You've Been Detoxing Wrong This Whole Time ft. Dr. Rahm, Dr. Kim & Dr. Peatross | TUH #289

Hey guys, welcome back to The Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, and today we're talking about one of the most misunderstood mistakes in the entire detox world. But before that, I want to ask you something. If you started a detox and felt worse, not better, What did you assume? That it was working? That you finally were pushing the toxins out? What if it wasn't progress? What if it was your body just telling you it's not ready? Every doctor I trust says the same thing. Detox order matters more than detox intensity. Skip a step and you don't heal faster, you just get sicker on a new timeline. So today, 3 doctors who learned this the hard way, not in a textbook, in their own bodies. We're starting with Dr. Jessica Petross. She walked out of conventional medicine to chase root causes. She'll tell you that the one rule she broke early in her career and never again is you cannot detox someone who's still living in an environment that's poisoning them. Let's get into it.

And I would say my story exemplifies the saying from Rumi, "The cracks are where the light enters." And so I started out training as a conventional medical doctor. I went to school at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, went to residency there. I did internal medicine and I was board certified. And I only worked in the hospital and I learned a lot. I triaged and I kept, care of a lot of sick patients, but eventually there started to be cracks in the system for me. I started asking questions that people didn't like. I started saying, you know, why am I discharging people on 40 different medications? That's not health to me. The doctors should be really ashamed of the food that the hospital system has had contracts with.

I think they'd be ashamed if they knew.

They don't know. Some of them don't know, and I will echo what you said. If I was in an emergency situation, I broke a leg, I'd head straight to the emergency department. No doubt. Thank God for acute medicine. But in chronic medicine, they kind of miss the mark. The mark. They did. And so I started to see that in the hospital system. And I started to ask questions. Maybe they didn't know. What would happen if I said something? And it wasn't— they labeled me a disruptive physician. It didn't turn out so well. And the last straw, actually, I had been complaining about things. And the last straw was I wrote, this patient that's being admitted to our service— I wrote this in the electronic medical record— has been on a proton pump inhibitor called Pravacid for 8 years when the package insert clearly says 6 months to 1 year. And I wrote that in the chart. And the primary care doctor who was an outpatient doctor called the hospitalist, lead hospitalist, to complain about me and said she's a liability rather than him being the liability for the medication he had this patient on for years. And they sat me down and they said, listen, if you don't stop doing this, you can't work for us. And I'm kind of knee-jerk reactive sometimes, especially when I don't feel the ethics align with me. And I said, okay, I quit. And one particular patient sticks out in my mind here at Whitaker Wellness. Actually, I was there when Dr. Mark Filadé was there who does a lot in mold and Lyme. Lyme. And it was the beginning of my career in functional medicine. I didn't know a lot about those topics. And a patient came in who had heart palpitations at night and his thyroid was all messed up and he had severe anxiety and all these other kind of just very vague catch-all symptoms. And I was new, so I asked Dr. Mark Filadelfi to see him for me as a second opinion. And he came back and said, "This guy has Lyme and I missed it." And I didn't even think to test for it, and by God, I never missed it again. I'll tell you that, that was my lesson.

So, you know, you, you do this test, and let's say that you find a mold species. Um, you know, I've been told that the cardinal rule, um, that you can't violate, and sort of nothing else matters in, in the detox protocol, is that a person has got to remove themselves from the toxic environment first.

Avoidance, first rule of environmental medicine, 1,000%. And I will tell you, based on genetic predispositions, how full their toxin bucket is, how stressed out they are, there are a number of multifactorial reasons people may not do well in mold. But I can sometimes open people's drainage in mold if they're more of a warrior genotype. Okay. If they have HLA-DR, which is a haplogeneic haplotype that is on the— like a little sticker that's on the immune cells. These people don't recognize pathogen proteins as well, so they don't recognize Lyme, they don't recognize mold spores as well, so they can't remove them from the body. And they cause sickness in these people. I mean, really deathly ill sickness. Wow. And so I definitely can't get open the drainage if they're still in the exposure.

So first stage is identify diet, and the second stage is get them out of that environment or remediate the environment they're in, because nothing that you will be able to do is going to help them if they're just continually inoculating themselves.

Right. But in general, first and foremost, like I mentioned, the nervous system regulation and taking care of histamine, which is so many people, I can't have their body just like so confused with chemical communicators that it's not going to take a protocol. So I have to calm the inflammation down. I have to give them antioxidants and basic building foundational nutrients so that they can fight. Calm down everything. Then when they're sleeping a little bit better, they feel a little bit better, they feel less anxious, less itchy and puffy, that's ready to open drainage. And that can take a month or two. If you're closed up and you tell me you can't poop every day or you can't sweat in a sauna within 10 to 15 minutes, and people tell me they can't sweat, that's not normal. Your bile and liver should be moving properly. You should be sleeping a decent amount. And I have to tune that up because if I can open those drainage pathways, then when I start killing and binding, they can drop. When I'm binding, binding. That's like a mop-up toxins. They can drop it out of their body, out of their bowels, out of their liver, out of their sweat. And if that's not open and I start a killing protocol, we're not going to be friends.

That's exactly what we've experienced. I'm so glad you're talking about this because most people think I just take something and I start detoxing, and, and then the— and, and the problem is the detoxification process can make you much sicker than the—

that's right—

the process of— because at least your body has hidden it and it's in the tissues and it's contained it. And, you know, it's having a low-grade inflammatory response. Your immune system is probably in low-grade fight, what's manageable, and then all of a sudden it flares up. Dr. Petros just gave you the rule: get out of the toxic environment first. Nothing else works until you do that. But removing the mold is only step one. What happens inside your cells once the exposure is already there? That's where it gets interesting. Dr. John Kim found out the hard way— not through a patient, through his own heart attack at 33 years old. Doctors handed him a statin,. He wanted an answer. What he found was Bartonella, mold, mercury, and a nervous system that had been running from all of it for years. He built a method most doctors skip. He calls it the Encore Method, and it starts with a step almost nobody takes seriously.

And I end up having to be in the cardiac ICU unit staring at a wall for 3 days wondering, how did this happen? And then I had this overweight physician coming in and telling me, to cut out all meat, cholesterol, and everything else. They put me on atorvastatin, 80mg. And I was like, this is nonsense. There's something wrong here. She did a blood work. And then after a month and a half later, that's when we've tested positive for, uh, Aspergillus antibodies, IgM, IgG, Bartonella infection, mycoplasma pneumoniae, Epstein-Barr, mercury poisoning on top of parasitic issues. I lived in a very moldy house to begin with growing up, right? And then also lived in a very stressful environment growing up as well. That's when I already had an existing problem to begin with. I had anxiety left and right. I could not sleep that well when I was in my 20s and 30s. And then when I actually had that heart attack, that's when I stopped to listen and figuring out, all right, what's going on? And I got the answer. Now, it took me about 2 years to clear it out, but it was a very tough process. And that was the moment that I found out how Cellular integrity is so vitally important for your health.

You call it, um, which I thought was, uh, absolutely genius, the Encore Method. The environment, the nervous system, cellular integrity, which virtually nobody talks about. Um, you know, Dr. Pompa and there's a few other, few other leaders in this area, optimized detox and rebalancing in the microbiome. I think what happens is most people skip the ENCO and go right to the R and start balancing the microbiome.

Correct.

So The, the reason that I came up with this particular Encore method was after learning and diving into the whole cell danger response method. When you look at Dr. Robert Naviaux's work of cell danger response, it's very complex and it's very difficult for you to take that information and put into clinical use of it. And so I was just thinking like, what can I do to utilize this correctly for people who are dealing with biotoxin issues? Like if it was me back in 2015, if I had a particular methodology, what would I have done differently? The first thing was basically environment factor there, right? Environment. If you are stuck in the same environment that made you sick, you're not going to get better.

No chance. I always say that, right?

You cannot out biohack on that part, right? The environment is the best thing that you could actually end up fixing. And this part is often difficult. The second thing I would also recommend, if you could hire the same people that does it, great, but building biologists. Why? Non-native EMF. Why is that? And this— I'm a strong believer in this part now more and more. The reason being is why is it that people are getting sicker and sicker even though we have advanced medicine and such? I mean, you could talk about food, the glyphosate and all these things, but when you look at the bombarding issue dealing with the cellular stress that we're dealing right now with non-native EMF, it's over than anything we could actually fathom now, right? Compared to what it was 100 years ago, it's much, much greater.

Okay, Dr. Kim just laid out the sequence: environment first, nervous system next, cellular repair before you ever even touch the gut. That's the framework. Here's what it looks like when nobody hands you a framework at all. Dr. Christina Ram was 19 years old. She fainted in a movie theater. She woke up and couldn't remember her own name. No functional medicine doctor, no detox plan, just a diagnosis nobody believed and a body that was falling apart in real time. What she did next with nothing but curiosity and her mother's background in herbs became the foundation for everything she teaches today.

I was at a movie theater with my boyfriend at the time and one of my sorority sisters. I mean, and they're in a bunch of friends and I fainted. And they got me to wake up, but I couldn't. I had such a high temperature and I couldn't remember my name. And I still remember my father. I love my father. So if he's watching this, I just, I love it. He didn't believe it was a real diagnosis because remember at the time, no one really understood it. And then you're right, they were throwing everything at me. But even at that age, so I was younger growing up in a small town where my mother the Native American background and then the Eastern European background, like the, I think on both sides of my families with herbs and vitamins and everything they wanted. They didn't really believe in taking us to a doctor. They believed in us naturally treating things. So they threw everything at me. I looked like a completely different person. I was swollen all over. I was miserable.

Corticosteroids will do that terribly.

Yeah, they had me on everything. It's a mixture, in my opinion, of, taking different steps nutritionally, even sometimes pharmaceutically, but spiritually, emotionally, and mentally believing in yourself. And from my perspective, I really started studying things that could detox my body, not really having any support from a medical community, but I feel like there's a parasitic component to that because your spiral sheets, and you're right, they're hiding everywhere, trying to come out. So, you know, with cancer cells, there, once you have a cancer diagnosis, you can go into remission, but unless you're constantly, and this is just my opinion, detoxing and keeping that, the communication down between cancer cells or the communication down between spirochetes or Lyme disease, it rears its ugly head.

I totally agree with you. You know, there's an emerging theory in aging called immunofatigue, and it's the assumption that You know, progressively as we age, the immune system gets more and more and more overwhelmed. And things like Lyme disease especially, as well as mold, mycotoxins, viruses, parasites, just distract the immune system. The immune system's over here, you know, trying to deal with the Lyme.

So how is it supposed to protect you? Your P450 system, your IL-2, IL-4 pathways are like rammed up by trash, right? Yeah. So how is it supposed to work? We've got to understand Your body can only handle so many things. So what are we gonna do to change that? And when you buy a new refrigerator, a new air conditioner for a place like your beautiful home, you don't have to worry about it at first, maybe, but after 10 years or 20, and our earth is, our land, air, and water has gotten older, and our bodies have had to deal with all these outside, like Lyme's disease. So that's personally, what I've asked doctors and what I've treated myself with, along with turmeric curcumin. I think you probably know this about me. I believe in zeolites and silicas to detox.

I'm a huge believer. By the way, those are gut binders, yeah.

Yeah, 'cause you're trying to get it all out, right? But then another thing for me is every time I look at detox, I'm focusing, I'm trying to focus on how do we detox people while we're also providing what they need for their body? Which if you look at like black cumin seed, turmeric curcumin, If you look at different types of zeolites, which you act— you add like a trace mineral component and vitamins, then you can make sure when you're cleaning the system, you're also supporting the cell so they're restoring back to who they should be.

I mean, I see it all the time. I mean, if you don't get rid of the exhaust, it will back up and blow the engine. 3 doctors, 3 bodies that broke down before anyone would listen. From Dr. Petros, you cannot detox your way out of an environment that's still poisoning you. Remove the exposure first. Calm the nervous system second. Open the drainage third. Skip that order and detox makes you sicker, not better. From Dr. Kim, a heart attack at 33 wasn't a cholesterol problem. It was mold, Bartonella, and mercury in his body that he'd been fighting silently for years. Environment, nervous system, cellular integrity, optimize detox, rebalance the gut, in that order. Skip straight to the gut, and you're rebuilding on a foundation that's still toxic. From Dr. Ram, at 19 she lost her memory and nearly lost herself. Nobody handed her a protocol. She built one out of necessity, and it saved her life. 3 different bodies, same lesson. The order you detox in matters more than what you detox with, and that's just science.