisdom. And again, just to, you know, this, the, the seasons were important because they had, they had, you know, the four, the four Seasons we know of.

Right.

But they also had an early summer, late summer, because in the central Chinese Plains where a lot of traditional Chinese medicine, the philosophy arose, there were, there was an early dry summer and a late wet summer. So they had five seasons. Then they had five elements, the wood, fire, earth, metal, water.

These were how they thought about why.

Porridge is good for you, why a certain type of activity, why deep breathing or tai chi or any of these activities, actions that you're recommended to do, were all based on these five elements. So it's another way of envisioning the body. And I've always believed, and Mark, you've been a great guest on the show, and My goodness, you've moved a lot of books educating America on basic advice. But I believe that a lot of the advice that you and other experts give can be explained in ways that go beyond what our traditional understanding is. So it actually gives them more credibility. And the reason we wrote the book now was based on a couple of insights. First off, 17% of Americans in a Rand report, 17% of the listeners right now report excellent health, one seventh. So 83% of us aren't really feeling like we're getting an A in the game of life. And when you look around for reasons for that, part of it is because Western medicine is really good at some things like gunshot to the chest, right? Or, you know, doing a bypass operation. But we're not so good at some of the more chronic issues that plague people, right? Libido problems, sleep, GI problems, depression. And traditional Chinese medicine approaches actually do offer solutions because of 5,000 years of experience with those very issues. And understanding the lymphatic system as part of that also opens up doors of potential treatments that might get us to where we need to be. Now, I was blessed to have an opportunity to work with the dean of the major traditional Chinese medicine institute in the world, which is Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. He's my co-author, so his name is An Zong Zhu. And Dr. Zhu, who's actually a PhD from the United States, he trained at the University of Illinois. So he actually speaks, his English is great, but he also bridges the gap well because he was trained in both East and the West. and I'll share an epiphany that he told me early on that I didn't.

Think I was allowed to say, but I've gotten permission.

Okay. Because the big question I had is where the heck is traditional Chinese medicine been for the last six, seven decades? Why didn't we know more about it? Why is this Yin Yang you book the first real effort to translate it into Western approaches? It's not the first book of traditional Chinese medicine. There were many of those, but they're always written only thinking about traditional Chinese medicine.

Yeah.

And not translating it to the Western mind in a way that could be accessible. And the reason was Mao detested traditional Chinese medicine. Mao felt it was a throwback to colonialist China. It was a remnant from the Imperial Age. It needed to be expunged from the history books. He wanted China being a modern war country without the burden of its history. And so the Chinese went underground. Traditional Chinese medicine continued. but it was actually not endorsed in any capacity. There were no universities that were big and growing, there were no resource programs, et cetera. And China as part of its discussions with other countries would never bring it up. Where Premier Xi, the current leadership of China has said, you know what, we can't erase our history, we're going to embrace it. And they've allowed traditional Chinese medicine practitioners to speak more openly, which is why this book could be written in the first place. So now we're able to go into China, provide scholarships to learn more about these approaches, do research on which ones work or not. There's a whole thing, for example, around preventive Shi, which is the energy force that gives you more resistance infections. Well, you know, we all know people get sick all the time, people never get sick. These kinds of approaches explain that. And you, as a student of Chinese culture, you understand why these ideas resonate. But I love the fact that it takes us into a deeper understanding that might help the 83% of Americans who want to feel better about their health. Well, you know, that's so interesting because.

I am so glad you said that. It's really about how do we create health as opposed to just treat disease. How do we create balance in all these systems? Yin Yang is a dynamic balance. That's the concept. It's not about whether you have a disease or you're not, but what's in balance or out of balance in your system. and the lymphatic system is one of those systems that's in balance or out of balance like every other system. And, I think it's such an important concept. And, I actually wrote an article a bunch of years ago about how functional medicine was mirroring a lot of the ancient concepts of traditional Chinese medicine, which is systems thinking. How is everything connected? It's not everything interact together.

It's not just a bunch of separate organs. It's all connected. And, let me just underline that, Mark. Interestingly, traditional Chinese medicine, because it was created by farmers, is based on ecosystems. I had a more holistic approach. Western medicine is more of a hunter-gatherer approach. It's more like sniper shots. I'm gonna shoot that cancer, right? And I'll kill it. If I miss, then I don't kill it. But in traditional Chinese medicine, you've never even talked that way. And that actually, I think goes back to what Dad was saying about the facts. My father-in-law, I just brag on him for one second, because one of our earliest interactions, we were playing trivial pursuit. You ever play that game? Yeah, yeah. Right. So I was playing trivial pursuit. There was a question. It was which Famous heart surgeon was called Rock Doc by Rolling Stone magazine because he was the first to play rock music in the operating room.

Uh, Jerry Lamo.

Jerry Lamo. My father-in-law, his chip down, he knew the answer because he was the answer. But he was always thinking out of the box. And so, so often in medicine, you're barely keeping up. You're trying to memorize and learn and just stay up with the professor. Dad was always willing to challenge orthodoxy. and say there's something more there we're not seeing. As example by the fact that he was failing at heart transplantation, not because of anything he did technically wrong, but because there was some unexplained process that was closing down arteries. Which by the way, if it closes down arteries and people who had transplants with 22 year old hearts, what's it doing to 80 year olds? And why do the conductors, why do the conductors never die of heart disease? It seems that maybe they're milking their.

Lymphatics with their arms.

It's all right, the thoracic duct, right? Exactly. So all these insights start to pile up and you begin to think, well there's more more wisdom here. And this is, I'll give you just a completely out of the box idea. So people getting piercings all over the place, right?

Yes.

Well, it turns out that piercings might not be the wisest thing to do in some parts of the body. So as an example, traditional Chinese medicine, you would never pierce the pinna because the pinna has very, that's the outer part of the ear that has very specific purposes. So if you pierce the wrong part of your ear, you might actually create some issues for yourself. Now, this is, again, based on traditional Chinese medicine. If you already got the pierce, don't take it out, but. It's a, you know, think about maybe the lobe of your ear is the best place to get pierced because that's okay with traditional Chinese medicine. And these are the kinds of insights that you want to at least know.

About before you start doing stuff. Yeah, it's so true. I mean, I just couple of anecdotes. I traveled to China in 1984 when it was still Mao suits and bicycles and, you know, donkey carts. And, I was way in the north and my girlfriend I was traveling at the time had a terrible migraine. She had a really bad migraine. so I ran to find a local doctor, the Chinese doctor, grabbed him. We rode back to the hotel and donkey cart. He comes in, he feels her pulse, and it was extraordinary. I mean, he literally told her, he didn't ask her any questions. He just told her everything about her, about her period, about her symptoms, about where it was, about how, I was like, whoa. That was really mind-blowing and then he gave her a prescription, which was a bunch of herbs. and we went to the local herbal pharmacy. We filled it all. It was, you know, roots and bark and who knows animal parts. I don't know what it was. And it tasted disgusting. But she drank it and got better. And then 10 years later, I went to. And I was like, oh, there's something here. And then I. And then I went to China after I worked in Idaho, and I had had back surgery, and I had a really bad disc problem. I had severe pain. I had. constant pain for two years and it just was miserable and nothing really worked. And I had physical therapy, I had everything. And I was sitting in the hot tub in the International Hotel with some other foreigner and he was talking about this Chinese doctor that he saw from the Sino-Japanese Hospital who fixed his shoulder. And I'm like, oh, what's her name? And I wrote it down. I called her immediately. I went to see her and I went three times a week to her apartment, which was in Beijing at the time. It was winter, it was cold, and she had me, it was kind of illegal to see her as a foreigner, but I kind of paid her under the table, and I would lay on the floor of her Chinese apartment in my underwear, which was basically concrete with her family watching Chinese soap operas. And, she did all these procedures on me like cupping with these glass things with hot fire in it to suck out whatever, and then she used guasha, which is a scraping thing, which is scrape all of a sudden, and then ACU, but she put acupuncture needles everywhere, like the ends of my toes. I mean, it was so intense. And literally within a week, my pain after tears is gone. And within six weeks, my calf, which it was shrunken because the nerve damage grew back. And I was like, oh, there's something here. There's definitely something here. And I think, you know, she wasn't treating a disease. She was enhancing probably lymphatic flow and blood flow and nerve conduction and all these different modalities that we don't take advantage of in traditional medicine. So, it's just such a beautiful model for complementing what we do.

Mark, the things you're describing that you had done to recover from back pain are what world-class athletes like Mike Phelps did in the Olympics last cycle around in order to get cupping, Mark Sisson's back. The forward to the book is written by Lindsay Vaughn. Yes, I read that. The best U.S. female skier ever, and she uses traditional Chinese medicine for some of the pain from her multiple surgeries. tons of knee operations. So, I think when world-class athletes are trying out new techniques, when they're using lymphatic massage, it's because they find they can run faster, jump higher, shoot better, whatever it is. So, the way we learn in Western medicine is we take a thousand people and put them into a trial and figure out, but there are not a thousand similar people. There are all kinds of different kinds of people. Maybe that's not the right way to always figure out subtle changes when you're looking at a more of an ecosystem. because what the Chinese traditional medicine folks are doing is preparing the soil so.

You can plant the seeds. Yeah, yes. Yeah, so that's exactly right, Mehmet. And that's the whole concept of health creation, which is what functional medicine is. It's not the science of diagnosing and treating disease, it's the science of creating health. And when both of you are talking about our systems of thinking, whether it's lymphatic science or whether it's traditional Chinese medicine, that aren't about treating a specific condition, But about optimizing the function of your own healing mechanisms. And that's really what has the biggest impact on creating health for people. So now I sort of want to switch to you, Jerry, because can I call you Jerry?

I just want to make sure.

Yeah, please do. I mean, you're in trivial pursuit, so maybe I should call you Dr. Lamo.

I never get to call him Jerry.

Well, you get to call him dad, which is, you know, better. so tell us about what you've learned about how do we optimize our lymph system? Because then if it really is the key to optimal health, longevity and feeling good, because by the way, when your lymph system is full of crap, you feel like crap, right? So how have you found that we can enhance our lymph system? What are the, the dietary nutrient lifestyle factors and other factors that that you've discovered make a big difference?

Well, exercise is a big thing and it's not necessarily, you know, extreme exercise, but deep breathing, for example, walking, lifting light weights are all good exercise that will contract the muscles and pulse forward the lymphatics. So in the exercise realm, I think is very important with your deep breathing, with your with your movement of the muscles will increase lymphatic flow. The other thing is plenty of good pure water because you need, you know, there's a sal gel system there. The lymph can turn kind of sticky like a sal gel and you want to keep it pure and flowing so plenty of good clean water. As far as foods, the plants and the fruits. I'm not saying that you have to be a vegetarian, but you should have the majority thinking about plant-based, you know, a diet like, you know, I call it plant rich. Yeah, plant rich. We want to call it. And green leafy vegetables, ginger, turmeric, spices, things like that will always make, we have a recipe guide we had made there that is all lymphatic stimulating. So you keep the polyphenols, for example, in olive oil, polyphenols of olive oil are very important. And that's one of the things that we look for in pure virgin olive oil is the polyphenols. So you have green leafy vegetables, you have herbs and spices, you have onions, garlic, things like that will all increase the lymphatic flow. And then certainly the idea of stress modification to suppress the, suppress the, the, the, the, your epinephrine and things and this ACTH and stuff like that, which constricts the flow. So these things in spirituality, doing yoga and meditation and things like that, get the lymphatic flow going. Yoga is called like an internal massage. The plans of the yoga are to.

Increase.

The massage of the internal organs. So those are the things you can do. And there's a whole, you know, we have a chapter on meditation and yoga. We have a chapter on exercise and a whole bunch of recipes. that you can use and we tasted some of them and they're pretty good, aren't they, Memet? We tried it. I think those are epigenetic. Those are things you can do to change your gene, change what the genes produce. And it's important to do that, things we have control of. And once we understand why we're doing it, I think we will apply it more fervently and we'll have better control of our health. Yeah.

You mentioned yoga, and I think yoga is one of those things that's sort of underappreciated for its effect on lymph flow. And, I created a detox program years ago, and I work with a yoga teacher to create a lymph yoga program to actually help move lymph through the body. There's twisting, there's bending, and all the massaging you do, it's really one of the most powerful tools, I think, aside from just walking and regular exercise, but it really can be a powerful factor. And, you mentioned the spices and the polyphenols. We don't use them much in this country. It's just amazing to me most of our food is so awful and bland. It's flavored with salt, sugar, fat, additives, and chemicals. I just got back from Turkey where you're from Mehmet and I went to the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul. It was just like a incredible kaleidoscopic bonanza of colors and spices, and I brought some of them back with me that are just used every day as part of their cuisine. And we don't do that here. But those cultures really have understood the role of these things in our diet as health promoting factors. And the olive oil you mentioned.

Where.

Your dad, I guess, had an olive oil orchard, and I was being schooled on the ways in which you have to actually maximize the polyphenol content. because most people, when they pick olives, they shake the tree and then it falls to the ground and they pick them up and then they smoosh them and they get olive oil. They have them hand-picked. Every olive is hand-picked so it doesn't hit the ground and start to become acidic and lose its polyphenol content. So, I mean, we have such an amazing world we live in with all these tools, with all these foods, with all these spices, with all these potential therapies that we don't take advantage of that help enhance our health. and I think that if people just pay a little attention to what does mess up their lymph system and what enhances their lymph function, their health and their life will be a lot better, right?

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

So, do you have a daily lymph practice or how do you think about incorporating into your life? I mean, there are so many things we have to do, right? Eat right, meditate, exercise, but how do you start to make simple changes that could help people say, okay, I'm going to do this because this is.

Well, I, yeah, I, I, what, at my, my age, I'm, I'm limited to walking on, walking of three miles an hour for a mile or two in the mornings. And then I lift five pound weights just to get them so, so I can play golf with this guy. Otherwise he tries to embarrass me, you know?

Oh, what do you mean? He's not, he's not competitive. He's, I've never seen.

Hold a second. Let's be clear here.

Dad is.

Four years old and for any golfers out there, he shot his age two weeks ago.

Oh, wow.

And then, okay, that was the warm up. The next weekend we played my dad and I against my two brothers in law and we beat them, which is unheard of.

Wow.

And then as he hit the winning putt, winked at them with great joy in his eyes. So I knew that you were the winner.

Well, I might achieve hitting my age when I'm maybe 140.

Exactly.

Like most of them. Good. Good golf.

Well, that's the thing is that these common ailments that you're talking about, that that was the thing through, I mean, they exist because we don't have good solutions for them, right? So, if we had a great solution for libido, and there are some pharmaceuticals obviously that we can start using now, especially for women, but the Chinese say goji berries, nuts, Siberian ginseng, they have their game plan, like li-chi berries, which are like, you know, li-chi that fruit.

Is sort of reminds you of something.

It looks like testicles. Things like sleep, the Chinese use Kanji. They use a lot of Kanji, which is a grain, but they also use massage. And the main tip for massage is it stimulates lymphatic flow, which Dad showed and others have proven. You massage your feet, you stimulate thoracic duct lymph flow. So that's very hard to even connect those two structures. How does your feet affect lymphatic drug flow in your chest. On the other hand, the Chinese do acupressure and acupuncture in the feet and they can stimulate parts of the brain that coincide with that spot. So, they're clearly connections between parts of our body that we don't understand with the traditional Western model that you and I, all three of us participated in. It doesn't mean they're not right.

We haven't discovered them yet. We will one day, but why wait? No, it's so true. It's so true. I think the ways in which these ancient systems have developed models for maintaining health and optimizing health and creating health is so foreign to how the three of us were trained in medical school, which was find the disease, kill the disease, and then move on. That was it. And, it's exciting that you both are coming at this in a different way that help us understand a new way of dealing with some of the challenging conditions that we suffer from. and I think fatigue is another one that people have. And I think fatigue is probably really connected to lymph flow because fatigue is connected to the toxic burden into inflammation and oxidative stress. And if your lymph is not working.

It'S hard to function with that. And a hot bath will also stimulate lymphatic flow most likely. It also happens to be the foundation of traditional Chinese medicine treatment of depression and fatigue. So if you Google, right, if everyone listening out there by a computer, Google Why am I? It will auto complete so tired. It will do it. I mean, that's amazing.

The first seven entries are all gonna be tired.

Right? But why am I sounding like a philosophical, a spiritual quest? You know, it's done. Why am I will auto complete on Google so tired or so exhausted? You know, because that's the number one thing we search.

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, you mentioned a lot of things, Jerry, that were good, but there are a few things you didn't really talk about. Traditional Chinese medicine has Tai Chi, which I think is an interesting form of exercise that I imagine because of the kinds of motions in there does move lymph around quite a bit.

Well, I believe the problem was once you start thinking this way, everything is expressed in the lymphatic clearance. And the fact of the matter is there's no question that Tai Chi can can get us into positions like yoga does, sort of. It doesn't look like you're going to anywhere, but internally the lymphatics are being massaged and milked and there's no obstruction to them. The other important thing is the spasm of the lymphatics is significant because with cortisol and epinephrine and stress, they go into spasm. So consequently, It's not going, nothing's going anywhere. So, relaxing like in Tai Chi or yoga, it will increase the flow.

Now, that's something I didn't know, that your actually lymph vessels have muscles, smooth muscles. I thought they were just passively massaged by your own muscles, by regular muscles to get the flow back, but that's fascinating. So, they're basically listening to your thoughts.

They have a peristalsis.

They're listening to your thoughts. And if you're stressed, they're not happy.

Exactly. I mean, they have their own peristalsis. They have nerves ending sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves going into the brain and sending signals out both protein, you know, signals and nerve signals to instruct the rest of the body whether they want to release complement or, you know, general inflammatory response from the liver. So they're in touch with all these organs. That's the beauty of the lymphatics. It's not just doing one thing and having the brain respond. And the other thing you were talking about was the skin. There's a lot of lymphatics right in the skin and also right in the other skin we have, which is the GI epithelium. because there's more lymphatics in the GI tract than there is anywhere else in the body. There's more endocrine than there is in any other endocrine organ. There's more neural than there is in the spinal cord. So these are things that we don't recognize, but the lymph integrates that. It's leading the symphony because it does communicate with every other a system, you see.

That's amazing. So you've talked about a lot of things that can really help what you eat, polyphenols, a plant-rich diet, walking and exercise, yoga, stress reduction, meditation, you know, phytochemicals, all these great massage. I'm pretty lazy, so I actually want to ask you about a few things that I do that I think might be good. And I, and so what I do is I, I basically like to take a steam and an ice bath. and they get really, really hot and then ice cold. Is that good?

Yeah, evidently the BDNF and things like that get increased when you do that. And the fact is that using a sauna, for example, will draw out toxins through your sweat. That all comes from lymphatic cooperation with these cells to get the extra fluid. to get you sweating on your skin. So, it all has to be in accordance with a systematic approach to it.

And massage is my other favorite thing.

Oh, yeah.

We usually just lay there. Tell us the difference between about the difference between regular massage and lymphatic massage. Does regular massage work or do you have to do special lymphatic massage? What is lymphatic massage?

Lymphatic massage is very light. you don't press hard like we usually do with them. And so, but it's always directed towards the heart. It's always directed upwards towards that. And, you know, when we were doing experiments years ago, we would cannulate the animal. I don't, you know, it was dog animals. We don't do that anymore, but we used to cannulate the lymphatic duct. to measure the flow. And when things slowed down, all we had to do is massage the back of the neck of the dog and it would just increase multiple.

Yeah.

So we know, in fact, there are papers that show lymphatic flow with massage in animal lab scientific papers. So it's very productive.

Now, if you just get a regular massage, does that work?

Regular massage works great. I mean, lymphatic massage, people It's our specialists in that they do that, for example, things like macroglia when some of these kids, unfortunate kids, have enlarged tongues and stuff, they say they can help their speech by lymphatic massage, reducing the size of the tongue that is interfering with the normal speech.

That's really, really impressive. So we have a whole new thing to think about. But the good news is, the good news is, is that the things we have to do for our lymphatic system are the same things we have to do to basically treat everything else, to keep our heart healthy and our brain healthy and prevent cancer and deal with the energy and fatigue and stress. So it's really, it's beautiful. You don't have to add a whole bunch of new things, but there are new things. One of the surprising new things in your book that people maybe haven't heard of, that will help them to enhance the function of their limb system.

Well, I think, you know, and I, Ted Spiker, the professional writer who helped, he kind of dumbed this down for me. I kind of put in words that may not be the easiest thing to read, and he wrote it out nicely. So, the idea is that it's important to get, for example, these inflammatory setups that by leaving a toxin on your tissue too long, not only does it delay the healing of that, but it also prevents the cells coming in that reparative ones too. So that what's interesting to me is that we have this inflammatory situation that can be can be changed by things like NAC, N-Acetyl Cysteine, can be changed by antioxidative stress. So what impressed me with the research is that in fact, oxidative stress causes bad problems in our tissue and that certain certain supplements, I want to say, can help obviate that and get our tissue back to health.

That's great. So there's things you can take also that would be helpful.

What are. Yeah.

Besides enacetylcysteine, which is actually one, I think one of the most important things we can do both for, for just General Health, for detoxification, for inflammation, oxidative stress and even helping with COVID Yeah. What else have you found that.

Well, like, let me give you an example. Teri is still being. Terastilbine is like resveratrol, but it's about, it's four or five times more absorbable and it's the stuff in the blueberries that you get, the terastilbine, and it's so you can get, take the terastilbine and get an antioxidative effect. You take Resveratrol, Quercetin, things like that. Those are all in that same flavon polyphenol family, you know? And then what's interesting is, one of the reasons I got interested in this, there's a chemical called Daphne, Daphne Daphne. It's 40 years old. It's made in France. It's sold for varicose veins and hemorrhoids. If you look at what it does, it does the same thing in the venous system that we need to do in the arterial system. And what is it? This miracle drug is got diosmin and hesperidin, two flavonoids, that's all it is.

That you plant compounds.

This plant compounds, exactly.

Amazing, miracle, miracle. Well, this is incredible. I think everybody needs to get a copy of your book, Lymph and Longevity, the Untapped Secret to Health. It's available now everywhere you get your books. And I think you will not be sorry. And I think, Amen, I just want to spend the last few minutes of the podcast talking about Yin Yang and you. Because for me, the origin of my thinking about health and disease was from studying ancient Chinese texts, the Yellow Emperor's classic, you know, internal medicine textbook of Chinese medicine that was written thousands of years ago that I read in college. helped me to sort of think about how diseases begin, how the body's organized in a different way. And, it really, in a way, was the foundation of me leading towards functional medicine and it allowed me to actually be in Western Medical School without being too brainwashed. And, I understood there was a bigger framework. So, how have you sort of gotten more into this as you sort of learned about it? And, And what are the sort of take homes that you want to share with people about how traditional Chinese medicine can intersect with traditional Western medicine?

Well, one very visual response, and I'll show it on the screen for anyone who's watching this, but I'll send you a picture of this. But this is from a page early in the book, and you can see it's a tongue and an ear, and it's designed to show you that there's a reflection of every part of your body on the tongue and likewise on the ear. If you go into a Chinese facility, they'll have you stick your tongue out and then they will diagnose you based on that. Now, my first exposure to this, Mark, it was 1993. I was just finishing my training. No, 1992. I wasn't even done yet. I remember this because I was uncertain what I was doing. And Dad took me to China with him. Now, Dr. Lam is an iconic figure over there because early on, he was operating at a major center in the US that some of the Chinese leading physicians were allowed to go train in. Remember, this is back in the 80s when they, you know, you couldn't get out of the country. So they'd all come and trained under him. So they all admired him. He treated them with respect. And they weren't doing bypass surgery at the time in China. No, because no one was, no one had bypass disease. They were eating, you know, Chinese food that that year was free of saturated fats, not a lot of sugar. They were eating healthy meals. And they were all, as you mentioned, their mouth suits riding their bikes to work.

Right.

Everything that you experienced in 1984, I experienced six, seven years later. And so, I was sitting there and I went to a hospital that was a traditional Western hospital, but it also had an Eastern hospital element to it. And, if you went in and went to the West, you went to the operating suite where I was teaching them bypass surgery ostensibly. If you went to the Eastern wing of the hospital, they had thousands of people waiting in line. So, we're a billion and a half people. Everything's big. But, they're waiting in line. You step up to the front, you stick your tongue out, They look at all the subtleties of your tongue. Is there a coating? What kind of a coating? Is it beefy red?

Things that in the West, we don't think about.

Is there a crack? Is there a shape? Is there scalloping? All that matters. And you think about it, if everyone sticks their tongue out now, looks in the rear view mirror or the bathroom mirror, wherever you happen to be, don't stare if you're driving. But, you know, the tongue's shapes are all different and why would we ignore that as a clue? Why would you not want to take that into account when you're figuring out? So they would look at the tongue. then they check your pulse. And as you know, the pulse is much different. In America, we check the pulse to see if it's regular. But we don't get into the subtleties of it too often. Sometimes in a crisis, you might look for a thready pulse or some other subtlety, but most doctors don't know anything about pulses. We're not taught it. So in China, they put three fingers on the pulse. They look at subtleties like how fast it goes up, how fast it goes down. Is it a flat top or a pointy top? You know, all these things like a mountain range might be described by someone who knew about mountains. and so all this subtlety would come together and they'd start diagnosing how those five elements that I described to you earlier. We walked you through this in the book in a non-intimidating way so you actually understand the philosophy of traditional Chinese medicine taught by the world leaders. So they're not, people know things really well, can make them accessible. If you don't know it that well, it gets confusing and that's when people tell me, oh, it's confusing, but you really are saying you don't really understand.

It all the way.

Einstein didn't think physics was confusing. and they're not the Einsteins, I get it, but this stuff, if you understand it well, it becomes come alive. And so that experience steeled me for a lifelong interest in how the Chinese people treat their ailments amongst themselves. And I think that as we learn more about the parts of traditional Chinese medicine that can be added to Western medicine, so again, it's not alternative, it's complementary. Use them together. Depending on what your problem is, you want both. I mentioned libido earlier. There are medications that can help with erectile dysfunction. There are medications that can help the female brain with libido. But a lot of times it's more subtle than that. Sometimes you're better off taking Siberian ginseng and leechy nuts. It's even richer in the GI system because there's so many unknowns in our intestinal system where there are more bacteria, there are 10 times more bacteria than cells in our body. that it makes sense that a holistic approach where you don't say, I'm going to snipe for shoot those two trillion bacteria doesn't work so well. Maybe we're better off saying the bamboo shoots or bergamot and our congees a better sort of gentle nudge if you need something more urgent because you have ulcerative colitis or celiac disease. Well, then obviously we have more aggressive approaches that can be used.

But shouldn't we nudge first before we push? Absolutely. And, you know, there's a lot of techniques in traditional Chinese medicine from qigong to tai chi to acupuncture to Gua Sha to cupping to massage and obviously the herbal medicines. But, you know, what really struck me when I went there was that they really in the culture understand that food is medicine. And actually in the Chinese language to say, you know, we say, I'm gonna take my medicine. They don't say that. They say, I'm gonna eat my medicine. Chir yao, chir yao, chir yao, like, Chir fa means eat rice. Chir yao means eat your medicine. That's literally how they talk about I.

Learned a lot from language, right? Eskimo has like 50 words for white.

That's right. And I think what you're describing is that, you know, it's easy to dismiss, oh, this is just, you know, a bunch of sort of in sort of pagan traditional stuff that may, you know, just may not really be that scientific. But, you know, when you see it in action and when you see the results and the outcomes, and I personally have experienced it over and over again, you can't ignore it just because we don't have a billion dollars of randomized trials on it doesn't mean it's not worth incorporating because one, it's low risk, two, it's relatively inexpensive, and three, it makes sense now given a lot of our scientific understanding about how the body is truly organized. So, I'm really glad you did this and bring it to light. Your voice on this is going to be important because I think we We need all the tools we can get. We are a very sick society. Like you said, you know, what is it, 83% of Americans don't feel good, 88% metabolically unhealthy. I mean, we're 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the COVID cases and deaths. Why is that? It's because we don't know how to take care of ourselves. And both of your books are essentially roadmaps for how we engage in self-care and help create a better foundation for health, a better soil, as you said. And, that's really the whole work of my life, which is functional medicine, is clear what you've been doing. And, I think it's awesome. It's really awesome. I thank you both so much for the work you do. Any final thoughts you want to share about lymph or Chinese medicine?

Well, let me commend you for stretching our brains. I appreciate your hosting, Dad, and I love having you on the show. And, a lot of the wisdom that you've taught America I think, has been on the cutting edge. So thanks for all that service.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It's really good seeing you again and speaking with you and we appreciate the time we spent. Thank you, Mark.

Okay, well, absolutely. Everybody right now go to Amazon or your bookstore or wherever you get your books and make sure you get both of these books, Lymph and Longevity, the Untapped Secret to Health and Yin-Yang and you, Biohacking with Asian Codes, are available now. And I love the title, Biohacking with Asian Codes. That sounds so fun. I'm gonna check it out. And share this podcast with everybody because everybody needs to hear about things that they probably don't know that are gonna make their lives better. Let us know how you benefited from fixing your lymph system or Chinese medicine. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we will see you next time. on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman.

Thanks for tuning in to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I wanna tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to DrHyman.com/picks to sign up. That's DrHyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health. and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.

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