The Truth About Chronic Fatigue and Early Aging with Dr. Paul Anderson

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So.

So in this episode, I have Dr.

Paul Anderson here to explain what the real root of early aging is and how you can actually take actions yourself right now to reset your vitality from the inside out. Because anti aging, it starts at the mitochondrial level, and we're gonna walk through.

Exactly how you can recharge. All right, Dr. Paul Anderson, appreciate you joining me today. How are things on your side?

Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Of course. Well, this is definitely a timely thing. Well, I personally, I'll just talk about me, 40 years old. I just turned 40. And it's interesting. My group of friends, you know, and coming out of my 30s now, going into 40s, a pretty common thing is like, hey, I'm feeling a little sluggish. I'm tired, you know, afternoons coming around. I don't know, I'm feeling old now. You know, I feel like that, that, like, switch is starting to happen. At least I'm hearing the talk. And that's kind of what you specialize in, right? I mean, or at least you talk a lot about it.

Yeah.

Give me your thoughts on that initially. And then I want to go into kind of this overall idea of feeling a little older than we really are.

Yeah, certainly that. So, yeah, big area of both my practice and my teaching is chronic illness. And if, if you look at the core of many chronic illnesses, if you dial it back far enough, they usually start with the things that might make us maybe feel more fatigued, maybe have more pain, maybe not recover as well from exercise as we used to, maybe not sleep as good, all of those sort of things. And if we keep doing that and keep kind of having suboptimal function in those areas, we really can wind up with dysfunction, you know, that could lead to chronic illness. So I think that, you know, it's a. It's not just you.

It's I think it's sort of a universal feeling. And you know, I think even if you look at statistics for chronic illness, if I go back 30 years in my practice and working with people or teaching, etc. There certainly was lots of chronic illness 30 years ago, but it was a little bit more specific. Like it was in, you know, the groups were maybe more narrow, you could say, etc. Whereas now we have, you know, a lot more reasons maybe and a lot more things that might put you in a broader group that might feel chronically just not yourself. Yeah.

What are, I guess what are some of these glaring things that, that you're noticing? Maybe most people are unaware, like the changes from back then and now.

You know, it's, it's sort of like the, you know, the old story about if you do something in increments that are real tiny, you don't really notice it. And that can happen on population wide levels. And I think that even if we go just three decades back, but certainly if we go five to seven decades back and we look at what are the biggest changes in people's health overall, the things that we see so kind of work backwards here. But the things that we see that might lead people to feel more sluggish, not heal as quickly, not recover from exercise, all the things we talked about, they tend to group in a number of areas. But one is the way that our endocrine system, our hormonal system responds to life. And we can get into that. But the bottom line is that a lot of the job of our hormonal system beyond say reproduction is to keep our cells going and to have feedback that says, oh, we're having some challenges here, we're going to upregulate these hormones for a bit and help you level out or we'll down regulate these other ones. So, so that's certainly an area. Another area that I think is more commonly dysfunctional is actually at the cell, the cell mechanics level that would be say, mitochondrial function and then all the things that relate to how well your cell is, you know, processing the good stuff, getting rid of the bad stuff, you know, all of those sorts of things. That's another real common area that we see. And then there's others kind of that relate to that. But if we take a look at, okay, somewhere between three and seven decades ago, people seem to have less troubles in these areas. What's changed in this little tiny short, you know, time period for human longevity on the earth? Obviously this is a microcosm, right? And I think if we Go back to what would affect all of these different areas kind of universally. It would be the effect of, you could call it modern life, modern, you know, science, modern whatever, which has lots of really good positive things. We live longer than we used to and we don't die of infections, you know, all those good things. But the, the other side of sort of modern life is we also have tens and tens of thousands of chemicals that did not used to exist in the world 100 years ago or more. So our evolution has had time to catch up with, you know, this sort of last century of scientific advancement, which has brought along with it a century of new chemicals, new toxins, new, you know, stressors. And I really think if we look at, okay, that can disrupt our hormonal system. Hormones are sometimes structurally related to toxins, so they can interact that way. But also, if we're chronically stressed on a toxic level, our hormone system gets a little confused. Certainly this whole thing of the cell mechanics, mitochondrial energy production, getting, you know, the good nutrients in, but also getting the junk out. If we now, 100 years later have a bigger load, that just stresses the cells. And it's not so much, you know, we think of poisonings or toxicities, like a acute thing, you know, you ate something that was full of a poison, you're going to be really sick or die. Right. But if it's all the time, and it's just your background, you know, life that you live, you don't really feel it. It's not like one day, you know, you weren't toxic and now you are. It's just throwing a little more into your system than you can deal with every day. So I really think that's probably the big change in humanity and our exposure. And like I say, there's good to it, but there's also some dangers. And I really think, you know, if we extrapolate back 30 years, you know, in my experience, and now I think that's maybe why there's just a broader group of people who aren't feeling well.

Yeah, well, like you said, it was a lot more segmented of populations, probably location based, I would imagine.

Yeah.

But now it's so widespread and it's modern living.

Right.

It's all the developments. Yeah.

Really? Yeah, yeah.

And that's you mentioned. So hormonal systems, endocrine system, but also cell mechanics. And that's what I find really fascinating is. And I'd like to dive deeper into the cell mechanics and the mitochondria because I've been starting to see A lot more reports and things being talked about from other doctors talking about how that really is kind of the source of a lot of disease and of course, toxins. Play with that, but break that down, how that works, why it's important for us.

So if we, if we look at the way it's set up to work and how it's supposed to do business, most all of the cells in your body need energy that's produced locally, meaning within the cell, usually or neighboring. And that has to be done by the mitochondria, which are an organelle, a little piece of the cell that's made to make energy. It takes in nutrients and it does some manipulation with them. And it creates essentially electricity that runs a particular apparatus that makes ATP, which is energy units. Your cell then can take that ATP and break an energy bond off and run all of its energy, requiring processes, etc. So that's, that's why that's so important. And generally your cell has, you know, from hundreds to thousands of mitochondria. So it's a, that's a big business for yourself.

The other thing is beyond energy and helping the cell actually do its business, the.

People, usually somewhere in maybe grade school, high school, learn about cellular respiration, which is so human respiration is I breathe in and out and oxygen goes in, CO2 goes out, cell respiration, same thing, only there's no lungs involved, it's just oxygen goes in. It helps to run this energy production system. Carbon dioxide goes out the other side and leaves. Well, while that's going on, in addition to helping us make energy, which obviously people who have low energy states might have some mitochondrial issues because you feel your energy levels. But in addition to that, a lot of the mechanics of cell maintenance are based on the mitochondria doing their job. So. So good stuff goes in, energy is made, bad stuff goes out. The issue, I think, in modern life is that we're still doing all of that, and obviously we're still alive and moving along and all that. But the more stress we put on that system and all the basics, I just said, the slower we are, removing the bad things like toxins and just cell debris that builds up and all of that. And also we can get kind of metabolically confused. And the cells, instead of running, you know, I, I'll tell patients, you know, instead of running in top gear and, you know, like you're on the freeway, they're stuck in second gear or first gear or something to protect themselves, so they run more slowly.

But the engine is still Revved up. Right.

The engine is trying to go faster, but, but the, the cell mechanics are saying, you know, we can only do this today. This is all you're going to get.

So it's a bottleneck of sorts.

Yeah, yeah. So, so a lot of the, you know, a lot of the troubles then come from, not so much we have bad equipment, but the equipment can only deal with so much going on. And, you know, people should know that, like, this is not a brand new concept. Even if you go back, you know, 50, 70 years ago, but certainly around half century ago. Every medical pathology book in the very beginning has a summary section. And it essentially would say again, even 50 years ago, disease in many cases starts at the mitochondria. And then you get cells that don't work right, then you have a tissue that doesn't work right, maybe an organ that doesn't work right, build out. And if you have enough dysfunction at the mitochondrial level, it sort of brings everyone down with it.

Got it. It's upstream.

Is, is, yeah, because it's, you know, our function is just the sum total of all those cells working, you know, so, yeah, I think that's a lot of it. And, and so certainly there, there are many, many things that could affect it. But to our earlier point of modern life and modern exposures, I think that those would be something that has really changed and changed the load on the cell as far as, you know, what it has to deal with.

Yeah, well, that's what you said is it's good stuff in, nutrients in. But as I'm kind of gathering here, it's not just good stuff in, it's.

Right.

Yeah.

Other clogs and potentially toxins and whatnot.

Right, yeah, you, you, you definitely, you know, you have nutrients and oxygen going in. That's the good stuff. You have a system that's made to take those and make energy, you know, and then take out the trash. But if you consider just that simple, you know, setup of the system, if I'm also, you know, every day putting more junk in to the cells and the cell areas than we used to have exposed to us 100 years ago, my cells aren't really made to deal with that. So then every day I've got, you know, my good in and my bad out, plus other junk I really not set up to deal with.

So is the mitochondria, like when they're, you know, maybe overworking, let's just call it, you know, with, with all that extra stuff pumping through it, what happens to the cells, you know, the mitochondria, like, do they just stop working at a point? Do they slow down?

Yeah. So important thing which is good for all of us is if they really stop working, we're just dead. So they shouldn't do that. There, there are certain pathologies like poisonings and things and some genetics where they'll get close to stopping working and you'll still be alive. But generally speaking, what happens is it's sort of like they're always behind, so they, they have to run if we're still here on Earth, but they're always behind and they're always getting enough good stuff in to keep running and putting enough bad stuff out to kind of keep their head above water. But there, there's never a chance to kind of clean up the background so they can run at 100%. So what they often do is they sub, sub optimally function and, and what that feels like to you, trillions of cells doing that, is, you know, I don't feel as peppy as I used to. I, maybe I don't sleep so good or maybe I sleep too much, you know, or maybe now when I work out, I have to be really careful or I won't recover like I used to, or maybe I just get sick, sick more often than I used to. Lots of things, you know, can come downstream from that.

So those are, would you call those kind of some of the early symptoms of sorts, like.

Yeah, a lot, A lot of times it just starts out very, you know, easy to sort of kind of blow off and not think about, like, oh, maybe I just didn't sleep good, so I'm tired today, or gee, maybe I, you know, went too hard at the gym and now I don't feel good or something like that. It's when it's happening more persistently and more of my body's not working 100. That's when you start to then have symptoms that are maybe, you know, the fatigue that used to bug me a couple times a month is kind of every day now, you know, or, you know, I, I'm working out the same, but I'm getting less out of it or, you know, all of those things. Yeah.

So is there a point point where you, I don't know if you recommend or you just observed. Okay, well, yeah, when it's a consistent thing that maybe someone starts to notice in their lives, like fatigue thing, for instance, like what, what are the best next steps that someone in that position could and maybe should take?

Yeah. So I think the first thing that's always a really great reminder, just for, well, logic, but simply safety also is fatigue, let's say, or chronic pain or other things that just, they don't make sense. You're not doing anything real different. There can be some, some medical conditions that would create those. And so I always tell people you should get, you know, a general screening for the, you know, the big, big things that might do that. For example, you could.

Have slowly sort of drifted into type 2 diabetes or blood sugar issues that will make you fatigued also, you know, or you could have developed maybe a slow functioning thyroid or, or maybe some other hormonal things, you know, that would make you feel this way as well or, you know, some other, you know, chemistry abnormality or something. So I always tell people, as a first layer, just kind of rule those things out. But what I'll tell you from working in the chronically ill community is almost 100% of people with chronic illness have said, yes, I got my labs looked perfect. Okay. But I still feel horrible. And that's not really that, you know, it's not a, you know, a comment on the labs that were done. Those are screening labs to make sure you don't have a big time disease.

Okay.

There's a lot of other labs that can be done that are not done as part of screening because if you do 100 people who aren't sick, they don't need all those labs done. Right. Got it. In chronic illness, though, there's some more subtle things, etc. That should be looked at after we know you don't have an endocrine problem or you don't have a, you know, a disease or diabetes or cancer or something else. There's other things that should be looked at really. So I think that the first layer is just make sure you don't have a name brand, you know, pathology. But if that's, if you're one of the majority of people whose doctor has said you, your physical exam is good, your screening labs are fine, there's nothing wrong there. You know, maybe you need to sleep more, maybe you're depressed. Maybe, you know, whatever they come up and say, if you're in that group, then I think then the next place to go is, well, how would I both maybe assess the mitochondria, but also these things that affect, you know, the kind of, the more bad going in than, than good coming out.

The toxin levels.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that's when, you know, working with someone who works in chronic illness is great because that's what they do. The thing I would tell people though is although there are good tests for mitochondrial function and they're getting better all the time, they are, number one, not readily available because there, there's a lot of research based tests and there's a lot of sort of what they call, you know, esoteric modern tests that are done. The other thing is, a lot of times insurance won't cover those because they're considered, you know, kind of outside the bounds of reality. So in a lot of cases, if someone's chronically ill, unless they have a genetic mitochondrial disease, which does happen, but usually, you know, you had that from a fairly young age. For most folks, we just assume the mitochondria are having trouble. So then it's, well, what could we test? Right, so why don't we test the things that are either chemistry markers that the mitochondria are a little behind, or direct things affecting those mitochondria. So toxicity is a big area. And there's lots of things that are toxic to humans, especially chronically and in modern times. So we generally. And those, as opposed to 20 or 30 years ago, we can test most toxins much more sensitively than we used to. Right. And those could be metals, they could be chemicals, they could be biotoxins, like mold toxins. You might live in a moldy house or something. They could be.

Any number of other things. And in those, there's panels that can be done to look at those things, you know, so that's one big area that we look at with chronically ill folks. Another is looking a little more broadly at their chemistry. And that might be done with your regular, maybe a broader panel of irregular labs that might show, yeah, you know, your mitochondrial function is a little slower. For example, there's a marker that looks at poor aerobic metabolism. So the thing I described of the good stuff and oxygen, nutrients going in, carbon dioxide and junk going out, and we make energy that's aerobic metabolism. If we shut it off, the tissue would die, but we can slow down. And sometimes there's just markers in your little broader blood chemistry that might say, yeah, you're, you're working, but you're behind a little bit. Sometimes it's, you know, things that simple, sometimes you look at. And that's quite common in the chronically ill population to see those things. This other testing that often is done beyond the toxicity, which would be a lot of times in the urine, they'll look at what are called organic acids, which are the, kind of, in that test are the remnants of your actual metabolic Pathways. And those sometimes can say long before you have a disease or anything, gee, you're really having a hard time processing this chemistry, or you're having a hard time with your mitochondria working or something. So that, you know, there's ways to get in at it. But.

In general, and I want to bring this up because a lot of people live in areas where they maybe don't have a provider that does. You know, beyond primary care, maybe there are things you can do, assuming that we're all exposed to toxins every day or we're, you know, all have these things going on that could be generally helpful after your doctors ruled out diseases.

So I would love to talk about that.

Yeah, yeah, it's usually, you know, that's usually where people start anyway, because the more you do for yourself, you know, the better. And what I will say is I've had people then say, okay, well I cleaned up these things and I did all this and I'm way better. But I still have a couple things, you know, that aren't working right. Then sometimes that makes it a little easier to find out what problem is. Got it. Kind of clear the trash out, really.

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Chat so one of the things, if we're looking at, well, what, what could anybody pretty much do at home for themselves? So the first thing is looking at the balance between how do we make energy or maintain energy and then what, what gets in the way? So the maintenance and, and production of energy. We do want to make sure we have good nutrition going into our body. Okay. Another change the last hundred years is the modern Diet. Now, there's some better things about diet than maybe 100 years ago, but there's also a lot more junk that's in food just kind of naturally, you know, whether it's preservatives or, or additives or, you know, other things to keep food shelf stable. So getting good nutrients in. So first looking at just generally, am I eating, you know, enough protein? Am I eating enough, you know, good fat versus bad fat? Me enough carbohydrate or whatever. That's a. Some people, that's where the problem starts.

You know, you're basically tracking macros more.

I've had, yeah. People that, you know, came into the chronic disease clinic and in first looking, it was, gee, you know, your, your diet's actually 80% carbohydrate. And yeah. You know, and that's issue in itself. You're gonna. You're getting enough calories, no problem, but you're gonna be on this roller coaster with your blood sugar all day. And people are like, oh, I never realized that, you know, and like, we fixed that. And 4, 40% of their problems go away immediately, you know.

Well, you mentioned protein being the first thing, right? When you say that's the part that's. I mean, I think that's the most difficult part in the modern diet, at least to. To get enough of.

Yeah, yeah. And I, I think, you know, a wonderful thing about the modern world is we used to have, give. Give people handouts for all this. You can look up on the Internet, you know, the exact number of, you know, know, grams of protein for the food you're eating. You can figure this out really pretty quickly. Proteins are important because they, they break down to amino acids, and amino acids have a bulk of their activity in helping us to turn over and create new cells and tissues and, you know, maintain our body. That's huge. And then proteins, also the aminos, some of them break down to make neurotransmitters for our brain and our peripheral system. Lots of stuff comes from protein. So it's good for you. Now, obviously, too much of anything's not great, but. But a lot of people, it's like, it's easier sometimes to get carbohydrates. They're easier to find or they taste better, they're easier to eat, Right? Yeah, you can kind of, you know, go there. So there's just the macros on their own, but then there's also, I tell people, what are you dragging in with the macros? Let's say you straighten your macros out, but then it's all like preserved foods with chemicals your body just doesn't need to deal with or, or colorings or, you know, all these things.

And even if you look at, even in the modern last 70 years, yes, there were some preservatives and some colorings 50, 70 years ago, but they were far less than there are now.

Right.

They keep creating more band. Right?

Yeah. You know, food science on the commercial marketing end, you know, make it look better, make it smell better, make it taste better. Immediately you're going to sell more of that, you know, So I think there's, yeah, get, you know, straighten out the macronutrition, make sure you're getting the good stuff you need, make sure you're hydrated enough. You know, what your grandma would tell you. But then look at, okay, now the food sources. Is there anything I could do to remove as much junk as I can, you know, from the foods? So one thing would be, you know, if it's not packaged, if it's not meant to stay on the shelf for months, you know, without spoiling, it's probably going to have less junk in it, you know, and people will think, well, I, you know, I eat organic or I'm thinking about it, but it's expensive or whatever. We need to understand that in modern times there's no, there's no pure food that you can find. Like, we have a toxic world. Yeah. But if you do the, what you can to reduce toxins coming in and, you know, pesticides, then all that, as we talked about, you, you lower the load. So macros increase our energy. Possibility decreasing the toxin lowers the load. That in itself, eventually you're supplying less junk to the system, so you'll clean out better. You know, your energy macros are good, your cells will run better. You know, this kind of makes sense there. The next thing is, and you know, I remember a few decades ago thinking, oh, this is maybe more of a, you know, maybe a luxury recommendation. I think now it's not. And, and that is having, if you're the water you drink with and cook with, having it some kind of filtration. And again, you can't filter everything out probably. But anything that would reduce the amount of junk that's in our water. And you know, a lot of, probably the majority of you know, what we consider clean tap water, it's clean because it doesn't have certain bacteria and viruses in it, which is great. We want that it's clean because it doesn't have super high levels of lead or, you know, other things in it. We check for that, right? Yeah, but there's a lot of other stuff like pesticides, herbicides, they run off and they get into the water table. And unless they hit a certain real high point, they're coming in, in the water, you know, toxic metals, other stuff. So I think in modern times, the, the cooking water and the drinking water that you use really should be. Have some filtration ahead of you. There's levels of that. So that's another way just, you know, take. Take the junk coming in and decrease it. Your body has, you know, detoxing mechanisms. So that's. That's another good way.

That's a good point.

Yeah. You know, and then there's physical things we can do. So we think of, you know, oh, yeah, drink more water. Everyone says that, well, hydration actually is part of the way your body naturally deals with the trash around your cells. And as in, in. In cancer research now, there's actually research that shows, oh, if the cells are better hydrated and they can remove metabolic trash more quickly, which is done partly by hydration, they have less aggressive cancer. They have less, you know, other bad things. Well, same with toxicity. If you're constantly dehydrated, which many people are, your body can't really, you know, put the good stuff through fast enough to take the trash out. So hydration is a physical mechanism. Another physical mechanism is sleep. Our brain detoxes a lot while we're asleep when the glymphatic system is working. And there's other good things immunologically that come from sleep.

Cultural things that used to be, oh, that's done in, you know, these countries or whatever. But if you look at a lot of, you know, the Nordic countries and some other places is a lot of constant, say, sweating, you know, whether it's sauna or other things, that's really common in, you know, colder areas, probably because they're cold, but also that's just part of what they do. Well, it turns out we used to think sweating. Oh, yeah, it probably helps with chemicals coming out because it actually does. But actually now we. We have research to show in the last 15 years that in addition to the chemicals, some of the toxic metals you've held onto will come out in sweating. And the really good thing is, like, people say, well, I don't have a sauna, or I can't get to one. If you do anything that makes you sweat, to put a extra, you know, sweater on or hoodie and go for a brisk walk. As soon as you sweat, junk's coming Out. It doesn't matter how you heat yourself up.

Just got to sweat more, period.

Yeah. Which again, used to be more a part of our lives because we had more manual labor.

That's right.

That. So sweating, you know, so you've got things like more water, sleeping better, but sweating.

Yeah.

Part and parcel with that. Things you can do for yourself, you know, unless you have severe mobility problems, are just move the big muscles in your body. Your leg muscles are the biggest drivers of, you know, good chemistry and stuff, but also your arms and your postural muscles. And people say, well, okay, it makes sense, I'm exercising. But it also does two huge things. And again, this is just walking more or something. The. When the bigger muscles move, yes. They, you know, they grow and do all the good stuff, but also they pump your. Your venous blood reserve. We have this big blood reserve in our body that doesn't. Sort of stagnant. Oh, really? Was stagnant. The more you move your muscles, the more you pump, the blood reserve forces it back to your liver to be cleaned again. And you have a cleaner blood reserve, which winds up helping. But another thing, again, more of the last 20 years, is our understanding that the muscles literally send out.

Chemical signals. You could say some are kind of hormonal, some are more pure chemistry, and they actually will send out healing signals. Okay. We didn't used to know this, but in the early days of COVID when if you put Covid on any research project, you probably get it funded, there's this really amazing paper that came out that said, well, part of the damage with COVID is the, the protective brain barriers get not protective. And it turns out that by moving our physical muscles, we actually send signals that tell it to. To fix itself.

Oh, wow. Okay. Because you. You're almost like not tricking your body, but you're showing your body, hey, right, I can move.

Yeah, it's, it's. It's kind of part of the normal healing mechanism that's built in the, you know, our blueprint. It's just we, you know, we thought, well, muscle movement probably helps our heart, you know, you know, and some other things, but turns out it sends healing signals out for most of your tissues. Really? And I always tell patients, you don't have to become a marathoner or anything, you know, and. And a lot of people say, well, I don't feel good, so I don't want to exercise.

Right.

Totally get that. Just pick something that's a little bit more than you did last week, you know, and just baby steps into it. The more. And even if it's, if you have legs, your legs are, are enough really, you can get your arms moving even better.

I mean there's, I know there's chair exercises if your mobility that way.

Yeah.

Air squats are even good.

Yeah, we, and we do have, we have patients, you know, who are mostly bedbound. And so we'll do other things with them, you know, but, but anything to get a muscle moving, you know. And again that's so. And there's tons of other stuff, but if you take like all these things that we think and a lot of people would be like, oh yeah, I've heard about drinking more water, exercise, you don't realize how powerful those things are consistently.

Right.

Yeah.

Routine.

And if you do that and you decrease the amount of junk, you know that you're eating or drinking and you get three, four, five, six months in, you'll have some things that aren't there anymore, negative, you know, and then what you can do. So let's say you're trying to do it as much on your own as you can.

Yeah.

Then like I said, whatever's left over, you know, once you've screened big bad medical problems out, you could maybe work with somebody and say, okay, I'm doing all this good stuff for me, I still have these symptoms. Can we figure out what's wrong there?

Would that be more of the clinical side of things then that's where.

Yeah, probably more. You know, like I say, if, if they've ruled out the, the primary disease states that would make you have those symptoms, which usually already done, then you're looking at the place between what can I do, you know, at home with myself to decrease toxicity, increase energy.

And I know over here I don't have disease, you know, that's going to kill me causing it. What's in between? Those are clinical things that maybe we could do as healthcare providers to help you have, help you decrease your target toxicity, for example, or help you feed your mitochondria better or, you know, any number of things.

Yeah, well, I mean just since topic or you know, the title of this, this podcast, you know, the TPE blueprint. I'm curious of your perspective on therapeutic plasma exchanges, like aiding the cellular repair. Like just this whole concept. Does it have a place in there? Is that something you, you've recommended or.

I guess, yeah.

What are your views there?

Yeah, it's. It, it. And it would definitely fall into that place in the middle we were just talking about because obviously it's something that you can't do do at home. Absolutely. And all that. But the way that I think about it is, and this is, you know, for the decades that I've been working with chronically ill people, one of the areas that we always try and work on in chronic illness is, is whatever level of toxicity the person has, the first treatment goal is don't put more in. So. So if they're eating or whatever, you know, so that. That's kind of obvious. The next, though, is, can I help your body in some way dump more of this stuff out? And basic things like movement and sweating actually will start to do that sometimes. Then we might find. Find, oh, gee, you've been exposed to a lot of chemicals or metals or, you know, whatever else, and we do those other things, but you need more help. Well, we might specifically give you supports to help your liver and kidneys get rid of that stuff. Whatever comes out through your digestive system, get rid of it. So we might support elimination. We might specifically say, gee, you've been exposed to a lot of metal and maybe we need to do chelation, which is a medical treatment for metals. But then the place where TPE therapeutic plasma exchange comes in is almost on a more macro level when it comes to the toxicity piece. So TPE is kind of considered in medicine very marginalized and segmented to just a couple of big problems. Could be people with too many antibodies from an autoimmune issue, or, you know, something like that could be someone who was acutely poisoned by something that would be on the plasma proteins. But then it's not used a lot other than that. Well, in the world of this middle place, of the, you know, integrative approach to medicine, you can use the mechanics of therapeutic plasma exchange to help the body not only clean out some of the junk that's there, but also there's this other mechanism. So if we go back to the simple equation of, you know, good stuff and oxygen in CO2 and energy comes out the other side, and we take the trash out. Well, when we do tpe, because you are replacing these large proteins that float around in your blood. And what they will do then is they have charges, electrical charges on them. They'll attract junk to them. So you can have hormones being carried by these plasma proteins and remnants of proteins. You can have some. You take a drug, a lot of it'll get stuck on their hormone. A lot of it gets stuck on there. Well, also toxins, you know, chemical toxins, metals, mold, toxins, everything get on there. So you think, well, if the. If the job of tpe, part of it is we're going to just remove a bunch of that stuff during the procedure. Well, yeah, you'd naturally remove whatever was stuck on those. On those big molecules. The other side of it, though, is as soon as you do that, two things happen. One is the liver gets some signals to say, gee, we should make some more of these. Yeah, makes them, you know, let's replace what. What went missing. But then also, it's almost like you have a vacuum in the middle. And so you have kind of clean albumin running around for a while, protein replacement. And so then the cells and the extracellular space literally says, oh, there's room to put more of this trash out here. So the liver makes new stuff, which also can help the liver get rid of things. The cells have an opportunity on their end to say, oh, let's dump some more junk in here. And this is why we believe in the world of, you know, chronic environmental toxicity, that TPE probably is quite helpful because it sort of. It takes this big mass in the middle and makes your body replace it. And then while it's doing that, your cells actually can just dump more jun. You know, out.

That's interesting. I've heard it described that way, but that makes a lot of sense. It makes room like a vacuum for the cells offload.

Yeah, yeah. So you're. You're removing toxins at the liver level, but also at the peripheral cell level, where we hold most of the toxins. It's just. There's more, you know, of course, it's a sort of a chemistry equation, but there's just more room to dump the trash out, really.

And ideally, with dump, that trash being dumped, it's making way for better functioning by the mitochondrial level in each cell.

Because. Because then you think about it, and, you know, your body has natural detoxifying mechanisms through the liver, kidneys, and gut and the skin. Well, if I just cleaned all those up, then they have more room to get rid of more junk, too.

Yeah. The pathways. Yeah. That are naturally there already.

Yeah.

Very interesting. I love that description. Thank you for your perspective of it. Because I think when it relates to the mitochondrial cellular repair level, basically that's.

The root of it all.

It sounds like that's my big takeaway here.

Yeah.

It's up to us. Obviously, we're living in a toxic world, like you already said said, and, you know, can't really get away from that, but we got to do the best we can, you know, and there's a lot of mechanisms to Try to do it ourselves. But I think the big thing is testing. That's what I've taken away from a lot of episodes with other folks like yourself, is get your own data, you know, understand who you are, and at least start there so you know, you know where you're at. Awesome.

Well, before we wrap, is there anything.

On these topics, I mean, you went in depth on a lot. Anything that are glaringly that I missed or we missed together that would aid the listeners and watchers?

No, I think. I mean, we could talk for days about this topic. I know, but I think, you know, the one thing I usually try and end with, whether it's face to face with a patient or in an interview, is it's easy. Like, it sounds really good while we're talking about it. And then when you apply it to yourself, it's easy to kind of get overwhelmed and maybe even feel a little like, what's. What's the use? You know, it's like, this is too much work for me.

Control the toxins and all this other stuff.

Right. It's like, oh, you know, now I'm afraid of the world. And so I think the way to look at it, though, is that no matter where you're starting and no matter, you know, how badly you or your loved one feels, doing a little more every day to. To help all those areas we talked about will still pay dividends over time and multiply itself. Even if you feel like, oh, you know, it's. I don't think I'm getting anywhere, you know, you are. And not being overwhelmed by, oh, gee, there's so much bad, you know, and there's so much, you know, that's coming at me. I. I could never win the, you know, the game. Yeah, you can. And you. Everything you do for yourself is very worthwhile, even if it doesn't feel great in the beginning. So, you know, just realize it's. It's not a microwave solution. It doesn't just sort of happen overnight and that you're one of the biggest positive benefactors of your own body if you can just make these little changes.

Yeah, I love it.

Yeah.

And it's our own game to play, too, so. So, you know, it's. Let's play for the long game.

We're responsible for this body we're using right now.

Well, thank you for your insights and bringing your expertise here. I love it. I loved it all. You have a very. You have a great place for people to go to. I know we already talked about Dranow.com Dr. In the letter a now, now n o w dot com. Maybe point out some things. Maybe next steps that you have a great YouTube channel. I've seen a lot on books.

What else?

Yeah, so the. Yeah that I made that website because I have lots of other things I do, I think for the, for general medical education, which is why I started my YouTube channel because we talk a lot about toxicity and mitochondria and chronic, all that. The.

The.

On the doctoranow.com there's a link to the YouTube channel. That's probably the best place. There's hundreds of videos there. Most are fairly short and bite sized and they get into these things. There's also links. I've written some books about cancer and some other things on there. But yeah, I really think that the YouTube outlet is probably the best thing to dive into little bite size sized chunks of what can I do for myself.

Yeah, yeah. So that's where I told you I was, I was going down the rabbit hole watching a lot of yours and it's great content, it's very helpful and everyone can jump in and learn something new. So appreciate you very much again and yeah, keep, keep doing, doing your own game here and sharing with the world because I'll, I'll keep watching. I hope.

Everybody else, thank you so much.

All right, welcome.

Bye.

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