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Welcome everyone to another Women to Women podcast, Everything Adrenal, Hormone, Weight and Trauma. And today I'm pleased to have with me somebody that has great conversations with me. And his name is Dr. Peter Kahn. Peter and I have actually known each other for a while. He's board certified in integrative medicine, functional medicine, and board certified in chiropractic which is amazing because it really connects the dots. He's a creator of neurometabolic integration, a science-based virtual online coaching program that identifies the root cause of autoimmune and other chronic conditions as well as the big masterclass, which we'll talk a little bit more today, launched several times and will now be available to attend via health talks online this January. And Dr. Khan has a wonderful array of bonus gifts to share that we'll include in the show as well. So one of the things that's kind of interesting about both of us, Peter, is that both of us are I was born in Australia in the outback, and you were born in Taiwan, and we came to America kind of with, I certainly came with dreams of making a difference. I've known that about myself since I was a little girl. I wanted to transform lives and transform health. And here we are kind of doing some of that. So it's kind of fun.

Well, when I was a little girl, I didn't know what I wanted to do. So you're much better than me there.

That's because you were never a little girl. No, I really did. From the time I was just very young on the beach, churches in Australia when I was walking and no one was actually there. I just knew, I don't know where it came from, it was just deep in my soul. And I think that there is something about us that makes it even stronger within us to have a purpose. You know, I've certainly seen that in my family, all of us that were immigrants in that way that really had some purpose in life. So it's kind of fun. don't you think so?

I think, you know, being an immigrant, for me at least, it wasn't a cakewalk. Let's just put it that way. You know, I had to adjust, you know, a completely different culture, completely different language altogether, too. So, you know, for me, it was, you know, I don't think.

Yeah.

I mean, you say you knew what you wanted to do as a little kid. I don't think I. I don't think I knew what I wanted to do until I'm 30, you know, so it took a while for me to find out, but, you know, we all take our own roads. But I think as an immigrant though, you know, it's that there's certain things that you bump into, right? The hardship, the things that difficulties that, you know, other people may take for granted. Oh, you go to high school. Heck, when I went to high school, I feel completely out of place because I don't even speak the language. So it's trying to get popular, forget about it, right? So I think, you know, some of these hardships, you know, when I look back, it was good because it teach you how to be tough, teach you how to be persistent. and teach you how to just, you know, overcome, you know, difficult situations in life. And a lot of what we do with clients, you know, and patients in functional medicine is helping them to navigate that difficult situation. I mean, some people have really chronic issue that lasts, that it's been around for a long time. And so I think one of the key things for people to come out of the other side is being patient and being persistent and not give up. So for what it's worth, you know, that's what I got out of that.

No, I don't, I completely agree with you. I mean, I came, I certainly spoke English, but oftentimes some of the ways that I spoke English were very different. I was, you know, I skipped a grade, I went from fourth to sixth, and I was teased mercilessly, and it was horrible. And they were all into makeup, and I was wearing hoop skirts, and, you know, the math system was in the 12s, and here in America was 10, so it was much easier and I couldn't get it. Oh my God. And the song that was my favorite song was One is the Loneliest Number. So I totally resonate with what you're talking about. And it was not easy and it certainly taught me resilience of how do you kind of learn from those situations and being popular in high school. Like seriously was not going to happen. Even though as a cheerleader, it was like, not so much. And I agree with you, but it really, I think, helped me. be who I am. And I think one of the things that's helpful for people, even listening to this today in a podcast, is that, you know, it might look like we have a lot of the pieces to the puzzle, but for both of us, it didn't come easily. It was something that we had to kind of work through and work or, you know, make a difference with. And I think it makes us better teachers that way, that it did not come easily for either one of us. So I completely agree with you.

Well, anything worthwhile doing, it's always gonna be challenging and difficult, but that's what makes it worthwhile. so, you know, same thing with people's health, you know, it's, there's nothing more important than your health. So it's, it's a worthwhile, Noble thing to, to improve it. And it may be difficult, but, you know, you just gotta do your best and get the right help along the way is really helpful, too. You know, I can think back so many times in my life, if I just had a mentor or somebody pointing me in the right direction, I probably wouldn't have, you know, partied as much or drank as much in college or, or to spend my time wiser, but. That's the same thing in functional medicine. If you have somebody that can point you in the right direction that has experience, I think you can shortcut that process so you get there faster.

So let's talk about some of that. I think that's an interesting point is that we all need mentors. And certainly for me, Jeff Bland was my mentor back 35 years ago when I heard him talk about, let's take a look at the cause of the cause. Let's take a look at biochemistry. Let's take a look at why everyone's a little bit different. When it comes to chronic diseases, I think there's many different things that can be similar, but there is also a common denominator for many of them, but also varied differences. Let's talk a little bit more about that, especially when it comes to neurological issues as well.

Absolutely. Definitely brain, especially when it comes to brain, because a lot of people, what people come in, when they have chronic health issues, they complain a lot about symptoms within the neurological system. And sometimes they have symptoms that they don't even think it's a neurological issue. For example, they have my digestion that's not working great, but that could be a neurological issue, meaning the vagus nerve is not functioning properly. So the brain has its antennas, its arms into almost every single part of our body. We experience our life through our brain. A lot of people with chronic conditions suffer and experience brain symptoms. And what I've learned over the years is that when you have neurological issue or symptoms that can impact brain function, usually there's some common denominators, right? So, and when you start to address these common denominators, complicated conditions becomes less complicated. It becomes not as overwhelming. It becomes where, you know, you may not have like 50 things wrong with you, you may just have one big thing wrong with you that's causing 50 different symptoms. So if we could just address that one big thing, then the 50 problems can just resolve themselves a lot of times. And that's the approach we want to take because I think in this world of Summit and Google and Dr. Google, there's just too much information, right? And what happens, people, they Google online and they Google their symptoms. They say, oh, I find online, they're describing this. have the exact same symptom that they're describing. Okay, just because you have the same symptom as describing doesn't mean that's the root cause of your problem necessarily. It could, but it could also be not. So you have to kind of give yourself this objectivity in a sense to be able to see through it. And one of the ways that can help you do that is by having, you know, a concept, a roadmap that's guided by science and having these 30,000 feet view ideas and concepts. that's, you know, that's grounded so that it's not causing you to chase 10 different things. So one of the things that I talk about, you know, in the brain immune gut summit that's, you know, coming up in January, is this idea that there's a brain immune gut access. And this is one of those things that helps people to, you know, reduce the complexity because the brain immune gut access is where there's an intersection or inter connection between the neurological system, the immune system, and the digestive system. And they affect, it's like a three-way triangle. They all impact each other. The brain can impact the immune and the gut. The gut can impact the brain and the immune and the immune brain gut. So you can't separate them out necessarily because when one aspect of this brain, immune, gut axis fails, It becomes a domino effect, a chain that tugs on the other two parts, and the other two part invariably will start to get weaker and maybe even produce symptoms. So by looking at a lot of these chronic conditions through the lens of brain immune gut, we're able to bring order to chaos and be able to structure, you know, the way that we may solve this problem in a better way. Now, When you have brain immune gut axis dysfunction, like I said, when one goes, the other parts go. You get very typical or archetypical symptoms or that's common among all people. Regardless of the diagnosis, which is your point, Marcel, earlier, there's a lot of condition and these symptoms and condition can overlap. So which is which? and that's exactly the point. So when you have brain immune gut access dysfunction, you may have brain symptoms. So that what are these brain symptoms that are common among people with all different type of chronic disease, whether it's Lyme disease or mold toxicity or Hashimoto's or celiac disease or chronic fatigue syndrome, I mean, they all have brain immune gut issues and the brain symptoms can be fatigue, brain fog, short-term memory issue, depression, anxiety, can also be peripheral nervous system problems like numbness, tingling, and neuropathy and so forth. If you have these neurological symptoms, even just one or two, that means somewhere in the nervous system there's some dysfunction. Now, that doesn't tell you what's causing that dysfunction, but at least you know there's a nervous system component which can sort of tug on the other part of this brain, you can get access. Then we come to the immune system part of the brain immune gut access. Symptoms in that category can include things like inflammation, can include things like, you know, chronic infections that you can't clear. It can include things like even chemical sensitivity and food sensitivity, which really are immune system mediated responses, right? People think food sensitivity is a GI problem, but really food sensitivity is an immune system problem. So we have to look at it from that lens. So those are immune system challenges. And again, you don't have to have everything on that list. You don't have to have a chronic infection and autoimmune and inflammation and this and that to have a problem within the immune system. And then the last part of this brain immune gut is the gut. And then so problem there can manifest as heartburn, reflux, gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, alternating diarrhea, constipation, SIBO, SIFO. I mean, the list goes on and on. Now, I'll bet, and those people, audience listening right now, you can just do it in self inventory. Do you have even one symptom in the brain category, you know, be a brain fog or fatigue or depression, anxiety? Do you have even one symptom in immune system category, you know, inflammation, chronic infections, food sensitivity, chemical? Do you have even one symptom in the digestive category? If you have at least one symptom in, in each category at the very minimum, you probably have brain immune gut dysfunction. And probably the audience all raising their hands says, I have multiple symptoms in multiple categories. And, and I'm not even talk about the diagnosis that they have, right? Because all these people say, yep, I have brain symptom, I have immune symptom, I have gut symptoms. One person may have mold issue, one person may have Hashimoto, another person may be chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, but yet they all have brain immune gut symptoms, or very commonly they have multiple areas that's malfunctioning. So that's the common denominator is that the brain immune gut dysfunction together, whether you have whatever diagnosis, if diagnosis becomes irrelevant, it becomes what's the mechanism and the mechanisms that when you have brain when you've got dysfunction, things just kind of break and you start having these chronic issues.

So let's talk a little bit more about if somebody says, oh my God, that's so true. I have that. But I do want to give an example of something was phenomenal in my practice that really follows suit with that. This is somebody who had actually parasites. She had a nematode and she had blastocystis hominis, chronic diarrhea, wasn't sleeping at night, blah, blah, blah. We did testing and I also really spent enough time with her to understand that there was a Vegas nerve issue. And I said, you know, I think these neuropathways of how you've always believed things to be is getting in your way. So she listened to my summit and started working with Annie Hopper material all online and had the most ridiculous food sensitivities. I mean, it was like, she couldn't eat this, she couldn't eat that, she couldn't eat this, she couldn't eat that. And I just talked to her last week. All of those symptoms are gone. Every one of them. Now, do we treat the nematode, of course? Do we treat the blastocystis hominis? Absolutely. But even after that, she had food sensitivities and still couldn't eat garlic and she couldn't eat this and she couldn't... It was really affecting her life. So I just want to bring us back to this notion that you described, which is also the vagus nerve piece that can really get in our way because people's lives are so affected and they're so frustrated. They think we've missed something.

Mm-. What do you mean by that? When we said, you said, we missed something.

What a lot of people, you know, when I talk with them, I always do an ACE score on people, Peter. And I always want to know, because one of the things that I say in my practice, and I was the first online talking about this, if we don't deal with our stories, our stories will deal with us. And we know that when you have an ACE score, and if people aren't familiar with that, it's Adverse Childhood Events score. And it was, really came to life in 1998 when Felitti and his group from Kaiser Permanente and the CDC looked to see if you had adverse events in your childhood, did you have long-term health issues? They did not anticipate the results they got. They thought there was not going to be a problem. And if you had a score of four or more on a scale of one to 10, your chances of having heart disease are 165% higher and many other issues. So Annie Hopper talks about if we continue to have this constant thought, I'm allergic to everything, I can never eat eat anything, my stomach, blah, blah, whatever. And it always goes on to more than that, that it changes our cortisol production and changes our neuropeptides and it changes our neurotransmitters. And she was another example, and I see it in my practice all the time, in which we did the work we needed to do with the gut, but it healed many of the other pieces in her brain and in her body as well.

Great example. Yeah, great example how, you know, sometimes you, you work on one thing, either it heals another area or you took the pressure off one area so that another area will become easier to, to recover or heal. Right. So you treat, you know, of course, this person had to deal with the, the vagus nerve, but you did treat the nematode and then the blastocystis. Without that, even if she had dealt with the vagus nerve, she still had the nematode and blastocystis, and she still know what, you know, not going to be further ahead. So that's a great example of, you know, what you just described, how you have to look at it holistically. You have to look at all the different factors. You have to step back sometimes because I think a lot of people get into the nitty-gritty like, oh, I'm gonna, like, learn the hundred different ways to detox a parasite. And they forget to take a step back. What about my vagus nerve? What about, you know, my blood sugar stability? What about, you know, some very foundational things that we can all pay attention to? that'll just accelerate our results if we did those other things. Yeah.

And I think that it's, you know, what I love about the work that you and I do, it's really individual. You know, we're really looking at somebody as an individual to really start to understand what's true for them. Forget the diagnosis. Forget, you know, those pieces. But, you know, the gut immune brain, for example, is where are we in this kind of journey with them that we can help them get to the other side? And the beauty of that is we can't. we just have to figure out the pieces along the way. You're a master at that in terms of really helping people get to the other side of, you know, figuring out what's wrong, including things like mold or chemical sensitivities or, you know, whatever else is going along in the journey for them, which I appreciate a great deal. And why do you think that you came to this place to do this kind of work? How did you get here?

Oh, well, that's a really deep question. I mean, I. I don't know why i'm here. here to do this work. I know that I definitely feel a sense of purpose when I do this work. I think a lot of the why, you know, like as far as why, like did God call me to do this? I don't know about that, but I know I did a lot of this work initially because my own family had health problems and I was trying to figure them out, right? So my father had liver cancer. This is before I even graduated from chiropractic school. He had stage four liver cancer and he was older and they say, well, you know, six months to live, you know, we don't do liver transplant for someone his age. so, you know, my brother and I, who's also a chiropractor, just took it upon ourselves to say, okay, what can we do to help them nutritionally or whatever we know how to do? And, you know, with just a little bit, a little bit of protocol that we, we, we just search and then find out on our own, you know, he was able to live four years, five years, symptom free, even with stage four cancer, when they say six months. So that taught me a lot about what's possible, you know, that this natural way of healing the body, you know, has something to it. And then my kids, you know, three out of my four kids all have major allergy issues, and I have to figure them out. So that's what got me down in the road, you know, road of doing functional neurology and functional medicine to help my, my own family. So that, that's kind of how I stumble onto this. And I think I always had a affinity and an interest and curiosity about the brain and neurology. as well as nutrition. So, you know, that kind of just fits right into my, where my interests and my, my, my why, my purpose and necessity all intersected. And that's how I got to do this. So I think that's what makes you.

Such a master at it, though, Peter. You know, you're always digging a little deeper to figure out, okay, so this didn't work. So what's behind that? What's behind it? What's behind it? And certainly when we have family members or we have something that, that we're invested in to kind of push us, it's the piece that's amazing for us to really shift the dynamic. which is incredible. So that's probably the contributor to you of why you put all the pieces together in the way that you do, which works so well.

Yeah, just being curious. And I think that will be something that all the listener can take away from, you know, be curious and being curious, meaning don't go in with specific notions of how it's supposed to work. Just go in with, okay, what does this mean? And how does that apply? And if it's not, if it's not this way, what about the other way?

Right.

Always look at two sides of the coin. So then if one way doesn't work for you, you're not just stuck. Whoa. You know, like, I'm so invested in SIBO. It's not SIBO. Like, cognitive dissonance. It can't be. It has to be SIBO. What if it's not? What if it's something else?

Right.

You have to. If it's not that, then what do I do? If I. What's my backup plan? What's my plan B? If it's not that. So I think it's just curiosity and, and no, always after the truth is, is what kind of helps me to, you. to accumulate these kind of information.

But the beauty of that is that you're helpful for so many people. And I think the unfortunate part, as you and I both know, is in the conventional world, we come very, very quickly to a diagnosis. And then we very, very quickly come up with a treatment plan that oftentimes doesn't work. So you need more medication to support what that medication was. And you're in my work is to find out what's upstream, what's the cause of the cause, what's going on with the mitochondria, what's going on with the muck in the brain or the immune system, or even the psychological pieces that contribute to the cortisol being up and the vagus nerve being complicated, it's really looking a little deeper, which is profound because that's what helps people get better.

Well, and that takes a lot of work. It takes a lot more work than just a five minute, 10 minute encounter and write a prescription and off you go. And if the treatment doesn't work, well, follow up in another month. that's just another office visit, bill insurance. So you can keep a likelihood doing that type of conventional practice. But ultimately, you know, it's about, you know, getting real results for people. And that takes work, you know, it takes, like, it's, like you said, a lot of detective work, a lot of thinking, but I think also takes work on the, on the clients or the patients part. Right. Because they have to participate. They become a participant of their own health. And sometimes people don't want to participate. They don't want to take personal responsibility. So this is, that becomes difficult. So that's why, you know, we only take on specific people and we do our best to explain our philosophy of how we do things. So it's a good fit, then we do this together and we get great results when we have that. But when people just want a quick fix or a magic pill, then that doesn't work. And so it takes work on both the practitioner and the client's part in this type of model.

And the end result is amazing, but we have to have people show up. If you can't show up for yourself at doesn't work.

Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. So tell us about this master class that you're having in January from the.

10Th to the 16th. Yeah, and it's actually an outgrowth, it's actually called a Brain-Immune-Gut Summit, and it's actually a collection of all the best interview, including yours, of course, Marcel, of what I've done in the past with what's called the Brain-Immune-Gut master class. And so what's the difference? The Brain-Immune-Gut master class is kind of smaller. We only had a few expert speakers and more just, you know, explaining that the general concept of what we just discussed here today, but in a little bit more detail. The Brain-Immune Gut Summit is a culmination of all the expert interviews. And then I also have special mastery sessions where I help people to tie the dots, connect the dots of what all these experts are saying. How do you make it useful for you? So I'm really proud and excited about this event. and I really recommend everybody to use the link that Marcel is going to provide you to register. In fact, there's a very big and important message on that registration page where I produce a special video. I recommend all of you to register and at least go to that page and watch the video. And after you're, it's jaw-dropping actually. So please watch it. And then after you watch it, if you agree that's jaw dropping is then go ahead and pick your jaw off the floor and go ahead and register for the event. It's free for you to view. It starts January. The first week of January is a great way to start a new year. And I think you're going to learn, come away with the big idea that there is a brain naming gut access, but more importantly, how to actually restructure and reframe your thinking so that you can make that work for you and leverage it so that you actually get your results. in less time, less effort, less confusion. Because a lot of people are bumping their head into the wall, doing too much, doing things that they shouldn't be doing, or think they have certain problems when that's actually other problems. They're just completely down the wrong rabbit hole. Utilizing the big idea, you're going to get this clinical roadmap which will help guide you so that you have a much higher probability of hitting the right target. than just flailing and trying 50 supplements and see what sticks.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. And they will have the links below so they can kind of look at this Summit as well as how can they get more information about you?

Yes, absolutely. So use the link to register for the big Summit and also my website's at askdrkhan.com but probably the most useful area is the YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is really we're, you know, thriving. A lot of free content. So people can find Peter Khan, DC. Just type in my name, K-A-N, without the H, and find my YouTube channel. There's a lot of free video there as well.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Marcel.