Expert Warns Breast Implant Illness Can WRECK Your Health

I have a very exciting guest today. I have Dr. Dony Wilson, who is an expert in women's health, Burnout, hpv, all things related to the stress and adrenal fatigue that my patients suffer. So I'm really excited to welcome Dr. Doney to the show today. I've been trying to get her on the show for a period of time, but due to our schedules, it's taken a little bit of time. So thanks for coming on my show, Dr. Doney.

Oh, I'm so glad to be here. Thank you.

Well, I know you're an expert in all things related to women's health, burnout as well as hpv. So I have a unique, you know, situation with my audiences. I have an audience that has surgery first and foremost, and they're concerned about chronic inflammation secondary to just the things that we face every day. Air quality, fluid quality, food quality, things we apply on our skin. And they may have breast implants. And then I have a whole group of patients who just want to increase their health span, and then, you know, by doing that, increase their longevity and lifespan. So maybe let's start with. Big question is, why are we all suffering from increasing amounts of burnout today?

It's such a good question, and I think it's so important, really. Stress and burnout is considered an epidemic worldwide. There's increasing numbers. More than 50% of people report burnout. And usually burnout is related to the workplace. The official definition is related to work. But I see that people are burned out with their lives in general. Men, women, children, teenagers. That's the thing about burnout, is it? It can hit anyone at any age. I see patients from. From young, you know, kids and teenagers all the way into their 80s experiencing symptoms of burnout. And I think it's. To answer your question, it's because, one, it's because culturally we're pushed. We're taught to push ourselves hard, right? We're taught we've got to do more, be more, be everything, be superhuman. And when we're pushing ourselves so hard, we're not taught to take care of ourselves. Right? We're not taught to, oh, we're humans. We need some downtime recovery time. And I think that ultimately that's what leads to burnout is constantly go, go, go with not enough recovery time.

Yeah, let's. I'm glad you phrased it that way. You know, when I promote my book or I give a talk, I really say, or I try to get the audience to engage in what I'm speaking about, and I ask Them one very fundamental question, and depending on who's in the audience, obviously there'll be a variety of responses. But the question is, what do you think is the most important factor in surgical recovery? So why do people recover slower, moderately well, or extremely efficiently after surgery? And it's not to put you on the spot, but it's what you said about recovery. So recovery is key, and that only happens when you sleep?

Yes, it's so, so important. And I see this in my patients who are going through surgery and recovery as well. And I see that when I teach them how to get good sleep. I mean, certainly that's one of our best recovery tools. But I always joke, I was one of these people who was taught, oh, I'll sleep later. You know, I got all these things to do. I don't have time to sleep. Right. That's how we were kind of taught to think that way. But actually, I wrote a book called the Natural Insomnia Solutions that in that when I was writing that book, I had to break down my own belief system around sleep and realize that when we sleep, so much good stuff is happening. It's not that we're laying down and doing nothing. We're laying down and we're doing a lot of recovery on every cellular level. So it's essential. I completely agree.

The. The main thing that I tell patients that they can start doing right now if they're suffering from, you know, whether it's burnout, which is your expertise, or if they're trying to recover after a procedure, which is mine, I tell them there's very specific behaviors. And, you know, the hardest thing to change is a behavior. So if you already have that limiting belief that you have to not sleep in order to get ahead, or you have to not sleep to do the next thing or whatever that is. I think in one of your books, you talk about how there is a huge rise in burnout amongst young people. And I think it goes directly back to obviously, the things we're highlighting with sleep, because a young person should not be getting up at 6am that's when they're getting in more REM sleep and things. So if you never get into deep sleep and can't then recover, those kids are expected to then get up, get dressed. Unfortunately, if you're unaware of what happens to kids based on the things they eat and drink in the morning, just give somebody who doesn't metabolize sugar and caffeine something sugary and see how their behavior changes on no sleep and a bunch of unprocessed food and sugar.

Absolutely. I don't. I always am so upset that the school systems often that start so early that, you know, it gets. It's causing, you know, kids to have to wake up so early and then they're going through a long day, barely any time to eat. That's another important thing that humans need is to eat in regular intervals. So then it's. And then they're rushing to activities later in the day. And if you think about it, it's like we're teaching them from a young age that you wake up early and you go, go, go all day and you barely eat and you barely rest. And that's what then people can. You know, it becomes the norm. And I think that's the thing with, with all of us as humans. Is whatever it is familiar to us? It might not be best for our health, but it's familiar. And so then we end up repeating it into our adulthood. And next thing we know, we're. We're working long hours and. Or we're parents and we have kids and so we're working or running a business and then taking care of our kids and then not getting enough sleep and it repeats the next day. And that's when, yeah, patient women especially come to me and say, listen now, maybe they're even. Whether they're trying to get pregnant or even Perry and postmenopausal and saying, how am I supposed to keep up? How am I supposed to keep doing all these things when I'm exhausted? Right. The symptoms of burnout is exhaustion, fatigue, as well as anxiety. And I hear a lot of times irritability, like your people. Women will say to me, I don't feel like myself. Why am I. I don't want to be grumpy with my kids, but I'm so burnt out and exhausted and overwhelmed that I end up grumpy with my kids.

Yeah. I think we have to make some acknowledgments that one, if you were, you know, not able to sleep and recover and for everybody listening, so basically you have to get seven to nine. And this is for an adult, if you're a kid, you need more sleep, not less. And that's why if you just think back and look at a child develop, basically all they're doing is eating and sleeping. It's very limited hours of, you know, activity. And then, you know, behaviors change based on what they're taking into their body. So I have some real world examples of performance and you know, even though, as you know, I've Written a book about recovery. And I take care of patients for a living, you know. You know, been doing this almost 30 years. You know, when your kids come to you, they're like non believers. It's pretty funny. And occasionally they'll like, have a light bulb moment and go, you know, I felt better when I did a better job about eating protein and limiting, you know, not so much fast food. Because if you're listening to this, fast food is actually not food. So you should just cut that out of your life. Now, if you drink out of something plastic, you're affecting your. Especially from a woman's hormonal perspective, you're affecting your hormonal activity through the, you know, ingestion of something called phthalates, which is part of the plasticizer that makes your plastic water bottle harder. So those things you can change. Just Today, listening to Dr. Doney and myself, you can actually stop drinking out of plastic. That would be great. You can stop eating processed food. That means food that comes in a box or something you bought that was fast food. Because it's actually not food. You're actually making the problem probably worse. And we'll have Dr. Doney comment that. Comment on that in a second after I get off my soapbox about these things. Appreciate a thing. And all of this is air quality. We talk about filtered water. We talk about organic foods, and Lord knows we can have a whole show about what's organic and what's not organic and. But filtered air. Because I live in Texas, we have a big problem with mold. Tons of patients with mold exposures. We have a real problem with that. Not just in Texas, but my patients from Florida, from California, from Hawaii, all places, basically. Maybe these all, you know, relatively speaking, contribute to what you're describing, which will lead to, you know, burnout and. Or, you know, adrenal fatigue, or limit your baby, your body's ability through natural killer cell function to ward off an infection like hpv. So take it from here and I'll. I'll stop yapping.

Oh, I love it. I love it. It's so important. In fact, I. In my book Mast yout Stress Reset your Health, I bring it back to using self care, or specifically the word care as an acronym. C is for clean eating, which is exactly what you're talking about. How do we start taking steps toward eating cleaner, whole foods, foods that serve our body and physiology instead of stuff that really isn't food. Like you're saying the A and care is for adequate sleep, which we talked about. R is for recovery activities. There's so many different recovery activities we can choose from and we can talk about. And then E is for exercise and movement. And so I absolutely find I've, I've been studying and researching stress and seeing patients for over 24 years. So this is something where I constantly am reading the research and learning like what is it that's causing so much stress to us as humans and how do we recover from it? Because a lot of times people will just say, oh, just decrease your stress. As if it's like that's going to be just an easy thing to do, right? Like, oh, just you walk out. People tell me they walk out of the doctor's office and say, yes, your symptoms are caused by stress, just decrease your stress. And what I find is that that's pretty hard for people to do, right? There's a lot of things that stresses that we can't change. We're parents, we're going to stay parents, we have jobs, we're going to need jobs. We a lot of these stresses. But this, some of the stresses that you're mentioning we can change. Like we can change the stress we're exposed to through food. We can decrease pesticide exposure, plastic exposure. I consider those toxins to also be stresses. So we can change that. We can change some of our toxin exposure in our air by getting a water, an air filter like you said, or a water filter for our water, we can reduce our toxin exposure and therefore reduce our stress in that way. And then otherwise for our day to day stresses, what we need to do is build in the recovery to counterbalance it. And I think that comes down to really fine tuning your self care routine on a day to day basis. Really getting inspired and curious about activities you can engage in and practice and figure out what you enjoy. Right. To bring that joy back into your life.

Yeah, Dr. Doney's very right for everybody listening. Like if you look back at history and notice certain problems developing both in adults and children, obviously it's a, a stressful environment that we're faced with all the time now. And things like the impact of social media obviously is a very different thing now. But, and everybody listening who knows me and sees me on social media, y' all don't know that on my phone I don't have social media. I have a specific phone that I carry. So if you're trying to reach me on social media, you'll never actually specifically reach me in real time because I don't carry that thing because I don't want to look at it. I don't want to be bothered by it because It's a, as Dr. Doney's mentioned, it can be a stressor. And then the other thing that, you know, from an environmental standpoint, you know, I know things on a whole are extremely costly to patients and their families and eating well is probably the most expensive thing to a family. The food and pharmacy and agricultural industry, you know, don't make this any easier for us. So things that Dr. Doney's remarking on, we've talked about it in my show many, many times. There's a thing that you have to avoid, which is certain foods that could affect you that may have been treated with, we'll just say glyphosate, which is something that is commonly found on, on foods as part of spraying crops and especially thin skinned fruits. If you're doing that, I had a wonderful patient the other day say, oh man, I used to eat like all these berries every day. And I'm like, so that's, you know, represents a huge glyphosate load when we look at their toxicity burden testing. And they grew up in environments where they got a lot of exposure through spraying of fields and or crops or they lived at a area where it was addressed through the use of atrazine. Maybe you could comment on that a little bit about those types of things that have certainly been around prior to, I would say, our acknowledgment because it wasn't always known that those were a problem.

Absolutely. And I find this in my patients too, because we, if so, I always will say to the patient, are you aware of a toxin exposure? Sometimes people are aware. Or as you mentioned, mold, we'll say, are you aware that there's been mold in your home or other building environment? You know, so if someone, sometimes they're like, yeah, I know there's mold, I can see it. Then we definitely want to do a mold toxin panel, an environmental toxin panel. And I would say, especially if a person is really experiencing a lot of symptoms, like when we first look at something like fatigue, right, we look for anemia, low thyroid function, and I'll also look at low adrenal function, we can talk more about that. How do we identify low adrenal function? And. But then if someone is still fatigued and weakness and maybe other neurological symptoms, then we got to go deeper, right? We got to look at those mitochondria. And if we see that the mitochondria and the oxidative stress levels high, then that really tells me we got to start Looking at environmental toxins, and there is this urine toxin panel where we can test for that. It's amazing. And I do see those toxins in patients as well. Glyphosate is the same as Roundup, and people still use that on their yards to kill weeds and on golf courses. Right, because they're trying to not have weeds on the golf course. And yet that's exposing us to these toxins. These pesticides or insecticide are also insecticides. A lot of times I find people who live in apartment buildings or condo buildings, they're using insecticides to spray. And so when we test, then we can see these things. We can also see the plastics, the parabens. Right. All the toxins we're exposed to. And the key with this is not just identifying it. Identifying it is important because we're all exposed to some toxins, some more than others. But the key is once we know which toxins are high, then we can go through a specific process of getting those toxins out. Some toxins require different detox support than others. I myself, by the way, Rob, I figured out at one point that I was being exposed to formaldehyde from a mattress, like a memory foam mattress that I was sleeping on. Here I'm thinking I was getting neck pain. I'm going to get this memory foam mattress. Lo and behold, these memory foam mattresses are filled with formaldehyde. I did my toxin panel, and it was way up high. I'm like, no wonder I'm getting headaches and fatigue. So. So then I went through a specific process to get it out of my body.

That's right. And for our audience who's existing, they know I do this on every single patient I take care of. Because you can't become a patient of mine without participating this way. Because it's really important for us to acknowledge and understand what environment exposures you've had in order for us to craft the plan that will help you the most. I think a lot of folks are under the impression that just surgery will solve, you know, their. Their problem. And after almost 30 years of operating, that's really not the case. So what I try to do about the sharp methodology is to highlight how your genetics, which I always say, you can't pick your parents and you can't outrun a bad diet. So in this setting, if genetic code makes it difficult for you to detoxify what Dr. Doney's talking about, the more you get exposed to it, the more difficult it will become. And then eventually your body will be unable to cope with the amount of toxins in your system. And that's when we see our patients, both Dr. Doney and mine, become more and more symptomatic. And it's a very logical, simple thing to understand. If you have too many toxins in your system and an inability to break them down, to kick them out, you'll become chronically inflamed. And that's basically, you know, the. The easiest way I can explain it, and then all things will go off the rails. But I encourage my patients to really embrace the fact that their gut health, their food, in particular, sensitivity to specific foods, are triggers that will affect their gut health. And then once your gut is not functioning properly, properly, and. Or your liver and gut health is compromised and you don't eliminate waste because either, you know, you have to poop, pee, or sweat to get toxins out of your system. If all those are off and your gut health is poor, your hormones will definitely be off. And I'm sure Dr. Dhoni can talk quite a bit about this, but that's how I explain it to our patients. Want to go through surgery because the number one causer of inflammation on this phone call, this Zoom meeting, this podcast, is me. I cause a lot of inflammation when I operate on people.

And I love the way that you break it down. It's absolutely the case. And to realize that, I mean, it's so great. I love that you're helping women with explants because now we're. Oftentimes that's a source of toxicity and we need to get it out of the body. Except that it's just that and surgery. Oh, my gosh, I'm so grateful. I myself had to have surgery a couple of years ago because of an inflammatory condition in my body. So I had to put myself through the inflammation of surgery in order to recover from the inflammation in my body. And so I'm very grateful for surgery as a tool. But it's. You're exactly. I love that you're saying it's not just about the surgery. We then have to help the whole body recover. Because ultimately, and this is, as an age of doctor this is paramount to my philosophy and medicine, is that we're a whole person. We're in. All of our systems are interconnected, right? That just because one area of the body has inflammation, it doesn't mean it's localized to that area. It means it's everywhere. So we need to help the whole system heal. We need to help to help the gut heal, help get the toxins out get the liver detoxification, the methylation working again, the mitochondria working again, the adrenals working again in order to help a person fully restore. And even though that can sound like a lot of work, it's doable all the time. I see patients going through that process successfully. And I wanted to mention, too, Rob, that the, like what you're saying about how this inflammation in the body sets us up for other health issues. And that's exactly what I see with women who have a abnormal Pap smear report that is more and more common. And this is the thing about abnormal Pap smears is a lot of times women don't really talk about it. They keep it to themselves, when actually over 40 million people in the United States have high risk HPV virus. And every year over 4,000 women die because of cervical cancer, which, you know. And so we're doing a Pap smear in order to try to identify that and prevent cervical cancer. And yet what's really going on, it's not just about cutting. Right, taking out the abnormal cells or. Or doing a surgery or procedure to remove the cervix or a hysterectomy, because what's really going on is an inflammatory state in the body that was allowing the HPV virus to cause the cancer. So, you know, I think that what you're teaching is so brilliant because that's exactly what I see with HPV and abnormal Pap smears, too.

Yeah. And I'm sure you could highlight how throughout history, women have been subjected to many chemicals that exacerbate the development of this. My mother had cervical cancer and had a hysterectomy after I was born, before I. I could, like, remember that.

Wow.

I was in medical school. I knew enough by the time I got this phone call that it was not a good situation. And she. I was trying to. I was getting out of my third year, so I was kind of finishing my third year, going into my fourth year, which is your last year of medical school. And my mom called me and said, you know, I'm having a lot of abdominal pain. And I was like, okay, well, you have to go get colonoscopy at a minimum, because she was already of that age. And she's. She told me she would have trouble with constipation. So a very obviously hits close to home because my mom ultimately succumbed to a recurrence of cervical cancer, which, just because you have surgery doesn't mean you're absolved of that issue. And it became a mass that Was behind her abdomen in what we call the retroperitoneum. And it caused a lot of discomfort. And I took over the last year of medical school. I moved back home and shortly passed away from that. But to Dr. Doney's point, and what I was saying is our body is a very elaborate sense system of checks and balances. And when your inflammation is too high, your ability to check something is out of balance, and things like cervical cancer from hpv or other cancers. And I love. I'm sure somebody will come out and say some ignorant things about this. Other cancers are allowed to develop, and they develop in really young people, which is always shocking to me, and without a genetic predisposition, because obviously some things are genetic and that's the way it is. But these are not genetic induced cancers. These are happening in young patients. And I have a patient who was on my show who Taylor dukes is her name, and. And she said I developed a brain tumor. I was like, well, I bet you had suppressed natural killer cell function. And he gave me this. How did you know that? Well, that's why brain tumors and other tumors develop in patients, because our body is surveilling all the time to protect us against humor formation, which is just basically unchecked cellular growth and stuff. I don't know. You know, unfortunately, the system is not set up to highlight this, but things like the liquid biopsy and the grail, all these things are coming up to look for and find cancer cells as they're moving around for everybody listening. I mean, everybody has cancer cells moving around all the time. And your body does a tremendous job of protecting you from developed tumors. But part of. I'll circle back. Like, if you want to protect yourself and do a better job taking care of yourself, I'm going to leave mindset and stress management to Dr. Joney. But I'm going to say you better control the quality of the air, the fluid, and the food that you put in your body. And for a woman who applies products, you want to be extremely careful with what you put on your skin, Because I've seen astronomically high levels of antibacterials like triclosan. I've seen the most abnormal amounts of chemicals you could ever find in somebody because I look for them. And you miss 100% of the things you never look for. Trust me, things all the time. You counsel your patients, especially women. You have to put a product through. And I have no interest in the environmental working group, but at least type it in there to see if it's on Their list. Has it been tested. And be just very careful of what you put on your body and in your body.

It's such a good point because everything goes straight through our skin. And even I said, like sleeping on a mattress, it could get into your body. So it's like, you know, we're these invisible toxins. We think because they're invisible that they're not there, but they are there. And it's the only way we see it is when we do a urine test. Right. And then we can believe it then.

Yeah. I mean, we have the fortune of, you know, experiencing these things through training and seeing things. If, for instance, you're the person who gets really sensitive around odors, like chemical odors or smoke, then invariably, genetically, you have a problem in your glutathione pathway. And so, Dr. Nonia are not using smoke and mirrors when we're discussing this. This is a very common problem. And. And I think many people now understand that methylation and the MTHFR gene, which is just what, you know, become wildly popular in everybody's. That's just one component, the methylation pathway. There's multiple genes involved. And I have a methylation problem, and about 40% or more of the population has a methylation problem.

So I do too. I have. Yeah, I'm heterozygous. Compound heterozygous. Yeah.

For everybody listening. So I'm constantly trying to lower inflammation in my patients prior to surgery. So if you're following along with how we think about this, obviously we're cleaning up the air and we're being cognizant of the fluid we put on our bodies. And then when it comes to food, food and supplementation, you got to be. And scrutinize your food carefully. I put people on a very, very increased amount of dietary protein and we use a pea protein just because I have a lot of patients who don't intake animal products. And I think this just makes it simpler for us to have a clean product that's in terms of ingredients, very minimal. So that simple. And the actual things that I wish I could get everybody to understand is if you take more and more supplements and capsules and tablets and things, it doesn't necessarily equate through deficiency in absorption of those supplements and. Or utilization by your cells in your body of those supplements. So if you already have difficulty with absorption, which nobody can tell you, I can't tell you whether you do or don't. I do highlight from my patients the reason that most of my supplements are liquid based. The core four, vitamin C, glutathione, methylated B complex, and vitamin D3K2 are that way. Because I know for a fact if those get in your mouth, you're gonna get the nutrient density that you need for those very important cellular, you know, functions that are so critical to stress management, avoiding burnout, improving your sleep, avoiding, you know, things that will allow the environment for HPV to take hold.

I'm so glad you're mentioning methylation, too. I mean, methylation to me is how our bodies use our B vitamins. Speaking of B vitamins, for all the good stuff that B vitamins do in our bodies. And even if someone doesn't have mthfr, their methylation can be bogged down, a traffic jam caused by the things you're mentioning, the toxins, the. That we're talking about. Right. This is what. But the other thing that locks and bogs down our methylation and our ability to use our B vitamins is stress. And so that's why that stress recovery is so important. But, you know, in addition to the things we've been talking about that I really recommend, and I see this also in the patients working with abnormal Pap smears and cervical cancer risk or vaginal cancer risk, is we need to be looking at the cortisol levels and adrenaline levels. So cortisol and adrenaline are made by the adrenal glands. And you can measure cortisol in a regular blood test, but then you're only getting it at the time you have your blood drawn, when really cortisol is a hormone that is high in the morning and gradually decreases through the day. So we need to test it at different times a day. And so we can do that with either a urine sample where you pee in a cup at different times a day, or in a saliva sample where you spit in a cup at different times a day. So we can see the cortisol and how well you're matching up with that cortisol curve. You were mentioning the circadian rhythm, I think, in, like, the sleep cycle. Right. So that point, we want our cortisol to be low, but when we wake up, we want our cortisol to come up and so we can measure how is your cortisol doing through the day. We assume because we're such stress magnets, we're always so stressed and burnt out. A lot of people assume that they have high cortisol, but actually, when I measure their cortisol levels, some percentage of them actually has low cortisol. And so I really encourage people instead of just guessing to actually test and find out what is your cortisol up to. And not only that, but in my research, I found that it wasn't just about cortisol, it was about the adrenaline, too. And we can measure adrenaline in urine so we don't have to just assume what's going on with your adrenaline. We can actually measure it in urine and see if it's too high or too low. Those kinds of tests exist and you can do them from home and send them in. I actually also, with this mastery or stress, reset your health book. I developed a quiz where, you know, in a couple minutes a person can go through these questions that I developed through my research and through patient care to identify what likely is going on with your cortisol and adrenaline. So even if you are not, you're wondering, should I do this cortisol adrenaline test? I would at least do the quiz first because you can do it right on my website@drzani.com and you can in a couple minutes see what likely is going on. Are you likely to have high cortisol, high adrenaline, low cortisol, low adrenaline, some combination of them in between? And the reason again that this is so important is the treatment's different, right? That's why we want to know which toxins, because the treatment's different. We want to know which what's going on with your cortisol and adrenaline. Because the treatment's different. Literally different herbs, different adaptogens are better at lowering cortisol that's too high than other adaptogens that raise cortisol that's too low. So we need to know where your cortisol is so that you get the right treatment to get it back to optimal.

I think I'm glad you said it that way because the consumers are obviously probably going to be a little confused by all the different options and all the different lotions and potions and pills and, and things to take for, you know, stress management. And I'm glad you mentioned that. I find. And we've. Dr. Doney and I are in several groups together and we've discussed the kind of interesting environment that is supplementation in all of us who try to help patients through improving their diets. Part of that improvement in the diet is one to make sure they get nutrients they need, but in nutrients where it's very difficult to get them. Supplementation plays a key role, especially for my patients pre surgery, post surgery, and for just improvement of health span. So I guess in terms of, I wonder, there was another thing you said like, you know, I find that patients who have a lot of sleep disturbances habitually do something and let's just, you know, talk about them a little bit. I really try to get people fall following a 321 so they stop eating about three hours before bed, they stop drinking a couple hours before bed. They get off screens and, you know, tablets and pads about an hour before bed so that you're actually hopefully lowering the stress and getting the exactly of the brain, you know, in a state where you're preparing for sleep. The room needs to be a little bit cooler, devoid of, you know, bright lights or other things that are going to distract you and keep you awake because a lot of people have trouble shutting off their minds. Can you share any tips or tricks to maybe help for those folks who are stressed out, who may have, you know, cortisol levels like that are definitely going to peak at the wrong times.

And bring just to mention that cortisol is one of our main hormones to manage inflammation. So, you know, it's like brings right back to that story of how do we help with managing inflammation? Can be with optimizing our cortisol. And Absolutely. The thing about like when you're getting to bed and you're like, I want to go to sleep. I'm trying to go to bed earlier, but my mind is racing. And the thing is like, the way our stress response system works is that it anticipates. So even if you're not currently having some major stress, you're like, I'm ready for bed, I'm all cozy, I'm in my jammies, the lights are out. But your nervous system is so used to the stress that it's is anticipating. And that's when sometimes people have high cortisol before bed. And so we want to use specific herbs and nutrients to help reduce the cortisol for before bed if that's the case. And at the same time, the other things you can do is just, I love to say you can intentionally engage your parasympathetic nervous system. So our stress response is what we call the sympathetic nervous system. That's that fight or flight, you know, adrenaline response. And we don't have a shortage of that. We can easily access that. But what we have a shortage of is the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the opposite, which is the rest and digest and sleep. And how can we intentionally engage that parasympathetic nervous system? Well, one very simple thing to do is take a couple deep breaths. It's amazing. To me, when I lay down in bed, if I just remind myself, let me just take a couple deep breaths. Literally, we're saying to our nervous system, oh, we don't need that stress response right now. We want to go into a calm mode and so you can talk to your nervous system and teach it what you want. So there's deep breaths. Then you can. You can potentially go into a meditation or biofeedback or guided imagery where you literally going through your body, like a body scan and relaxing each body part through your body. And you're. As you're doing that, you're practicing mindfulness because your mind is thinking about your body and your present moment versus all the things on your task list that you have to do tomorrow. So you're training your brain how to go into more of a calm, relaxed state. And you could use that any time of day. But it can really be helpful at bedtime when your mind is racing. I love to put on a meditation before bed and. Or calming music. Research really shows that there's. There's all right, white noise, pink noise, all these different types of sounds that we can play that help also calm the brain and the nervous system. So if you've really been, like, struggling, I would be thinking of those types of things. How can we teach your nervous system to calm? And if you're really still struggling with sleep, that's when I would say we better check your cortisol and adrenaline. Because adrenaline, for example, if it's too high, we can use magnesium to process it through those methylation pathways, comt pathways, and we can reduce the adrenaline levels with magnesium. It's so simple, right? It's like, oh, let's just take magnesium and we're gonna relax our muscles, relax our brain, and actually be able to go to sleep and stay asleep fast. Better.

Yeah. I think the kind of tracking of this. And I wanted to. Just while you were talking, I was thinking about a lot of folks, you know, I just asked them, like, how long do you sleep uninterrupted? That means, like, not getting up to go to the bathroom. And most people can't actually tell you.

I know.

Yeah, I know. Everybody fancies particular wearables, you know, whether it's a watch wearable, a ring wearable, a strap. And I've used at one point for, like, the last couple months. I had three wearables at one time because I was trying to compare them all to see the data. And my wife will tell you I get extreme about some of these things because I'm Trying to make sure that when I speak about it, I can be really confident in what I'm saying.

I've thought about doing that too, like, and I've done. I've used different ones at different times. But I love the idea of doing them all at once because then you can see how they compare to each other. What did you find from your research there?

Yeah, I've had a whoop strap since the. I was, I think, one of the first thousand people, something like that. So I've had it since like 2016, I think. And it's really. I found to be very accurate.

That was the most accurate. Yeah, I used one of those before, too.

Aura with it, and it wouldn't match up to the whoop data. So I wear an aura because of that. I. I just didn't trust what it was telling me. Now there's a new ring called Ultra Human Ring now that is actually very, very accurate in terms of sleep scoring and HRV. So HRV's heart rate variability. You are establishing, you know, recovery. And if you look at a young person, their HRV will be in the hundreds, like my, you know, my teenagers. And then I'm just happy if mine's in the 30s, to be honest. And then I was trying out different Garmin watches and I couldn't quite get comfortable with. Because I do look at HRV a lot. And if it's not within 3 to 5 milliseconds of what it is, you know, comparing them, then I'm always questioning, like, is this just a calculation? And of course they're calculations, but how accurate is the calculation? And this is probably a little bit more than the audience wants to hear. But, you know, I, I do try to make sure that when I'm telling you something, I've used that product and I'm very aware of how it's going to tell you data and, and that, you know, so if I have somebody who's struggling, I'm gonna say, these are the options. You can use one of these. I believe the data. It's for a purpose. Because if you come in and tell me that you got great sleep but, you know, it shows your recovery is terrible, or your HRV is the teens, well, then you didn't get great sleep. That means several things. Either you didn't get the quantity, so the duration of sleep, or you didn't get the quantity. Quality and quantity are what we're talking about of both cycles and deep sleep. And that's a whole show that people have written books about, basically. But that's imperative to help Dr. Doney get you doing better, obviously for us, in terms of getting you to get prepared for surgery, go through surgery, recover from surgery, these things. You know, I always say the magic happens only when you're asleep. So you have to make sure that you're focused on that. Otherwise all the things that Dr. Doney and I are discussing are going to be difficult.

What I love also, I've had patients who really fall in love with using the different HIV tracking devices. And they've, we've found that it's really good at helping to first of all, listen to your body, because we're really not taught to listen to our body. We're usually paying so much more attention to what's in the external world and what somebody else thinks about us, what is our body, what's really going on inside our body. And these tools help you get information from your body. So you can go, oh, my body is not. And, and, and then as you're fine tuning your self care routine, you can use that to help guide you. Because a lot of times I also find that sometimes people are thinking, okay, exercise is good, I'm gonna exercise more, I'm gonna do, you know, and they end up overdoing it. How do you know if you're overdoing? Because we can actually burn ourselves out by doing too much of a good thing, right? If we overdo intense exercise now, we're, we're beyond that, kind of like Goldilocks, you know, we're trying to get in that perfect zone, right? We're trying to, to create change. We have to do something different. We have to go a little bit outside and we're, we a little bit stress our system, even any kind of exercise is a little bit of a stress on the muscles in order to get the muscles to grow. But if we go too far beyond that, we overstress this system, end up working against ourselves. And so tracking the HRV can also help with that. So that if, say you work out one day, then you check your heart rate variability the next day. If you're getting a lower score, it could be related to overdoing it and your workout. And so then you can go, okay, now I need to, I need to pull back a little bit. I need to adjust what I'm doing with my workout or any other activities during the day. I would say even fasting, it's possible to fast for too long and end up stressing your system more.

Well, I think what Dr. Doney has highlighted is incredibly important in terms of both how stress plays a role both in your day to day and overall in terms of your. Whether it's. I don't want to say that's going to lead to us all getting burned out at one time or another, but there's certainly times where it could be more stressful. And so I would say for our patients in particular, Dr. Doney resonates with. Our concepts are to really be careful with both the quantity and how you're exercising. So we don't have our patients do things like hit an intense cardio because that's not going to, you know, from a health span, lifespan, achieve the goals that I'm looking for for our patients, which is avoiding osteopenia and osteoporosis in my female patients and allowing them sufficient recovery periods because many of them don't methylate. Well, if you have intense periods of cardio or intense exercise intervals, you can create more and more inflammation, which makes it harder and harder for you to recover. So it's not like lifting weights is going to make people bulky. I think there's this perception that everybody's going to become a bodybuilder, which is quite hilarious, but nonetheless, so obviously engaging in exercise. Walking is great, walking up hills is great. Lifting weights rates I have. Our patients avoid hiit, spin and intense cardio for the reasons previously increase their dietary protein, really concentrate on their sleep control their air quality, flu quality, food quality, and products they apply to their skin. And that's my best recipe for avoiding what Dr. Doney treats all the time, which is an adrenal fatigue. And unfortunately for the patient suffering with hpv, that concern for her. So I want to thank her for being on my show. It's been a great honor to have you on and privilege to have you on. I'm glad we were able to get a schedule. Thank you again, Dr. Torrey.

Thank you so much, Dr. Rob, I'm so glad to be here and I'm glad to help people know that they can recover from stress and they can prevent HPV from causing cancer. Thank you so much for sharing that story about your mom. I was really touched by that. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Sam.