EP027: Allopathic vs. Holistic Approaches to Autoimmunity with Sachin Patel

Welcome to the Perfect Practice podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel, is a functional medicine success coach, international speaker and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Hello and welcome to a very, very, very special episode of Perfect Practice. In today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you a podcast that I did with the University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine podcast called Raw Talk. And for whatever reason, you be the judge, but for whatever reason, they decided not to air this information. I actually was treading lightly, but I want you to hear the information in its entirety. I want you to listen to it if you're a functional medicine practitioner. I hope this message resonates with you. Hopefully you get some nuggets on how to articulate your message when you're presenting or when you're being interviewed. I used some great analogies, I used some very powerful insights. I talked a lot about the human mind and the capabilities that we have of creating our reality, whether it's health or whether it's disease, and it just didn't land with them. For whatever reason it was. I didn't think it was too controversial. But again, you be the judge, but listen to it. Tell me what you think. I think this is going to be an awesome, awesome, awesome episode and, and, you know, have other people listen to it because there's a very powerful message in this for each and every single one of us. No matter where you are in your journey, no matter where you are in your evolution, personally or professionally, you're going to find some really, really great insights in this episode. And let's spread the message. My mission is to actually spread this to more people than it would have had the University of Toronto actually aired this episode. So I'm trying to get this out to as many people as possible and I think I actually have a bigger reach than they do, because, so help me, let's get this message out there to as many people as possible. If you know someone with autoimmunity, if you help people with autoimmunity, you're going to get a lot of value out of this. Once again, thank you. Thanks for all your support. Thanks for spreading the message. Thanks for being you. Thanks for swimming upstream against the raging current. And we need more and more people like yourself fighting and clawing our ways to get this message out there. And, you know, here's the thing. I use the words fighting and clawing because that's what people understand. But it doesn't have to be that way. We have a better system, a better methodology, powerful tools, and eventually this will be the mainstream current of healthcare. So have a listen, let me know what you think and enjoy.

Hi, Sachin, how are you?

I'm awesome. Vanessa, how are you today?

I am great. Really great. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to schedule in this interview.

It's a true honor and a pleasure. And I'm super excited to have this discussion with you and see if we can open up some people's eyes and get some light bulbs going off and empower people to really take control of their health, or if they're practitioners or students, inspire them to maybe approach their patients a little bit differently and give them both an opportunity to see what our beautiful bodies are capable of.

Absolutely. And as this episode is featuring autoimmune diseases, I think your extensive knowledge and expertise in this field would be a great help to a lot of people out there, especially those living with autoimmune diseases, including myself. So to start, would you mind sharing with listeners what your role is at the Living Proof Institute and how it came to be?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, the question that I get very often is, you know, what's your background? How do you know this? Why doesn't my doctor know this? And so I think it's important to kind of frame my beginnings. I started off, I never thought I'd be doing anything close to what I'm doing today. When I first started out, I knew I wanted to make a difference. I knew that our health care system needed some sort of revamping and retooling. And I actually graduated from school as a chiropractor. So I went to McMaster University, got my honors degree in kinesiology and and then went to New York Chiropractic College. And I really wanted to study sports. You know, I was really into athletics, and I was very physically active myself. And I loved, for whatever reason, I felt compelled to be drawn to athletes and working with athletes. But then one day, a couple of years into my career where I thought I was at the peak of my career, working with Olympic athletes and working with professional football players and Baseball players and really becoming well known in our industry. You know, I thought I had everything lined up, and life was great. And then all of a sudden, I'm on the news in a positive way. They interviewed me about elbow pain and golfer's elbow and tenor's elbow, so medial and lateral condylitis. I guess I can use those words on this podcast. And so we had remarkable results because we're using a soft tissue technique. And so being on the news was great, except when people started calling our office, virtually none of them had elbow pain. So patients started coming in, they started pouring in, and they had chronic health issues, autoimmune conditions, chronic debilitating arthritis and migraines and psoriasis and just excruciatingly painful conditions that people were dealing with. And these people came to me as a chiropractor, and I had no idea what to do with them. So pretty much overnight, our office went from seeing some of the healthiest people in our community to seeing some of the sickest people in our community. And as I started interviewing these people, I realized that I couldn't help them. I didn't have the training. But what I also realized is that neither did their doctors, because they'd already seen five or six, up to seven or eight specialists in some cases. And so they were just desperate for help. So what I realized is that, A, that these people aren't being helped. They're not being serviced. They're not getting the answers that they deserve. They. And B, it felt like somebody punched me in the stomach because I could help people run faster or throw harder, give people their careers back, but I couldn't help people in my community give their life back. And I didn't know where to send them. So it's okay if you can't fix somebody as long as you send them somewhere else. That's kind of an oath that we take for our patients. But if you don't know where to send them, then what do you do? That person just suffers needlessly. And so right around the same time, I started learning about functional medicine, and I started getting emails from who would then become my mentor, Dr. Ron Grisanti. And he was sending me case study after case study of people that he was helping with psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis and, you know, fibromyalgia and, you know, other chronic, you know, painful, you know, challenging health conditions, and he was helping them. And as I started researching him, I'm like, hey, this guy's a chiropractor. This doesn't make sense to me, at least at the time. And then I started digging a little bit deeper and it turns out that chiropractic in the state of Ohio, we have the ability to order lab work, we have the ability to order certain scans and labs on our patients that I was never really looking at patients from that perspective because I was so focused on soft tissue injuries where we didn't look at blood work, we didn't look at diagnostic testing because we relied on their medical doctors to do those things. But when you come across people who can't be helped even by their medical doctors, and then you come across somebody who's actually helping them, and then you realize as a chiropractor, this is within your scope of practice. I started digging deeper and deeper and deeper and really looking at how I could bring this type of knowledge to my community and help these people and at a worst case scenario, help myself. Because I said, God forbid, if I ever get into a situation like these people or a loved one does, I'm not going to know how to help them. And neither is any other doctor out there, because very few people know how to fix these issues. And so as I studied functional medicine, I started recognizing the power of it. I started using it on myself. I realized I had my own health challenges. And sometimes you don't realize you have health challenges until you start feeling really good again. So I used to have, in hindsight, I used to have chronic joint pain and stiffness. I used to have chronic fatigue as well. And I just attributed to the physical nature of my job and also the fact that I was exercising and working out. I just thought that I was supposed to feel sore and tired all the time. I just thought that that came with the territory. But it turns out I had food sensitivities, particularly to gluten. I was reacting very negatively to gluten and dairy. And so as a vegetarian, that was a big part of my diet growing up. And so I cut those out. We're talking about 10 years ago, I cut those out and I immediately started feeling better. The joint pain, the swelling, the inflammation, the acne, that I had completely disappeared. And it was like a whole new world for me. So then I started applying this into my patients lives by looking really at the root causes, you know, looking at what environmental factors are contributing to illness or fatigue, what food factors are contributing, what socioeconomic factors are contributing to people's health challenges. And you start looking at people's health from kind of a different vantage point, different perspective, and you Start realizing why people don't feel well. And when you start correcting some of those root causes, they start feeling better. So, you know, in 20, I started the Living Proof Institute, and we started off in Cincinnati, Ohio, and our focus was only working with people in a functional medicine capacity. So I used my chiropractic license because we're able to order the lab testing, was ordering functional lab testing and identifying the root causes of people's challenges, taking a thorough history and really getting remarkable results. And then my wife and I had a son and we decided to move back to Ontario, and we live in Toronto now, in Mississauga, actually. And we started a second location, and we have other practitioners now that are working on our team and working with people in this capacity. People who feel like they've tried everything but really haven't looked for the underlying cause. They've tried every treatment, but they haven't had a thorough investigation and a multifaceted investigation of what's going on. So that's kind of my journey. And then just fairly recently, my journey evolved even further because I realized that I couldn't fix everybody. Neither could my team, because there's just so many sick people that we need to train more practitioners. So my focus for the last three years has really been training other healthcare practitioners and helping them set up systems and processes and algorithms and training them on how to work with patients in a functional medicine capacity. Because this is a whole different paradigm. This is a completely different approach and way of looking at your patients. And it's not taught in medical school or chiropractic school. The closest educational model that we can think of would be a hybrid of naturopathic and chiropractic school. But, you know, nobody's really practicing an entire system, right? So functional medicine, the way the Living Proof Institute practices it, is a whole different paradigm. We look at things like mindset, we look at environments. We have hypnotherapists on staff to help reprogram people's unconscious and subconscious minds and their belief patterns, which could be sabotaging them. We have a healthy home specialist that can analyze your home and your office environment to see if that's contributing to illness and toxicity in the body. We also have a pharmacist on staff. We have several chiropractors that work with our patients in that functional medicine capacity. And we also have a health coach. You have a full spectrum of care, and you have people that are highly specialized in east. Each of these different areas that are helping our patients overcome these patterns and these behaviors. And resetting their paradigm so now they can empower themselves so they can actually heal and regenerate again.

Wow. When I think of functional medicine, I do think of the tree and all of the roots. There's different causes ranging from mindset to epigenetics. Looking at all of these factors that are contributing to someone's health problem, what is the major difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine, would you say?

Well, I think, you know, depends on how far back we go. I think the end outcome that we're all striving for is the same, but there's different paths to get to that. And there are two different paradigms. One suggests, which is the holistic paradigm. It suggests that the body is a self contained unit and it knows how to take care of itself. It assumes that the body is highly highly capable and highly, highly intelligent. Okay. So, you know, whereas the other paradigm, more of the allopathic paradigm, is more focused on micromanaging because it assumes that the body doesn't know what it's doing. So the simplest analogy I can think of is if a car got into an accident. So if you came across a car and you saw that it was in an accident and it hit a pole, and, you know, there's basically no skid marks, there's no bad weather, there was no traffic, it just drove into a pole, you would probably never blame the driver for that, right? Yeah. I'm sorry, you would never blame the car for that.

Yeah, exactly.

Right. You, you would blame the driver, Right?

Right.

So a holistic model, you know, acknowledges that the driver contributed to the car accident, if not caused it. Not this, you know, machinery that had millions and millions of dollars of research poured into it and millions of hours of engineering poured into it. It's highly unlikely that that made the mistake. So our allopathic system assumes that the car made this mistake. Our holistic viewpoint assumes that the driver made the mistake. That's fundamentally the biggest and most obvious difference. Okay, so when somebody comes in, I'll give you an example. When somebody comes in and they have high blood pressure in an allopathic model, you know, we'll oftentimes give that person a medication. Right? Certainly we'll make some, you know, very superficial lifestyle suggestions. We won't dig too deep and we'll make some lifestyle suggestions and maybe suggest some weight loss and such. And, you know, maybe some people can get their blood pressure under control, but they did it through lifestyle changes. They did it through unlocking the body's own potential to heal itself and regenerate itself. Now, eventually, that person might go on a medication. And so that person goes on that medication. Their blood pressure is high. We're assuming that the body's doing something wrong. So we artificially lower the blood pressure. Now, the body's smart. So, because it requires high blood pressure, because that's the signal that the nervous system is sending to the body, our body will find another way to raise blood pressure. That's why we have multiple different blood pressure medications, basically acting on different mechanisms of raising blood pressure. The body is not unintelligently raising blood pressure. It's raising blood pressure because the signal from the sympathetic nervous system is suggesting that the blood pressure needs to be high. Now, in an allopathic model will artificially lower their blood pressure at the expense of damaging other organs and systems in their body. Now, in a holistic model, we might take a deeper history on the patient. We might look at what are environmental factors that cause a person to be in a sympathetic state. It could be financial issues. It could be relationship issues. It could be a nervous system that's tweaked so it stays sympathetic dominant all the time. It could be somebody who has a job that they just can't stand. It could be a relationship that's gone sour. And now that person has tremendous amounts of stress, which raises their sympathetic tone, which then causes high blood pressure, because that's what sympathetic tone does. And it's not the body doing something wrong, but it's doing something highly intelligent. So if somebody came into me with that history and said, you know, my marriage is falling apart, can't stand my job, I'm eating out all the time. You know, I get no time in nature. I'm sitting all day and my blood pressure is high. What's wrong with me? I would say, congratulations, your body is working exactly the way it's supposed to. There's nothing wrong with your body. There's something wrong with your lifestyle. There's something wrong with your environment. There's something wrong with how you perceive or the amount of stress that you're under. And we need to fix that, because we don't fix that, and you stay sympathetic dominant. Well, sympathetic dominance leads to a downregulated immune system. It leads to a decrease in muscle building, leads to a decrease in bone building. It leads to a decrease in melatonin production, which we're now knowing is one of your most important immune system hormones. And it also leads to downregulation, digestion, at least the downregulation of libido. And you know, sex drive and reproductive health. So all of these problems that we're seeing this day and age, you know, whether it's heart disease, whether it's cancer, whether it's autoimmunity, whether it's diabetes, hypertension, are all sympathetic dominant physiological states that produce that it's completely normal. You know, disease is intelligent adaptation to unintelligent situation.

Right. So it's looking at the system, not just the symptom in healing.

Exactly right. Like if somebody came to me with all those problems and their blood pressure was low or normal, that to me would be a problem because now they can. Now they can't even respond. Their body has a sympathetic signal and environment, and it can't produce a sympathetic response. That, to me, is where illness starts when our. When our body can. When the nervous system cannot produce a corresponding physiology to the environment that's required of it.

Right. I think I remember during your talk, you said, we're not broken. There's this paradigm where people believe that when they're sick, their bodies are broken. But you're saying that we have a natural tendency towards healing, is that correct?

Well, that's the only thing the body knows how to do. It knows how to break things down. Okay. And it knows how to build things back up. Right? So, for example, it knows how to break down fat into glucose. Right. And then it knows how to take glucose and turn it into ATP. But it also knows how to do the exact opposite. Right? So our body's in a constant state of, see, sawing back and forth. Now, a simple example that I can give you. If you study animals in nature, okay? When animals in nature are portrayed in nature documentaries, what we see is animals that are in their sympathetic dominant states, right? They're in a hunting state or they're running away from something, because that's what's exciting. That's what gets people amped up. If you ever go to the zoo, what's the animal doing?

They're just resting, sitting.

They're just sitting there. It's resting, it's digesting, it's eating food. Like, you know, it might put on a little show here and there, right, for entertainment purposes once in a while. But they're in a parasympathetic dominant state. And if you look at a human being, what state are human beings in? Human beings are in a sympathetic dominant state. So I should expect them to age faster. I should expect them to have more oxidative stress. I should expect them to have more digestive issues and immunosuppression. And sleep problems. Like that's what I should expect. I shouldn't be shocked when people show up that way. So when you say, when you go to the doctor and the doctor says, oh, well, we don't know what causes this, Well, I mean, it's pretty clear what's causing these things. Once you understand basic biology and physiology, I mean, this is in every medical textbook and nobody's talking about it, right? Because we're trying to micromanage instead of macromanage the body. And here's the thing. We have this delusion in health care that we think that we have to match the complexity of the body in order to work with it, right? The body is one of the simplest things to take care of. Being healthy is very, very simple. You know, trying to be healthy in a sick environment with a sick mindset and a sick, you know, paradigm and belief system, you know, that's impossible. That will never be possible.

Certainly. I was talking to Gillian, one of the. One of the representatives at the Living Proof, and she made the connection between, you know, your body is your unconscious mind. So if your mind isn't healed and you don't even have that mindset shift towards healing, it will be very, very hard for your body to heal.

Well, you know, our mind is the crown jewel of the cosmos. And when you think of it that way, you start realizing, wow, like, the human nervous system is the highest level of intelligence in the entire universe that we're aware of, right? If your nervous system, even a cell from your brain, was found in outer space, it would be the greatest discovery of mankind, right? So that's how special we are. But we take ourselves for granted because we don't know any different, right? This is the only body we've had. This is the only body that we know. And because we don't recognize different and we take it for granted, and so our mind is so, so powerful. It's so exceptional at what it does. It's so powerful at what it does. And this is why our belief systems matter so much. This is why the greatest intervention ever studied is actually the human mind. It's called a placebo and a nocebo effect. So every single study controls for the human mind, which means that the human mind is the most studied thing in the entire world. If people only knew how powerful their mind was and how capable it was, I mean, our society can't handle. Wouldn't be able to handle it because there would be such an awakening of consciousness. Our entire economy would fall apart. I mean, imagine this For a minute, Vanessa, imagine everyone woke up perfectly healthy tomorrow and knew how to take care of themselves. So if they came down with a cold, they came down with the flu, they came down with an autoimmune condition, which you don't come down with. You essentially create these things. But imagine people knew how to not create these things and stayed healthy. What would that do to our economy?

It would plummet.

What would it do to our stock market?

Oh, it would be going down.

So all of us almost have a vested interest in other people staying sick. So it's kind of scary when you think about it, because the greatest threat to health care right now is health care, right? It's the health of the individual. That's the greatest threat to our healthcare system right now is a healthy population. And so we have to start, really. And, you know, there's so many things that you and I could talk about. I know that the topic today is autoimmunity. So I want to make sure that we stay true to that so that people get value out of this. But really, you know, no disease develops in isolation. The same blood that goes everywhere. So when somebody has a diagnosis, that's not the only problem that they have. But here's the beautiful thing about it, because the same blood goes everywhere. If we send the right messaging and the right nutrients and the right material through that blood to every organ, every cell in your body, you can heal all of them at the same time as well. So let me give you an example. Emotions change our body, right? So all of us have experienced this. We might be crying one minute, laughing our butts off, the next minute sad or excited. And these moments can change in an instant. How we perceive our environment can change in an instant. And so what that means is that when we feel different, our physiology is different. And so what that means is that when you're in a state of healing and repair and regeneration, you're parasympathetic dominant. Well, every organ in your body is parasympathetic. But when you're sympathetic dominant, every organ in your body stays in a sympathetic state because the same hormones are going everywhere, right? The same emotions go everywhere. Candace Pert wrote a book called the Molecules of Emotion, and she talks about how our emotional states change the biochemistry and physiology in our body, which then changes whether we're in a sympathetic or parasympathetic state, which then changes everything. So if we can get. If we can get people to recognize this and help them realize how important their emotional state is to their physiology and pairing their autonomic nervous system with the health goal that they're trying to accomplish. You know, that awakening, when that takes place. And that's where the magic starts, right? The magic doesn't start in figuring out the right set of herbs to give somebody or, you know, the right dietary changes to give to somebody. The magic starts when you activate the most studied intervention in the entire world, which is the human brain. When you activate that nervous system and you pair it with the right programming, consciously and subconsciously, anything is possible.

This is something I'd really like to explore more. The power of the mind and in relation to autoimmune diseases. Then, in a nutshell, what does autoimmunity mean? And what are some of the factors that contribute to it, such as your mindset?

Well, think about it this way. We think of autoimmune disease as the body attacking itself. And one of my dear friends, Stacey Robbins, who also has Hashimoto's, made a very profound statement at a conference that I went to, and it really stuck with me. You know, somebody has an autoimmune condition, which is essentially the body attacking itself. The question we have to ask, always ask that person, is where in their life are they attacking themselves? So as above, so below. We talked about fractals before our conversation started recording. So just like the roots that you see as above, so below, everything repeats itself on larger and larger scales. And so what that means is that if our cells, our own cells are attacking us, we have to ask ourselves, where are we attacking ourselves? So if I look in the mirror, do I love who I see or am I attacking myself? Another thing that we see in autoimmunity is oftentimes people have had some sort of traumatic event. They may have been sexually abused, they may have had a traumatic event, emotional event, a divorce, for example. Sometimes children go through a divorce and they start blaming themselves for the divorce happening. And that can manifest later on in life into an autoimmune condition. So there's a really good reference that I would definitely suggest people to look into. And his name is Gabor Mate. He's a medical doctor. He's based out of British Columbia, and he wrote a whole book about this. And the book is called when the Body says no. And he's probably the most decorated person to talk about this. He spent his entire career researching this, and he discovered that unresolved trauma is what Austin needs to these types of diseases and illnesses.

Very interesting. Yeah. Like we said, the body is the unconscious mind. So I'm sure trauma manifests and is stored as energy in the body.

Yes. And that's the thing, right? So our mind, you know, our thoughts become things. So the thoughts that we have organize the matter around us. And this is a concept we're learning through quantum physics, and we're starting to be able to measure and quantify these things a little bit better. But we're going to realize that our mind actually creates our reality. I mean, that's going to be, you know, the greatest discovery of our lifetime. I believe it's going to. I'm sorry, Vanessa. I believe it's going to happen in our lifetime, that we're going to be able to actually witness this. You know, it's quite fascinating. And the study of the human mind is just. I just love it. I could geek out on this stuff all day, and we can go pretty deep. But again, I know we want to talk about autoimmunity, but the mind plays such a huge role in all of this.

Oh, yeah. I'm a huge fan of Dr. Joe Dispenza and his work right now with measuring brain waves. So how would you say functional medicine can help someone then discover that root cause of their autoimmune disease?

So, well, here's the thing. I think it always starts with a good history, right? And sometimes it's important to have that conversation with ourselves. So, you know, we can ask ourselves, you know, do I have any unresolved trauma? Do I have any irrational responses to certain situations? You know, did it happen to me consciously or did it happen to me unconsciously? Because sometimes some of us may have experienced trauma that we were too young to even remember. And so there is that component as well that can occur, you know, so it really starts with having a meaningful conversation with oneself and really committing to going deep. And not just, you know, I think of things like changing diet and exercising. I think of those things as necessary, but they're very superficial. The deeper work, the deeper roots, that's. Those are the ones we want to really tug at. Those are the ones that involve, you know, working on the unconscious aspects of. Of the mind and also really, truly reevaluating our life. Do we love what we do every day for a living? Right. You know, think of it this way. Sometimes people, you know, they want to be healthy to go to a job that they don't like. Right. They're using their mind and they're using their body, which are the pretty much the only two things that we have at our disposal, which are the most magical things in the universe. We're using them to do something we don't like. It's hard to be healthy if you're not doing something that you love. And I believe that the ultimate health occurs when we have fulfillment and happiness and alignment with our values. And if we don't have that, we'll never experience true health. Health is like the pie in the sky when you really think about it. So really having that commitment to living your best life, willing to destroy everything in your life that doesn't work for you, and having again, that meaningful conversation. Like some of the best results we get with our patients is when they quit their job because that's the thing that they needed to do. And the moment they quit, their problems start disappearing like magic. But it's not right because we know that that's where their sympathetic dominance was coming from. You know, another, another thing about health is that, you know, again, happiness is the ultimate pursuit, as is fulfillment. And we have to have, you know, a deep sense of purpose. Like we have to feel good about what we're going to do that day when we wake up, and we have to feel good about what we did that day before we go to bed. And so working towards creating that type of life is where you're going to find your best health. So it's not an easy thing to do. But if somebody comes to me and says, hey, what do I have to do to be healthy? That's where I'm going to start. I'm not going to start giving them a bunch of supplements. I'm not going to immediately start running a bunch of labs on them. I mean, certainly, yes, we can do that. We can look at the microbiome, we, we can look at mitochondrial health, we can look for micronutrient deficiencies, but lab results are a result. So if we don't change what's causing that result, if we don't change the behavior that's causing that result. And where does behavior come from? Behavior comes from what we believe to be true and what our value system is. So if I want to change somebody's behaviors, I don't just tell them what to change. I have to understand their belief systems and their values and I might need to change those. So, you know, that's something to definitely look at. And I'll share a really interesting story with you because this has happened to a lot of people and they've been unconscious of it. And that is when we're young, we're always fighting for our parents attention. Especially now, right? If you think about it, children are fighting for Their parents attention because moms are at work. The community is not as strong as it used to be where you used to have grandparents living with you, helping take care of the young children. So those things are gone nowadays and parents are on their computers, they're bringing work home with them, they're on their phones. The children are constantly competing for their attention. And this has been going on throughout human history. Now, what happens in some households is the child doesn't get any attention until they become sick. And when they get sick, the entire house shuts down. And now they get all the attention that they want. Now what happens as adults if an adult needs attention and they're not getting it, they're going to go back to that unconscious pattern, that subconscious pattern that was installed when they were a child that, hey, if I want attention, then all I have to do is get sick and I'll get all the attention I want. So this pattern can be very deep rooted for some people. And when we unlock this for people now, they understand that their illness is a cry from their inner child for attention. We see this in our practice. And you can't measure, you can't. It's not going to show up on your cbc, blood testing, right? It's not going to show up. Like if we're doing a urinalysis, it's only going to show up on a stool test. It's really asking those questions, doing the deeper work, and willing to also submit to the idea of how powerful this actually is and how much of a role it plays in your health, because you have to believe that it's contributing to your disease if it's going to contribute to your healing.

And so once people do find this root cause, this emotional trauma that's manifested as an autoimmune disease, how can they manage this condition? So, for example, I know I've heard a lot about the, the gut connection and the role of gluten and molecular mimicry that leads to nutrient deficiencies as well as infections. Like, all of these different factors that are contributing to this disease. Now, what top three tips do you have for people managing an autoimmune disease?

Okay, so the first things first, we want to be conscious of something called autonomic pairing. And autonomic pairing is when our nervous system function matches the task that we're trying to accomplish. So let me give you an example. If I'm digesting my meal, where do I want blood to go?

To your intestines and stomach.

I want it to go to my intestinal area. Right. I Want it to go to the trunk. I want it to go to my liver, to my pancreas, to my stomach, to my small intestine, to my large intestine. So I want to send that blood to that area, because where we send flow is where we send function. Okay? So first and foremost, we want to pair our nervous system with the task that we're trying to accomplish. So if you're eating, I want that blood going to your digestive system, which means that you need to be in a relaxed state when you're eating. You need to chew your food very carefully. You need to choose healthy foods. Of course, you can't choose inflammatory foods like gluten, for example, and even dairy for many people can be quite inflammatory. And of course, processed foods and rancid oils and trans fats. I mean, if you're a medical student, you kind of know what's good for you and what's bad for you without going into too much detail. But certainly foods like gluten can be very problematic, especially if it's not organic, because it also has the residue of glyphosate in it. And glyphosate destroys the gut microbiome. So we definitely have to be conscious of the quality of the foods that we're choosing. We have to also cherish those foods. You know, be grateful for those foods. When you're in a state of gratitude, you're also in a parasympathetic healing state. We want to make sure we're sitting when we're eating and not necessarily driving or standing, because sitting sends a signal to our body that we're going to be in a parasympathetic state. If you're standing up and walking around, well, that's a sympathetic state, right? Like walking or running is a more sympathetic state. So we want to match our physiology with the task that we're trying to accomplish. So there's an acronym that we use. It's choose, chill, cherish, check. So you want to check your stool every day. You want to make sure that you're having a healthy bowel movement every day. And this is. This is, like, very fundamental. Okay, so you want to also chill. You want to be in a relaxed state. If people can do that, then that's going to be one of the most profound steps that they can take to healing their immune system, their nervous system, and their digestive system. We also want people to sleep, and we want people to sleep deep, which means that they're getting adequate amounts of restful sleep. Want to avoid blue Light televisions, computer screens, cell phones, about two hours before bed. And we don't want to eat about two hours before bed either, if possible. And we want to give the body a chance to heal and regenerate and repair. So the deeper we sleep, the more healing we experience, especially the immune system. Think about children. When children are sick innately, what do they do? They go to sleep and they wake up like a few hours later and they're like brand new because they let their immune system and nervous system kind of take care of that stuff while they were sleeping. So all of our healing process takes place when we're in that very deep state of rest and healing and regeneration. Another thing that people can do is, you know, very simply, you want to follow like, you know, fundamental principles of, you know, getting adequate amounts of sunlight, spending time in nature, I mean, just reconnecting to what it means to being human, right. Instead of being a human doing, start becoming a human being. And so, yeah, so there's a lot of really fundamental things. Like none of this stuff is rocket science, right? The rocket science is the work that your body does. You know, the greatest form of sophistication is simplicity. And so there's nothing more sophisticated than the human body, which to me means there should be nothing more simple to take care of. You know, what makes my computer as amazing and easy to use is the sophistication, right? That's the sophistication of the computer, makes it simple to use. Imagine I had to know every single detail about my computer just to type a letter on a keyboard.

That would be mind numbing most certainly. I think I've heard you say in the past too, like, you have to change the software to change the hardware as well.

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, the software is the information, right? And the hardware is our joints and our muscles and our proteins and, you know, our skeletal system and our skin. I mean, that's, you know, that's the hardware. But in our body, what's amazing is the software either breaks down the hardware or it builds up the hardware. And if the software is broken, the hardware certainly is going to be broken. So what we do in our allopathic system is we try to fix the hardware instead of fixing the software, right?

Get to the root. Cause essentially always look at the roots.

I mean, it just makes more sense. If you had a river running in your backyard and one day you woke up and the river was polluted, you would build a water purification plant at your property line, right? You would walk upstream to figure out where the problem is coming from always. I mean, you could build a power plant or the power purification plant, but it's going to be way more expensive and it's going to take a while. And guess what? Everything leading up to that point in the ravine is going to be destroyed.

Definitely. And for those interested in the gluten connection, could you explain how that contributes to. To inflammation during the autoimmune process?

Yeah. So there's a great study done by Alyssa Fasano, and he did a study about the connection between autoimmunity, leaky gut, and gluten. And what he found is that when we eat foods, particularly gluten, in this case, that these foods create an inflammatory response in the digestive tract, that inflammation leads to hyperpermeability of the intestinal tract. And so now these undigested proteins, because gluten is a very difficult protein to digest, in fact, some of the bonds in the gluten molecule, our bodies can't digest them. The disulfide bond, our digestive system, as far as I understand, can't digest that. So these proteins stay intact. The gut becomes hyperpermeable. Plus you have people who are eating under tons of stress, right? So that makes the gut even more hyperpermeable. And then now these undigested proteins end up in the bloodstream, and the body recognizes them as foreign proteins. And because protein structure of gluten is similar to some of the tissues in our body, for example, the gluten protein structure looks similar at a molecular level to the proteins in your thyroid gland and the proteins in the cerebellum, the immune system starts creating an attack. It doesn't have a gentle conversation. It starts attacking by creating inflammation. And that inflammation will start destroying any protein that looks similar to gluten. And so the thyroid can be impacted, in this case, the cerebellum can be impacted. And so now the nervous system and the endocrine system can get really disrupted by this autoimmune attack that's going on. And it's. So it's not the gluten that's the problem, but it's the fact that the gluten triggers a response where the immune system mistakenly attacks other tissues. And that's what molecular mimicry is.

Right? I've studied that a bit. And so would you recommend people with autoimmune diseases try going gluten free or even grain free?

You know, if somebody has an autoimmune condition, then I would start by recommending that they go on a grain free, low lectin Diet. And so lectins are plant proteins. With a plant basically makes a protein to protect itself, and that can create inflammatory issues. So the diet that we recommend for a lot of our patients with autoimmune conditions are what's called the autoimmune paleo diet. And that eliminates a lot of lectin containing foods, and it also eliminates grains from the diet. And we find that in a short period of time, people start really feeling much better. So, you know, if somebody does have an existing autoimmune condition, you know, gluten free is certainly a step in the right direction. But one of the challenges that we see nowadays is a lot of gluten free foods are actually not that healthy for you. So they just, you know, they're junk food minus gluten in some cases. Right. So if somebody starts eating gluten free muffins for breakfast every day instead of their Tim Hortons muffin every day, that might not produce significant health improvements because it's still processed food. So we want to make sure that people are eating whole, healthy, natural foods that they can recognize. So if a food is unrecognizable from its original form, you should probably avoid it because that means it's been processed.

In some way, in some. I guess, like with autoimmune diseases, it's all about not only finding out what that root cause is, which is very rooted mind, all the puns in the mindset. And on top of that, looking at the other root causes, such as their lifestyle, their levels of stress, stress, their diet, looking at their gut health into if they're eating something like gluten, molecular mimicry can occur. So eliminating that will address the underlying process, which is the autoimmune disease itself and not just the tissue like the thyroid, for example. In thyroid disease. Is what you're saying, getting into a parasympathetic state in doing things like mindfulness practices and gratitude training and whatnot, to bring you back to a sense of harmony and healing. Does that sum it up very well?

Yes. And also time in nature, I want to make sure, I emphasize that, is that the more we can get out into nature, the better off we all are. That's certainly been proven and shown over and over again. That being outside, especially at the time of sunrise and sunset, that helps reset our circadian rhythm. Getting midday sun helps increase serotonin and improves our mood. But also being in nature, I find puts people in a more parasympathetic state.

Mm. I've heard of grounding the grounding exercise, where you go outside and just walk barefoot on the earth and you connect with the earth's electromagnetic field, which has been found to have very therapeutic and healing properties. Yeah, well, we are part of this earth, and, you know, like, our bodies are working with us to survive and to flourish. So I really agree in that view that our bodies aren't broken. We're geared towards healing. It's just uncovering that lock that's preventing us from the healing process.

Absolutely right.

And so functional medicine is one of those ways for people more interested. So for people who want to learn more about functional medicine and the Living Proof Institute and possibly get involved, where do you suggest that they go?

So if you're. If you're watching, if you're listening to this and you want to learn more about some of my best lifestyle tips, we've got a free program, it's called 30 in 30, where I share 30 of my personal practices and the things that we tell our patients to do to get their health journey started. And I believe that everybody should be doing these things even before they get sick. Illness is a great motivator, but it shouldn't be. What motivates you to get healthy. What should motivate you to get healthy is realizing that you have this amazing life and you have amazing things to accomplish and contribute into this world that should motivate you to get healthy. So 30 and 30 is a great place to start. The website is www.30in30.org. It's all absolutely free, so I would check that out. And then people can also check out our website@becheproof.com and learn more about what we do. And there's lots of different places that they can go from there. You can read blog articles, you can watch case studies, you can see testimonials. You can also learn more about some of the charity work that we do, and then also some of the coaching that I do for practitioners.

Great. And I think I heard through another podcast that you have an organization called hey Hashis.

Yeah, so we run a nonprofit organization called hey Hashi, where we help men and women who are affected by Hashimoto's and share this type of knowledge with them and bring on guest speakers and, you know, we write blog articles to help Hashimoto's patients so they can feel better, too.

That's fantastic. Well, your path is definitely an inspirational one. And you can really see how your personal transformation and your career has manifested into all the different ways you're helping people today, especially with autoimmunity so thank you, Satchin, for taking the time again today. And we really appreciate all your expertise.

Well, it's such an honor. It's such a pleasure. And, you know, for those of you listening, I hope this inspires you in some way to, you know, serve your communities in a different capacity or even look at yourself in the mirror and know that there's so much that you can do to help people feel their absolute best. And maybe it inspires some of you to even go in your own personal health journey or transformation because the world needs the best version of you right now.

And I like the quote that I've heard you say before. The doctor of the future is the patient.

Yes. That's what we're realizing. There's a decentralization and democratization of health that's taking place right now. And the system that we have right now is not really set up for that type of infrastructural change. But it's coming. It's going to happen in our lifetime. I'm committing to that happening where we need to bring health back into people's homes and not pretend like health starts in the hospital.

Thank you again, Sachin. Have a great day.

My pleasure. Thank you so much. And have an awesome day yourself.

Thank you.