This Virus Causes Cancer: The HPV Cure They’re Not Talking About | Dr. Doni Wilson

If I were to tell you there is a virus that both men and women most likely have, but don't know they have until it's too late. Men typically only find out they have it once they get cancer, and women only find out if they have it once they get a Pap smear. This is what we're gonna be talking about today on Everyday Ancestral. I'm your host, James Barry, and my next guest is Dr. Dani Wilson. She is a powerhouse of a naturopathic doctor, professional midwife, clinical nutritionist, bestselling author of Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health, and an internationally renowned speaker and thought leader in women's health. She, for over 24 years, has been on the cutting edge of healthcare, standing alone in her proven approach to helping women clear HPV, prevent cervical cancer, and transform their health naturally. Please welcome my next guest, Dr. Donni Wilson. You're a naturopathic doctor, a professional midwife, clinical nutritionist. Which came first?

It all kind of happened at the same time, actually. I'm kind of one of those people who dives in, you know, there's some, and sometimes I'm the kind of person who starts at the, at the shallow end and I tiptoe into the water. And there's other times where I jump off the diving board in my life and This was one of those times where it just became very clear to me. And, and I was only 21 years old when I decided I wanna become a naturopathic doctor. I wanna become a midwife. I wanna help women with their health. I wanna help humans in a different way than what I could observe in the standard medical system. So at age 21, I entered into naturopathic medical school and midwifery school at the same time.

What led you down that path of naturopathic medicine?

I would say it's because I grew up in a pharmacy. You see, my father was a pharmacist and he ran a chain of 1,200 pharmacies. So throughout my childhood, I was always in the pharmacy because we were always moving locations and I was observing the pharmaceutical industry from the time I was born. And then I worked in my father's pharmacy when I was in college, and I started to have these thoughts. It happens when we're in college, sometimes we're like, what do I wanna do with my life? And I was getting a pre-med degree, so I was taking all these science classes, which I really enjoyed. And at the same time, I started having this thought, wait a minute, what about nutrition? How does nutrients play a role? I was very curious based on my own health. I was having my own health issues. I had digestive issues like reflux and I had migraines and I had menstrual cramps. And I myself, every time I tried to take a medication from the pharmacy, I felt worse. Like I would have a reaction. I had reactions to birth control pills. I had reactions to medications that I, someone would take for migraines. I had reactions to the medications that were used to treat reflux. I couldn't take the medications. They were all causing side effects. And so I started really thinking, hey, what about, what could I change in my diet? Because I just started having those thoughts and experimenting it with myself, I decided, you know what? I'd like to take a nutrition class here. I'm taking a pre-med degree and I decided to take a nutrition class just as an elective. And I fell in love. I was like, this is amazing. I need to know more about nutrition. I wanna know about every vitamin, every nutrient, what they do in the body, how they can help us heal. And so I ended up getting a degree in nutrition alongside my pre-med degree. And that's when I started having the thought, wait a minute, I wanna go to a medical school that includes nutrition. I mean, it seemed like such an out-of-nowhere thought, but really it should be that way, right? Medical schools should include nutrition. But the truth is that most standard medical schools, the doctors come out with less than 15 hours of training in nutrition. So at that age, somehow I was like having these thoughts of, I wanna go to a medical school that teaches me nutrition. I must have said that out loud one day, and a friend of mine said, well, what about naturopathic medical school? Which I had never heard of. And I'm like, well, that sounds interesting. There was no Google at that time, so I couldn't just Google it. I had to drive there. So I had to go in my car, drive to Bastyr University in Seattle because I lived in Oregon at that time. I drove to Seattle, walked into the naturopathic medical school and said, I wanna study medicine that includes nutrition because I believe food is medicine. They must have just thought that I came from outer space or something, but they were like, Well, we do that here. You know, that's exactly what we do here. And so it was like a dream come true. I literally was like, I listened to my intuition and I found what I was looking for. And it was so clear to me at 21 years old, I was supposed to go to pharmacy school, James. I was entered into pharmacy school. I was supposed to start pharmacy school. And I called on day 1 of pharmacy school and said, I'm sorry, I'm not going to pharmacy school. I'm going to naturopathic medical school.

How did your dad handle this information? I mean, he, I imagine he might've been a little heartbroken cuz you're not following in his steps.

Yeah, he was. It was really tough. It was really tough for him, I think, to understand my decision because of course this is back in the '90s when this was much less known. My parents were afraid for my future, you know, is she choosing a career that's not gonna help support her through her life? And so they were really afraid for me and they were, they were not supportive of the decision, but I did it anyway. And I think that, you know, that's one thing about my personality is I tend to be someone who's, if I see something that makes sense and I feel it in my intuition, even if people around me are saying, Are you making the right choice? If it's clear to me, I'll choose it. And that's how I ended up going to naturopathic medical school. And I had, I had interned with a gynecologist during my pre-med studies as well. So I had spent a lot of time with a gynecologist in a hospital and in deliveries and all of the things that gynecologists do, surgeries. And it became very clear to me in that process that I wanted to become a midwife because I could see the midwives in the hospital and how they practiced, practiced differently than a Gynecologist, and I had the thought, I wanna become a midwife. And so that's how I ended up deciding, okay, I'm gonna become a naturopathic doctor and midwife. And I luckily found Bastyr University that offered both of those programs at the same time, which is, I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing all of that at the same time because by the time I finished 5 years later, I was completely exhausted and it took me time to recover from that because When you're training as a midwife, you're often up all night. I was training as a home birth midwife, so I was at home births all around the Seattle area, and it was beautiful and amazing, but also exhausting. And then after I graduated and I completed my degrees and my residency, I also did a residency at Bastyr University. By then I had gotten married and my now ex-husband got a job in New York. In publishing. And so I wasn't planning to move to New York, but at that time it was like, okay, I finished all of my training. And at that time he, he got a job here and we moved to New York. So I've been in, in the New York, Connecticut area ever since then.

Wow. Okay. So before continuing on your journey, what are like the 3 kind of things that you learned from the pharmacy industry since this is something we all face, right? We're all Enmeshed in phar— the pharmaceutical industry, whether we wanna be or not. So what are 3 things that you learned that are like not really known about in public?

One is that you have to be so careful with pharmaceuticals. If anything, even if you're taking an Advil, I would look at the other ingredients in the product. We're getting better at looking at other ingredients when we go to the grocery store. Right. You and I talked about that on the How Humans Heal podcast. So you gotta look at the back of the package and see what else is in there. I really recommend you do that also with anything you take from a pharmacy. They make it tiny font, and sometimes you actually have to pull it up on their website and get out a magnifying glass to look at the font. But you need to look at what are the other ingredients in your medications because they're often filled with Colors, fillers, waxes. Sometimes there's gluten in there and other things that you otherwise wouldn't want to put into your body are other ingredients in medications. And I find that a lot of times when I react to a medication or patients react to medications, it's because of the other ingredients in there. I really recommend people pay more attention to what's in there. Still, there's a, a lot of people who are kind of following the standard medical system as if that's the only option for their healthcare, right? Where it's like, oh, whatever the standard medical system says is what I'm gonna do. And kind of, we have our blinders on and that's what they want us to do. You know, since the Flexner Report, when they really made it seem as if conventional traditional standard medicine and standard protocols and whatever's covered by insurance is the only way or the right In reality, it's not the only way. We have so much else available to us for our health. So what happens is when you're in that mindset of this is my only approach and I'm gonna go to the doctor and I'm gonna get this pill or this prescription or this procedure that they offer in the standard medical system, that we just have to understand that it's a, it's also a business, right? Insurance is a business and these pharmaceutical companies are in business. And they're in business to sell more of these. Now, I'm stopping myself to say medications. My father, he was a pharmacist. He ran a drug store. These are drugs. These are legal drugs that are made by pharmaceutical companies in the pharmaceutical industry, and they have some approved uses, but they most all have Also some side effects, potential side effects, and many of them have a risk of dependency and withdrawal symptoms. And so I think it's really important for people to understand that because sometimes we just are so much wanting to get out of pain, right? Whether it's physical pain, emotional pain, right? We're either having neck pain, back pain, menstrual pain, or we're having emotional pain like anxiety and depression. We're so much wanting to get out of pain. That we're, we're gonna go to the doctor and say, give me whatever I can take to get out of pain. And what we have to do is stop just enough to say, wait a minute, am I really willing to put this substance into my body when it may have some side effects that affect other parts of my body and it may cause my body to become dependent on it? And then when I wanna stop taking it, there's withdrawal symptoms that can make me feel worse. And so I just really encourage people to think this all through before you just think that you only have this one option in your healthcare and to help you with pain.

It's a good point, you know, that we have been conditioned and taught to look at pharmaceuticals as medicine, but I think you're really welcoming us to question, well, what is medicine? So how would you define what medicine is?

For me, one of my best medicines is dancing. It's very clear to me that for my body, I need to be dancing on a regular basis in order for my body to feel good and to heal. And so medicine can come in many forms. It's not necessarily something that we swallow as a pill. It could be a tea. It can be our food. As we were talking about, our food can be our medicine. It can be being in nature. It could be being with our pets.

It could be being in community. Yeah. I really like what you're introducing here is that, you know, medicine is, is not just this kind of parallel or this very one-to-one thinking. It's very expansive and it's very specific to the person and to potentially the ailment, but that it's not a one-to-one relationship that even the ailment that you think, and this is what I hear you saying, is that even when you think, oh, I should be taking this red pill. Actually, the medicine could be movement. It could be just getting out of your house, that we have to expand our definition of what healing looks like.

Absolutely. Thank you for offering that way of looking at it and to say that it is unique to each of us. We're having this human experience, right? We're in these human bodies. And yet we're more than that. We're this energetic, even people would argue spiritual beings. existing in a human body. And we don't come with an instruction manual. We land in these human bodies without an instruction manual. It's not like a, a camera that comes with an instruction manual. We have to figure it out as we go. And even though we're all human, we know we have our genetic uniqueness. We also, we know that everything that we've been exposed to in our lifetime, what I refer to as stresses, right? It's, it's really from our environment. Whether that's from emotional exposures to toxins, to just daily stresses, those impact our genetic expression, and that determines how our bodies might respond and what medicines our bodies need. And so yes, we need to be really thinking more broadly about what is a medicine for each of us, and that it doesn't have to just be In a pill, in a bottle at the pharmacy.

Well, and I love that this is coming from the daughter of a pharmacist. That's so beautiful. So now you spent a lot of your career helping women clear HPV, prevent cervical cancer, and, you know, and just in general transforming health naturally. You mentioned even migraines. You support people with chronic migraines, stress levels. So let's dive into a few of those. Like for example, HPV. Can you talk a bit about that? Like, what is it and how should people be aware? Like, what are they looking for to know that that's what's going on?

I wanna emphasize 2 things that from what I was sharing with my training, 2 things is while doing all that training in naturopathic medicine and midwifery, while I was learning how to support women in labor, one of my big research topics, in fact, my re— my thesis was on how stress affects women in labor. And it was how understanding how stress impacts women in labor that then had me look at how does stress impact all of us, men and women and children, whether we're in labor or not. So that was part of that learning. And at the same time, I was helping a lot of women with abnormal pap smears because that's one thing that midwives do is pap smears also. Usually we only think of going to the gynecologist, but you can also go to a midwife or a naturopathic doctor to get a pap smear. And so I started doing a lot of work helping women when they get an abnormal pap smear report. And so through that process, a lot of my colleagues would refer more and more women to me because they knew that I was helping in that area. And so I started seeing thousands of women over the years with abnormal pap smears and high-risk HPV virus. And I started to see this parallel where as I was helping women to prevent cervical cancer, cuz that's really what we're doing with a pap smear is we're looking for early signs of cervical cancer or cervical cancer, if it's there already, I started seeing this parallel with this impact of stress. What I started seeing is the more I help women recover from stress, the better they were able to prevent cervical cancer. So back to your question about HPV. So with HPV, we talk about it as if it's a single virus. Actually, there's over 150 different types of HPV virus.

Wow.

Of those 150 different types, some of them are low risk. And when we say low risk, it means they're not associated with cancer risk. HPV virus, or human papillomavirus, is associated with warts. Like even if you think of warts on your hands or feet or genital warts, those are the low risk types of HPV. And then there's the high risk types of HPV that we know of at this point in time. There's 13 types of high-risk HPV out of the 150. And these 13 high-risk types are associated with cancer risk, including 99% of cervical cancer is caused by high-risk HPV. But it's also associated with vaginal cancer, vulvar cancer, as well as anal cancer and oral cancer. And it's also associated with cancer in men. It can be anal, penile, or oral cancer. In fact, 70% of head and neck cancer is caused by high-risk HPV virus. So this is something that a lot of times we're not thinking about it, but it's in the background because when it comes down to it, the way we get exposed to high-risk HPV virus is by sexual activity through genital contact is how we get exposed. And while a lot of people think that this is not a common issue, it's actually more common than you would think. 80% of us are exposed to high-risk HPV virus by age 50. So if 80% of us, men and women, are getting exposed and the rates of HPV-related cancer are increasing, so this is actually something that many people are dealing with. But there's still very much a stigma around it. So people are embarrassed to talk about it.

How does it show up? Like, obviously if you're getting a pap smear, you can discover, but how does the person who, the male or female, how, how do they know if they have it?

Well, this is the thing. The high-risk HPV doesn't cause warts and it doesn't cause any symptoms. So men, because they're not being screened, there's no equivalent to a pap smear for men. So men only find out usually that they have HPV when they get cancer. It's really scary. Women oftentimes are being, going in for a pap smear, so they're hopefully finding out a little sooner. You know what I would say at this point, James? I would recommend that men and women do at least an HPV, high-risk HPV test on a regular basis. Depending on your, you know, if you've had any risk in your past. But I would say every year to every 3 to 5 years, you sh— we should all be doing a high-risk HPV test because if you know that it's positive, you can start taking action to help your body clear it. 'Cause the human body can clear the virus. It's just that we are not aware that we have it.

Mm-hmm.

Men especially, but a lot of times women, if they're not going in to get tested, they don't know they have it either. 'Cause there's no symptoms.

So there's no obvious symptoms. So let's assume, let's just assume we all have it and let's assume we have to just be mindful. Okay. If you have it, we gotta start fixing it. So how would someone go about fixing it?

Well, and this is exactly brings us back to what I saw in terms of the parallel with stress, because what I see is that as humans, when we're exposed to stress, which we all have stress, Right? We all have relationship stress, financial stress. We have parenting stress or taking care of our parents, caregiving stress, right? Like there's constantly gonna be stress. And when we're exposed to stress, it affects our stress hormones, our cortisol and adrenaline levels. We have a built-in stress response system as humans, and when we're under stress, it is going to affect that stress response system. And as it does, it disrupts our cortisol and adrenaline levels. And when that happens, it lowers our immune function. When we're under stress, we are less able to protect ourselves from high-risk HPV. And so what I would say is, to me, if we all just come back to this concept of how can I help myself recover from stress each day in small ways, the more we can help our bodies recover from stress and re-optimize our stress response system. The more we're gonna fend off infections like high-risk HPV and other infections as well.

How can ancestral or primal living reduce stress in modern world that's wired for burnout?

To me, the best way is what I refer to as self-care. Now, the thing is, a lot of times we kind of blow off self-care like it's pampering or we never have time for it. What I've done is I use CARE as an acronym. And I'll talk you through what that, what the acronym is. When we can implement self-care, which is really self-stress recovery on a daily basis, which is absolutely ancestral. When we look back in time and if we look at areas of the world, for example, the Blue Zones where people have, are living the longest and healthiest, what have they been doing over time that's helping them live longer and have less illness? Well, they're doing what I refer to as self-care. So the acronym for CARE is C for clean eating. So it starts with our food and what foods we're choosing to put into our body and which foods we're choosing not to have, right? So it's this C for clean eating. It's A for adequate sleep, which I know you love that concept as well. As humans, we have to eat, we have to sleep, and so we need to be Prioritizing our sleep. And sleep is when our immune system is functioning and repairing and helping us recover from what we're going through. The R in CARE stands for recovery activities, and we can go more into this. The recovery activities is some of those things we talked about before, the things that we can choose that are medicine for us to help our stress response system recover in the moment each and every day. And then E in CARE stands for exercise. So exercises, whichever movement is best for you and your body at this point in time, but we need to be moving and exercising. But it's also important to not overdo any of this, James, right? There's such a thing as overexercising and then we're triggering another stress response, right? It's tempting as humans. We are like, oh, I can do more, I can do better, and we can even overdo. Something that's good for us. But in the meantime, CARE is how I think about things we can do. And I absolutely teach this to women who I'm helping to prevent cervical cancer and other HPV-related cancer. And I teach this to all my patients. If we can implement this acronym of CARE on a regular basis, I would argue help us to stay well and prevent really all different health issues, including cancer.

So let's take this a little bit more granular. So if you had like 3 minutes with someone who's dealing with a hormone issue or a sleep trouble or anxiety, what daily habit would you tell them to start today?

I just recorded a video for, for patients yesterday of something that I recommend, and I'm happy to share it with all of you here. I would say I start with a, what I call a daily check-in. And you would do this daily check-in, like right when you wake up in the morning, maybe even the middle of the day and the end of the day. And the daily check-in could take 1 minute literally, or 5 minutes if you have 5 minutes. And it's simply an opportunity to even close your eyes and start noticing your breath. Get reconnected into your body by noticing your breath. You're noticing your inhale, noticing your exhale. Now you're teaching your nervous system instead of being distracted by our to-do lists and a million things. That people are pulling us in different directions. You're saying, no, I'm not doing that right now. I'm doing this. I'm doing me. I'm doing breath. And you just focus in on your breath, and then you can put your hand on your heart, which also helps release oxytocin, which is our anti-stress hormone. So by doing deep breaths, you're signaling the anti-stress system. By putting your hand on your heart, you're signaling the anti-stress hormone, and you are starting to just Be with your body and yourself, and you bring to your mind something you feel grateful for. By doing that, now you're even shifting at an energetic level to higher energetic state of gratitude. You do this and you say to your body, body, is there anything you need to tell me? Is just your body have a message of tension? Is there an emotion that's coming up? Is there something that your body needs you to know in that moment? So you're checking in to say, hey body, what do I need to know right now? So that I can take action on them. And then you bring yourself back to this reality and you can then be in a much more balanced state. You've activated your anti-stress nervous system, and now it's much easier to navigate our day-to-day routine.

I love that. I love that you're even bringing up energy. It's something that I think is not talked about enough within the health field. I think we sometimes look for very practical and very kind of tangible solutions, but I find in my 20 years of experience that it's actually the intangible that are more powerful. It's the things we can't quantify that we can't really understand fully, but that we just have to almost have faith with. And I have to say, I think this almost carries us into plant medicine because there's an interesting kind of debate going on and maybe it's not on a national level, but just within some circles I'm in, which is plant medicine is more and more being looked at as a means of therapy. The argument is with some therapists saying, well, that you can't just only do plant medicine, that there has to be integration and the integration is using traditional therapy modalities. But I've been experiencing some plant medicine ceremonies and I've had now 4 total, but 3 recently. The best way I can describe them is they have been astounding, like in the changes that have happened to me, but just truly almost mind-blowing, profound, truly profound. So can you dive into talking about what drew you towards plant medicine and what have you seen What kind of healings are you seeing from it?

I was researching stress. I have been researching stress for years, right? Ever since I researched stress in women in labor. And I actually had just at that time started writing the book that you see over my shoulder, the Master Stress Reset Your Health book. So I was in the midst of writing about how can humans recover from stress. And I, by the way, I don't go with this concept of managing stress. To me, managing stress is like just treading water. We don't wanna just be treading water. We wanna be surfing the waves, right? We wanna be able to be living our best life, feeling our best, living our passion, spending time with people we love, and improving our health. So that's not just treading water. So I was in a, a mode of, I wanna go beyond just Managing stress. I wanna help people to master their stress. And at the same time, it just so happened that in my life, I was going through a very stressful time. I was dealing with a different health issue, arthritis. It turned out to be, but at the time we didn't know what that diagnosis was. So I was in the midst of this diagnostic process and it was the middle of the pandemic. So it was like this whole sort of sequence of events that happened. That I was like, when a friend of mine, you know, said to me, hey, I've found a shaman in Peru that I trust. She and I had already been talking about ayahuasca for years and thinking as herbalists, because ayahuasca is a, is a plant medicine, it's an herb. As herbalists, we were like, we would like to know more about this herb from the Amazon. And so we were looking for an opportunity. And it just so happened that she found this shaman at that time. And I said, I'm in. And I just, again, went off the diving board into the deep end and said, I'm going. And I just booked a ticket to Peru during the pandemic because I knew I wanted to research for the book and I needed it for my own healing. And so those were the reasons why I was willing to just, cuz a lot of people will be like, how did you just dive in like that to go straight to Peru, straight to 2 weeks of a dieta? With ayahuasca. And the first day, the first ceremony that I took ayahuasca, I, I came out of that ceremony and I said, this is the medicine I've been looking for.

I have to agree. I did ayahuasca once. I was only able to do one of 2 days. It was a 2-day ceremony and I was only able to do one. And I understood what people meant. Like, it's not a drug, it's a medicine. It talked to me. I saw very clear images. I was told things that were beyond my current knowledge. I mean, I, it was profound. I can't stop using that word about it. And then the experiences I've had more recently were not ayahuasca. They were other, I mean, so plant medicine, just so anyone who is unfamiliar with that, you know, you're going to hear terms like ayahuasca, you're going to hear psilocybin. It can also be other things like 5-MeO, right? Which is also known as Bufo. It could be what's known previously as ecstasy, but it's MDMA. There's so many others. I'm not mentioning all of them, but there's a lot of these things that I know when I was younger, I saw as, I saw as a drug. I saw these as things like LSD, even like I saw this as a drug. And now I'm experiencing them, these medicines in, in ways that are very therapeutic and very deep.

So I'm in a training program right now. I'm in a, I'm just completing a certification program in psychedelic-assisted therapy. It's a training program through IPI, which is the Integrative Psychiatry Institute. So this is a mental health institute in the United States that's offering a whole program to therapists. And I'm in the first cohort of medical providers that are not therapists that are completing this psychedelic-assisted therapy program. And so we're seeing more and more providers, even from the standard medical system. Like I'm in a class with ER doctors and gynecologists and, you know, we're in all different practitioners, pediatricians, and we're in this training program together to say, hey, we can see that these medicines can help people. And as Healthcare providers, we see the limitations of how we can help our patients. These doctors that I'm in class with are saying, hey, I've been trying to help my patients and I'm seeing that there's only so much I can do with what's available in the standard medicine, in the pharmaceutical industry. And so they were wanting to bring these medicines to become more available. As you said, I also grew up.

Yeah.

During the war of— on drugs. And so these drugs were categorized in Schedule I, you know, several decades ago. And that's why they have not been available in the United States and in terms of illegal ways to get these medicines. But that is starting to shift. And now, for example, Oregon and Colorado have approved certification For use of psilocybin. Psilocybin is from mushrooms as a psychedelic substance from mushrooms. And MDMA is having so much research being done. They're hoping to fast-track that too. And the idea here, James, is not to just make it available for everybody, free-for-all recreational use. This is very much medicinal use. And as you mentioned, it's to be using the substance Along with support to integrate what we receive from these medicines. So it's, it's not that a person's just gonna use a medicine on their own and be all on their own with what they, with their insights. What the research is on all of these substances, when we research it, it's done in a very intentional way with where you're working with a therapist or a provider before, so you're prepared. During your session, after, to help you understand what, what you experienced and how to integrate it into your life going forward. And what they're— most of the research is on stress-related conditions, PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder. This is where these substances are being used effectively. It's also being used to help with anxiety and what is currently being referred to as treatment-resistant depression. When they say treatment-resistant depression, they mean that the pharmaceutical drugs are not helping the person. Of course, we can't expect these pharmaceutical chemicals that are just helping with, to deal with the receptors to solve a person's depression. We need to help the person in a holistic way. I really believe that that's where these medicines are different. is that they are helping us in a more holistic way to actually help our bodies heal and recover from stress instead of just making us dependent on a chemical substance for the rest of our lives.

I think that is such an important distinction. It kind of brings us full circle back to the pharmacy earlier, the pharmacy discussion, which is when you were mentioning pharmaceuticals that A, you're dependent on, but also B, that have a lot of side effects. Are you aware of many side effects with some of these plant medicines? The one side effect that I'm aware of is that you can get dehydrated a bit, you know, which just means you gotta increase your electrolytes or, or, you know, your intake of fluids while you're doing it or right afterwards. There are some more and more health practitioners that are helping people that are on doing these medicinal journeys to prepare for them, even with vitamins and minerals. So Are you seeing any kind of side effects that people need to be aware of should they go down this path?

Well, and this is the thing is sometimes in the midst of taking a substance, there may be symptoms, but I, I don't tend to think of them as same as side effects from a medication. It's more like depending on the substance, sometimes there's some nausea, right? Even with like psilocybin, for example, some people feel a little nausea, same thing with Ketamine is considered a dissociative anesthetic, and it is legal in the United States at this point in time, and it is used in a therapeutic way. But even ketamine for some people can cause some nausea when, during the time. But the key factor is that none of them cause symptoms that are ongoing. There's a very rare, very rare, I think less than 1% of the time that someone might have Ongoing symptoms after taking one of these substances. Also, they're not addictive. Now, I say that in that, like, say for example, ayahuasca, psilocybin, these are not considered to be addictive substances, and the treatment is not something you have to take every day. So it's very different than what we usually think of as, right, when you go to the pharmacy and you get a pharmaceutical and you have to take this pill every day, and a lot of times you have to take it at the same time of day every day, and if you don't, you're gonna have withdrawal symptoms.

Mm-hmm.

It's very different than that. These medicines are used in a therapeutic window. Usually it's depending on the case. It might be, you might use, you know, you might have 1 or 2, or in the case of MDMA, sometimes they're giving 1 dose per month over 6 months, you know? So there's specific protocols that are used, but as the person recovers from their symptoms, then they're no longer needing this substance. So it's a very different treatment protocol versus a daily pill. And the likelihood of any kind of, you know, side effects or dependency is very low. There is a slight, I wanna say dependency possibility with ketamine. This is why it's so important to work with a provider who can help you to make sure you're using it based on the protocol. What's going to be effective, what's going to help you heal so that you can then go on with your life and not be needing a substance all the time.

I'm so excited to talk about this. And I, and I know that we should dedicate an entire episode or multiple episodes just to this topic. Cause I think it's one that if anyone takes anything away from this conversation, it's that I just hope that it opens your mind to other modalities of healing. Many of these plant medicines that we're talking about, they are plant-derived. They're really more ancestral and natural than what you find on the market in the pharmaceutical industry. So—

And they've been used back in time, right? What we know is that these substances have been being used, psilocybin in magic mushrooms, ayahuasca. These are substances were used thousands of years ago. So if we're looking at what was helping our ancestors deal with their stress, this was part of it they were using. And they've found, we've found psychedelic substances in all different continents. So humans have been using psychedelic substances and there's a lot. I'd love to talk more about it, James. There's so much information and theories of how psychedelic substances have even helped humans through time. To get to where we are now. So I absolutely consider these plant medicines to be very ancestral, and it brings us back to our roots. It brings us back to our self-care. As I talk about, you know, I consider the plant medicines to be a recovery substance. They help us recover from stress and trauma, just like breathwork, just like meditation and yoga. And time in nature. Psychedelic substances have that same ability to help us heal. They heal the vagus nerve. They help us process and release emotional stress and trauma. This is way different than what we're seeing in the standard medical approach, and it's very needed. So many people are dealing with these health issues, pain, right? We know there's epidemic of Pain medicine use and millions of people on psychotropic medications when only 30% of them are being helped by those medications. So there's a huge need for humans to be helped in emotional and physical pain, as well as prevention of health issues like cancer and heart disease and dementia. And if, and so I'm, I'm simply a person who's on the look out seeking medicines that can actually help humans heal and not just have humans stuck being dependent on a substance every day that's not actually helping them heal.

Well, once again, I think it's really powerful that this is coming from someone who grew up around the pharmacies and pharmaceutical industry, that you are seeing that was not the answer, that there's something else. And then the fact that you're taking these classes with other health practitioners, doctors, People that are also acknowledging, hey, our system is not working. And I also love that, well, these things are, as we just said, they're ancestral. So we're actually looking towards the past to find solutions for the present. And that's exactly what this podcast is about. So I'm so appreciative that we talked about this today. Thank you so much. Before I let you go though, I do have a question. If every woman had access to one lab test in their 30s or 40s to prevent burnout and hormone chaos later, what would it be and why?

My dream, James, you're asking, you're asking me my dream test. My dream is I wish we could all have access to testing cortisol levels because again, cortisol is our main stress hormone. And we can measure cortisol in a blood test, but it's usually not done. You would have to ask your provider, please measure my cortisol. But even then, they're only gonna measure your cortisol at the time you have your blood drawn, which is stressful time. So we need to know our cortisol levels because what's, what's happening is oftentimes people guess that they have high cortisol, but I'm telling you, in at least 50% of the time, they're wrong because Not everybody has high cortisol. Some of us have low cortisol and some of us have low cortisol sometime a day and high cortisol at a different time of day. We need to be measuring cortisol morning, midday, evening, bedtime to find out where your cortisol is, because here's the thing is the treatment is different. So your, my theory, and this is what I share in the Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health book, if you want to learn more. My theory is that we need to be even modifying our self-care and our stress recovery Based on our cortisol levels. If we have high cortisol, we need to be doing different types of self-care, different types of recovery, different herbs, different nutrients than someone who has low cortisol. And the only way to know right now, we can do a urine or saliva test, which is what I offer patients through my practice. We'll do a urine or saliva test at different times a day to measure your cortisol. Talk about profound. It makes profound difference in people's health. To first of all, know what their cortisol's up to at different times a day, and then to know how to take steps to get their cortisol back to optimal. Because if our stress hormone is high or low, it's sending out a stress signal throughout our whole body and throwing everything off track. And if our cortisol's optimal, everything's gonna be on track and signaling on track. So it's, to me, so essential and what I wish would exist. I would love to meet a lab that wants to create a way to measure cortisol through, for example, our watch or our ring, or, you know, something that allows us to know our cortisol level each and every day throughout the day so we can take that information and modify our activities, our exercise, our meditation, our sleep. We need to modify our self-care based on our cortisol levels and That's only truly gonna happen when we can get a daily analysis of our cortisol. So for right now, our best ways to do that again is you can do a urine saliva test through a specialty lab, like, and a specialist like me in my office, we offer that. Also, just so you, your listeners know, I developed an online quiz called the Stress Type Quiz. You can find through my website. This quiz allows you to get a sense of what your cortisol likely is, if it's likely high or low. Based on an online quiz, but still my dream would be that we could all know our cortisol throughout the day, every day, so that we can make in the moment fine-tuning changes to optimize our health.

I love that. Well, we'll put the link for this quiz in the show notes. And I would like to offer that I bet you that the solution is not going to be a ring or a watch. It's going to be a bidet, like something that you put on your toilet. And it's measuring your poop and your urine whenever you go to the bathroom.

Ooh, yeah. And then it can have a little digital readout.

Something. I, you know what I mean? That, that just seems like there's gonna be certain things you can get from, you know, heart and whatnot through rings and watches, but then, you know, you're always gonna need to get other things from poop and pee. So we might as well have the measurement where you're actually going, right?

I love that idea, James. I love that idea. That'd be perfect. And then it could just tell you on your mirror when you wake up in the morning, here's what Here's how you need to modify your day based on your cortisol levels.

Oh my gosh. Talk about synergy. That would be an amaz— I'm sure that someone's working on that. I know that the toilet that analyzes, you know, your, your health is being worked on, but how cool would it be to then have it talk to one of those, you know, smart mirrors or something like that?

And yeah.

Wow. Well, that is a real congruence of taking modern tech and, and helping it with our health. Thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Dani. So how can people get involved? Do you take clients? If someone wants to work with you based on our conversation, what do they do?

And I work with patients from around the world. You can come see me in New York, but you don't have to. I work with patients virtually from around the world. They can just find me at drdani.com. So D-O-C-T-O-R-D-O-N-I.com. I'm also on social media, so I'm happy to see you there as well.

We'll put it in the show notes where they can find your books as well. Thank you for trusting your instincts. I think that it would have been very easy for you just to go down the straight and narrow path that your father had. And I'm just so glad that you were aware enough in your early 20s to say, you know what, I think I need to go a different way because you're helping thousands and thousands of people. So thank you so much for what you do.

Thank you, James. I appreciate you too. Thanks to your listeners for being here. I feel very grateful. Thank you.

Well, and thank you all for either watching or listening. This has been the Everyday Ancestral Podcast. If you're enjoying it, share it. Please let other people know what we're about and, uh, make sure to subscribe or follow us. But most of all, check in on our next episode. Thank you again. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's eatpluck.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.