I Made a Documentary

You know, I first began to discover the mysteries of the brain when I personally got sick. And I went from being very healthy, riding my bike 100 miles a day, being able to memorize 30 patients charts and dictate them all flawlessly at the end of the day, to barely being able to walk up the stairs and not remembering where I was at the end of a sentence when I got there. And it happened almost overnight. And it happened as I realized, because my whole system broke down from a number of insults that I wasn't aware of. The broken brain docuseries will show you the new landscape of how brain function, mind, mood, and behavior are created by changes in your body and your biology. I want to show you how I use that information to cure or dramatically improve the rising tide of broken brains, including conditions like depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, psychosis, attention deficit disorder, autism, dementia, Parkinson's disease, and much more.

For the most part, when you look at statistics for all types of neurodegenerative diseases, they're all on the rise. I mean, there's some stats that are saying that one out of eight children in the US have some type of developmental delay.

In terms of disability. Depression is the top cause of disability worldwide. 40 million Americans have a diagnosable anxiety disorder. There's now 60,000 overdoses in the opioid crisis. There were 40,000 suicides last year. These number are growing.

You know, if your brain is functioning well, if you have a sense of vitality and optimism and your cognition is clear, you just have to feel that everything is falling into groove, that all parts of the brain are focused in the same direction.

I think most neurologists would probably have concluded you're born with X and that's sort of what you got until you die. Oh, boy, is that not true. Your brain learns and takes in and gathers new information and learns new tastes and skills until literally the moment you die.

We are at the forefront of the evolution of neurology, like what is possible with healing in the brain. I am so excited for that. Everybody should be doing these things because we don't want to wait until someone develops Alzheimer's or dementia, because that's kind of like the end game, right? We want to make sure we catch those things earlier on.

But.

But the exciting thing is, even if it is endgame, there's things we can do to reverse that. We can make changes in lifestyle, we can exercise more, we can connect more with our loved ones. All those things have been proven to actually slow, stop, and even reverse any type of neurodegeneration you can't separate what's.

Going on in the brain with what's going on in the body. In fact, most of the problems I see that affect us emotionally, psychologically or in the brain per se. The problem is actually not coming from the brain. The problem is often coming from the gut or somewhere else.

The anxiety was so bad that I couldn't get out of bed. I would have panic attacks, I would sweat profusely and I was scared for my life. I was lucky. One day I was watching TV and I came across Dr. Myrick Hyman's clinic. So I went online and did some research and that's it. I don't know what happened. Something just hit me and I said, this is going to help me.

Brain function is directly influenced by what you eat, by nutritional deficiencies and allergens, hormonal imbalances, infections, toxins and stress.

What has happened is that we are practicing medicine that's a century out of date, basically. While things have move forward in Silicon Valley and things have moved forward with iPhones and look at what you can do today that you couldn't do even 10 or 15 years ago, medicine is still being practiced an old fashioned way where we look for a specific diagnosis. We ask, what, what is it? Is it measles, is it a broken bone, you know, is it rheumatic fever, what is it? And then for each thing, what it is, we get the right, right prescription, we give them the right thing to do it. That's not the way physiology works. So what we need to do then is to ask in 21st century medicine, instead of to ask what it is, to ask why it is.

Most people don't realize all the anxiety, the depression, the challenges that they have from this environment because it's there all the time. But the problem with stress to your learning, to your brain, when you have cortisol, when you're producing adrenaline, it's good for fight or flight, something physical. But it's not good if you need to take a test. It's not good if you need to remember someone's name. It's not good if you need to give a presentation at work to of people, because stress literally shuts down parts of your brain, so you can't learn it really well.

We have a very different way of thinking in functional medicine, which is actually looking at how the body affects the brain. And that is really a fundamental insight that I had once I started treating patients for their physical problems, their mental problems got better, their ADD went away, their autism improved. Their depression went away, their anxiety went away, their panic attacks went away. And I thought, wow, this is something that nobody's talking about, how our body affects our brain. And the first thing to do when you have mental illness, when you have add, when you have depression, dementia, any of these things, is to start to treat the foundation.

The change was absolutely in weeks. I mean, like, maybe even within two, three weeks, I was feeling, you know, much, much better. And I have to say that I have tremendous gratitude because it wasn't like I underwent heart surgery or something like that. But on the other hand, I had no life, and I was in, you know, really quite bad shape. And. And Dr. Hyman gave me back that life. I'm 68. I work full time. I'm not expecting to retire. And I can do that because I have my health.

When I started eating right, you know.

The clouds lifted, and I thought, wow.

And I was diagnosed with celiac.

It's like, wow, okay, this wasn't my fault. And it's getting better.

Patients always come to me and say, oh, you know, my doctor said it doesn't really matter what I eat, whether it's. Whether it's because they're having problems with their memory or their mood or their digestive system. And it's really because physicians have not been trained in the importance of nutrition. And we know that food is really powerful medicine. So there is a tremendous impact. Of course there is, in terms of what we eat and the health of our body. And we're really working hard with the Institute for Functional Medicine to get that message out there and to train physicians so that they can recognize that there is this important connection and they can start to use food as medicine.

Food is literally the most important health intervention that anyone can make. It's a collection of phytochemicals. Those are the chemicals that you find in plants. It's the fiber that has massive impact on things like gut microbiomes that have effects on neurotransmitters and inflammation. It kind of subsides lots of different barriers. It crosses the way we communicate with different people, our cultures, our ability to nourish ourselves is almost just one of the parts of how food has medicinal properties.

I weighed 300 pounds in my early 20s, and I started having really good success in my career. And I started having more and more problems with my brain where I just couldn't remember things and they weren't working. And after 20 years and a million dollars spent hacking myself, it comes down to the fact that I had muffin top. But I also had muffin in my brain, and it was just, what's that? Muffin top is that unfortunate thing that kind of hangs over. But it's all caused by inflammation. And when I went into the science, inflammation is always caused by the power plants in our body called the mitochondria. And by fixing those, you fix your brain, you fix your body, you change how you look, you get new pants, you get everything and fats.

At the center of that, I was on track to quite potentially becoming bedridden by my illness, potentially demented by my illness, Ms. reflexive pain was a big part of my illness, and that was getting more and more difficult to control. So I was worried that refractory pain was going to be a big factor. And so that's when I went back to reading the medical literature and would discover the ancestral health movement. I would discover vitamins and supplements, I would discover the Institute for Functional Medicine, and I would integrate all of that into a comprehensive diet and lifestyle program. That not only stopped my decline, which was pretty incredible, but to my amazement and the amazement of my physicians, was associated with a remarkable return of function.

The last 20 years of scientific research in the field of the brain and what makes it happy or sad, anxious or calm, focused or inattentive, remember or forget, has uncovered a few simple underlying factors that explain why things go wrong and how to fix them. But it can take more than 20 years for scientific findings like these to be incorporated into most physicians practices, and it may take even longer, since they threaten the very foundation of our scientific paradigm of disease. You don't have to wait another 20 years to take advantage of what we know now. What the last 20 years of scientific research has revealed is that our troubles with mood, behavior, attention, and memory don't come from bad luck or bad parenting or bad genes, but from imbalances in a few key underlying systems in the body. Helping people balance these key systems is the foundation of my medical practice. It is what I did to fix my broken brain, and it is how I have helped thousands of patients from all walks of life achieve a state of health they never dreamed possible.