Modified Citrus Pectin, Vitamin D & Light Therapy: Your Questions Answered

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode.

Good morning, everyone. Dr. Stillman here, back for another Q&A. As always, this is just general education, not medical advice. Questions have been taken from specific, often pertaining to someone's unique context and made more general and also more basic, simple, and fundamental for the purposes of being relevant to as many people as possible. So, As always, to premium subscribers and practice members, thank you for your subscriptions and your membership in the practice. I'm deeply grateful to you. Make sure you're using your members-only discounts at the supplement store, store.stillmanmd.com, as well as, well, actually that's just it. That's the thing. All right, let's jump in. All right. First question from Michael. What are your thoughts on modified citrus pectin in detoxification of heavy metals? All right. That's the first part of the question. So I've had some positive reviews in the practice from patients on modified citrus pectin. They've said it's had a significant impact on their gut function and their, the wellness of their skin. And so we will use it if someone is having trouble with detox reactions, but it's very case by case. I think it's very reasonable to try it in anyone for that. Do I use it a lot? I don't. I find that generally what we do is doing what it needs to do and people are getting great results. So we generally don't use it. I think it's a great product though for some people. Second question. What do you think about pairing modified citrus pectin with mineral balancing? I think it's a great idea. I think it could significantly improve people's results. Who and how, I'm not sure. All right, next question from Becca: What causes elevated PTH when vitamin D and magnesium are involved, and how should magnesium be adjusted with high-dose vitamin D? For a little bit more context, the question is asking about how do you distinguish between a true vitamin D deficiency and another problem like magnesium deficiency based on PTH. So what I will tell you So let me give, give a little background here. So higher and higher doses will drive PTH or parathyroid hormone down. Why do we care about this? PTH is arguably a surrogate marker for vitamin D activity, which means that regardless of what your vitamin D level is, the activity may be better reflected in PTH. Why do I believe and say, know this? Cicero Coimbra, MD, PhD, creator of the Coimbra Protocol, has been using PTH to guide high-dose vitamin D therapy, and we are now following in his footsteps with the way we're using vitamin D in our autoimmunity program. What does all that mean? The higher the PTH, arguably the lower vitamin D function. This matters because a lot of people are targeting a serum level of vitamin D of a certain arbitrary number. We like to see it around 50 in all comers, but we are using higher and higher doses of vitamin D in our autoimmune cases. And for that, we're not worrying about the serum vitamin D level, which may get very, very elevated. We're looking more at how is the patient progressing? Are they feeling better? And then what's happening with the PTH? So next part of the context you need: PTH can be elevated not because of low vitamin D activity, but because of other micronutrient deficiencies. So what do we do in the practice? We look at someone's diet, basically exactly what they eat every single day, so long as we can get the data so we know what's going in. Then we look at their mineral and supplement protocols, and we're repleting in minerals and vitamins and other micronutrients based on what we see in the labs. In that way, I'm covering for all the potential deficiencies that could confound the PTH being a marker of vitamin D. I've also I've got serum levels of magnesium, copper, zinc. I've got serum levels, or excuse me, hair levels of magnesium, you know, all the other minerals that could be involved with this process. So we're seeking to optimize all of them at the same time and then use the vitamin D to push the PTH down to wherever we think we're going to need to push it in order to get traction on the disease process where we're treating. Hopefully that made sense and hopefully that was helpful to you, Becca. All right. Next question. How important is it to fully avoid foods or substances that show up on food sensitivity or allergy testing? This is from Brett. So big picture, food sensitivity and allergy testing is a very tough subject. When I say it's tough, what I mean is people will routinely test positive no matter what tests they do and will eliminate the food and not see a huge improvement in their health. There's two likely reasons for this. One, even though they tested positive, it wasn't having a significant impact on how they felt, not necessarily their health, but how they felt. The second is they didn't actually eliminate it. It was present still in some kind of additive ingredient food that they weren't aware of. Things sneak in. Corn, soy, wheat— these are so ubiquitous. Dairy as well. Very hard. It takes a lot of work to eliminate these foods. You pretty much have to cook from scratch at home in order to reliably eliminate all these foods. And so I share that with you all because I don't want people to make the mistake of thinking, I was reactive to that food on a test, I eliminated it, and then I didn't get better, therefore I'm not allergic to that. It may be a problem contamination of foods that you were not aware of. Okay. For that reason, patients who are very sick and looking to get significant progress, who have an allergy test that's positive, I tell them to very carefully avoid that food largely by cooking from scratch at home with single ingredients. So you're not cooking with a spice mix. You are picking the spices off the rack and you are using them in the dish. You're not, say, like cracking open a chili or a soup mix. You are taking the ingredients off of the shelf and you were putting them into the soup and cooking it yourself. A lot more work, much better outcomes, for the record. So how important is it to avoid them? This depends on your goal. The healthier the patient, the less likely they are to notice significant improvements with avoidance of the foods or their other ingredients. The sicker the patient, the more profound the results tend to be. Now it just becomes a negotiation with yourself. How much do I care about getting better compared to how much work is it going to be to eliminate this. I say that hoping that people will understand that if they're a patient and I say, look, I think you should avoid this. And then they don't, we may not make any progress. And we may be sitting down in 3, 6, 9 months and saying, we are spinning our wheels. We are not getting traction. That's how powerful these reactions are. And the flip side of that is that I've had cases where 90% of someone's problems were eliminated by the test. Great podcast on this is my podcast with Sina McCullough. If you've not listened to it, Sina is S-I-N-A. She's a biochemistry PhD. She almost died from rheumatoid arthritis, which just was totally treatment resistant. And she was up and gardening within days of an allergy test that revealed to her what she was reacting to. And yes, she was reacting to healthy foods. We don't use that exact test now because unfortunately that company is no longer operational in that regard. We use another test that we really appreciate and are getting great results with called the MRT. So anyway, hopefully that's helpful for you. Brett. Next question. What are effective ways to support gut healing? So this is from John. We do our standard, what I call our standard operating procedure in the practice out of the gate. Personalized supplementation protocols, X39 patches. I may add additional patches, but I love the X39 for all things. Then I will add Dr. Stillman's detox powder, vitamin C. We always use digestive enzymes. And if there's serious gut issues in the picture already, I will use bitters., and I would use a product we call GI Restore. Almost all of those products are available on the store, store.stillmanmd.com. Again, we appreciate your purchases. If you are a premium subscriber to the Substack or a patient, use your discount code. It comes to you regularly. And if you can't find it, reply to an email or message a member of the team at the practice and we will get it to you. I have found that combination of things to be very effective at optimizing gut function. And patients frequently report that their troublesome gut issues disappear as we work through this process. A big piece of this, I always come back to our process, which is nourish, detoxify, purify. We're nourishing the body, we're detoxifying it, we're purifying it of any kind of infection. As we work through that, GI function tends to come back online and become better and better. And individual results vary, results are not necessarily typical, but that's generally what I see in the practice. And that's borne out in the results that we see people, patients reporting. The The average patient in the practice who follows that specific program reports, I think it's an improvement in digestive function and gut health of like 7 out of 10. So when we survey them at the end of their program or membership, they say their digestive function is 7 out of 10 better than when they started. For the record, the products I picked, there's not very many of them. You'll notice they're amazingly effective at getting people the results. And that's why, you know, we have 5 to 10 products we use every day to deliver 80% of their outcomes that we, we count on. More on this will be in my book. And in the meantime, the other thing I really, really rely on to get people back in action as far as their gut function goes is the allergy tests that I just alluded to, because it is often the case that the allergy test gives us the trigger that's really wrecking the gut. So, okay. Next question. What tests are best for assessing gut health? Also from John. I stopped testing the gut after I realized that we would spend hundreds of dollars on the test. We would then prescribe certain supplements that I've already mentioned, and then we would get patients better. I started to say, okay, well, hold on, we're doing $400-something worth of testing, but I could just try these supplements. I think all of those supplements bundled together is like less than $150. Maybe it's $200, maybe it's $300, but you get to just try them and you don't have to wait for the result. You don't have to even interpret it. And you might say, well, don't you want to use targeted supplementation? You can. And, and I will do that if they don't respond to the initial opening, you know, moves of supplements and things that we do. But reality is I put people on digestive enzymes that we stock in the store anyway. I put them on vitamin C anyway. I put them on a Dr. Stillman's detox powder anyway. We use personalized supplements anyway, and we use LifeWave patches, X39 patches anyway. So I'm doing all that anyway. So then I just thought, well, we're just spending money on lab testing, we should just go ahead and have them try this stuff. The two that I don't routinely recommend that sometimes I will recommend based on the testing are the bitters and the GI Restore. But if someone has symptoms, I'll just recommend those anyway, because they're so effective. I will also mention vitamin D. So we've got two vitamin Ds in the store of 5,000 and a 10,000. Vitamin D is very important for gut health and integrity. And you know what? While I talk about vitamin D, I need to talk about— this is a public service announcement, not in the Q&A. I got a comment the other day on something about, you know, have you looked at Jim Stevenson's work on vitamin D, which is related to Morley Robbins often mentions Jim Stevenson's work on vitamin D. I want to be really clear about vitamin D for people. In the audience who've heard a lot about it, who've heard bad things about it, who wonder about using it therapeutically. You're going to hear a lot of things out there about all the things I recommend and use, but particularly vitamin D in some circles, like, oh, it's a hormone. You shouldn't take it. It's dangerous. It's got all these negative effects that just isn't borne out in clinical practice. And I've very much cautioned people against taking the word of influencers who do not see patients all day and do not have real clinical training over the experience of clinicians who are doing this on a daily basis with patients and who are also, by the way, documenting their outcomes. So I document all of our outcomes. We do pre and post assessments with surveys. We do pre and post labs in patients. The practice has a patient satisfaction score, specifically the Net Promoter Score. If you're curious how we measure this, that's in the top 10% for healthcare practices. So I know we're doing something that is wildly effective and popular with the people who come into the practice. And the reason I say that is that If we were making people worse, I would know, and I would be absolutely crazy figuring out what we were doing wrong, but we're not. We have very happy patients all in all who are getting great results. The problem with— and what you're going to see out there is people are going to resort to all this paper, these rat studies, or this other thing over here that is this evidence that you can't take vitamin D or high doses are dangerous. All of that just falls apart in clinical practice. The other thing I would urge you to consider when we're talking about therapeutics is these are tools that we may not use for a long period of time. So high-dose vitamin D, as an example, you might go up to 60,000 IU a day, but you might also taper it down to 30,000 a day. You might taper down to 10 or 5. And I think it's important to remember that, you know, sometimes even if something has a long-term cost associated with it or risk, the benefit in the person's quality of life can be incredible. So when people talk— speak ill of vitamin D, I just think, what must it be like to hear this if you've got multiple sclerosis and you got up out of your chair with a high-dose vitamin D protocol, such as the Coimbra Protocol. How does that sit? Someone saying this is a poison and you're saying it got me out of a wheelchair blows my mind. The number of influencers who just talk smack about therapeutics without ever thinking about them in terms of this is a tool. Now we don't use tools all the same way, right? You pick the tool for the job. And so we often say to patients in the practice, there's no rules, there's just tools. You have to use these things thoughtfully. All right. Hopefully that's helpful to you all in your thinking, but I, it drives me nuts when people speak ill of vitamin D as a supplement. It's, I've seen it change so many lives and I don't just say that myself. I've just had mentor after mentor after mentor who spent decades honing their craft. They all agree, the ones who have any sense and any ability, they all agree that vitamin D is incredibly powerful in most cases, if not all. And we use it very consistently. All right. Anyway, next question. You know what? Let me go back to John's question though, because I don't feel like I fully answered it. I got off on a tangent. So tests that are best for assessing gut health. My favorite, if I do need to do in-depth testing, is the Genova GI Effects, the full study. It's a comprehensive stool analysis, I think is what they call it, but it's biomarkers, it's digestive markers, it's microbiome, it's everything. It's very comprehensive. There's not a better test, I think, out there. Okay. Next question. What's your take on soy? For its potential impact on hormones, even if consumed in moderation? Tess, it's funny you're asking me this question today because I just got off the phone with the mother of a patient who's got extremely high levels of copper. And without giving away too much about the case, I'll just speak in generalities. And it's funny because I actually have the Copper Toxicity Handbook over there. I was showing this mom that book. So the big problem I see with plant-based proteins is copper toxicity. And I don't know everything about this, but just for reference, copper sulfate's a very popular organic pesticide. It is sprayed with reckless abandon in the organic industry. Let me give you some context here. When I did the math on this, the number of tons of copper sulfate sprayed on our food, they spray 62 milligrams of copper sulfate on our food every day for every man, woman, and child on planet Earth. Stop and think about that for a minute. Right now, today, there's 62 milligrams of copper being sprayed on your food somewhere in the world. Now, maybe I got those numbers wrong. And maybe that's not accurate, but when I did the math, I was floored. We are loading the environment with copper and we routinely see high levels of copper in patients' hair when they're detoxing and they're really recovering their health. We see it as a very powerful sign that the body is finally getting well. What do we see in copper toxicity? We see hyper-emotionality. We see irrational thinking. We see patients who are not stress resistant. We see patients who feel fragile. They may have delusions. They may seem crazy. To other people. They don't have resiliency. They don't feel rooted. They feel like they're all over the place. They may have racing thoughts, poor sleep. That's the picture of copper toxicity. And it's a huge problem. And it's in order to balance out copper among other toxic metals, and copper is not a nutrient and a metal, or anyway, but in order to balance out this copper load in the environment and diet, as well as the heavy metal burden we face in our environment, what we do is we add zinc to pretty much every protocol. And it's very rare for me to use less than 30 milligrams of zinc per day. Day in every adult. One of the bedrock foundational principles of what I do. We've got to put everybody on zinc because if we don't, we are going to get behind on their zinc stores. And then we are going to wind up with heavy metal accumulation, copper accumulation, all kinds of other problems. You've got to balance the zinc based on other ratios in the hair. You've got to balance it based on other minerals. There's a lot that goes into that that I won't get into here, but I mentioned this because I've just learned not to ever touch these plant proteins. I just don't trust them. There's more reasons for that that I could go into if you want to know. I just avoid them. When people say and talk about soy and its potential for hormone disruption because it's got some plant-based or phytoestrogens in it, I don't know how big of a deal that is, but I see the copper coming out of people's hair who are taking plant-based proteins, and I want nothing to do with it. The record for high copper in the practice was a gentleman consuming large quantities of of protein bars with plant-based protein in them. If I was going to have to pick a protein bar, I would pick the like meat-based protein bars. Epic Provisions is probably the most well-known of those companies. I have no commercial relationship with them, by the way. All right. And by the way, that's why Dr. Stillman's Vitality Plus, our multivitamin, multi-mineral that I'm a huge fan of, it's why it's loaded with B6 and it's why it's loaded with zinc and it's got zero copper. People need the B6 and they need the zinc because the copper is destroying those two nutrients. And when you give people high doses of B6 tox and zinc, amazing things happen. Let's just say that. Not a guarantee. Individual results vary because it's planet Earth, but that's what I've seen. All right. Do you have any experience using Intestinal Metal Detox by Quicksilver for detoxing heavy metals in addition to or in replacement of activated charcoal or GI detox? Great question. I don't have any experience with that exact product. What I will tell you is that Chris Shade, who formulates everything at Quicksilver and founded the company, went through a brutal experience of mercury toxicity that I would actually love to have him on the podcast to talk about, but we just haven't had the time to coordinate that. And so I am sure that his product is great. Do I have any experience with it? I do not. We use Dr. Stillman's detox powder. We use the digestive enzymes, have bile acids. Bile acids help eliminate all kinds of toxins from the gut. One of the reasons why we use them in every case. And then we use the minerals, which also help drive things out, and then we'll add potentially binders if someone needs it. But if someone were inclined to try that, if they had a high mercury burden, absolutely. I think it makes all the sense in the world. I certainly don't see it creating any problems. Would I replace activated charcoal or other products like clays with it? That would depend very much on the clinical context. All right. Next question. How many LifeWave patches can be worn? In one day? And what do you believe are the top 3 to 4 for general health, for energy, for longevity, for detox? From Glenn. Okay, I always start with the X39. The proof of the X39 is in, is in the reality of what it did for LifeWave. It catapulted it from an obscure company that had great products, but it catapulted it to the fastest growing company of its kind in the world. And the stuff I see with this blows my mind. I will slap an X39 patch on just about any problem anyone talks to me about because I've seen it create these results that just make me very passionate about the product and the company. So, and there'll be a link below this if you'd like to purchase LifeWave patches and try them for yourself. I start with the X39 patch, and when I say I start with the X39 patch, I feel very strongly that people start with that and they should pick a runway with it that is as long as they feel comfortable committing to financially. And the reason I say that is that there's a trend for people to try it for a month, 2 months, 3 months, 4 months. There's also a trend for people to try it and have a dysfunctional toxic diet lifestyle, their body won't have the minerals, the vitamins to use the energy of the patch, which is why I created the 14-Day Reset. If you don't know what that is, go to my Substack, sorry, stillmanmd.substack.com, put in 14-Day Reset, it'll pop up. It'll show you all the diet and lifestyle habits that I hand patients to give them the minerals and the hydration and other raw materials they need in order to get the most out of the patches. So I start with that. And if you're missing the minerals or the hydration, the patches will just underwhelm you or create detox reactions or both. I want people to use them for long enough though, months. And there's a rule of thumb that people often throw out in the company, one month for every decade of life. So when you're 40, your first decade was 0 to 10, and then second was 10 to 20, and then 30 to 40, right? So you can do the math. That's how long I want people to commit to using the X39 before pronouncing judgment on the patches and the company. Money. In addition to the X39, what do I add for anti-aging, for longevity, for energy? For energy, energy enhancer patches, X49, either or both. Love that combination for that. X49 is also a great add for somebody who's very athletic. Athletes often come back to me and say, I have so much more energy, so much more stamina, so much more endurance. I'm really happy with the X49, X39 combo, and that's why they sell it as a performance bundle. Alavida, I like for longevity. That's why I wear it. I like Aeon, and I like glutathione for detox. So if I've got somebody with bad autoimmunity or bad toxic burden, which are often the same patients, I will use the X39, the glutathione patch, and the Aeon patch. If you want to hear a story about that, go listen, listen to my friend Ashley's podcast with me. And I think it was her third podcast. We talked about her use of the patches in order to recover from a water-damaged moldy home. And she had great results with that. And that's been a stack that's emerged out of many different experiences of mine. Using the patches for detoxification. So I'll use my own case as an example. What am I wearing every day? X39, X49, Alavita Aeon— those 4 patches. Why? I'm not trying to detox. I am looking for energy. I am looking for longevity. I am looking for performance. So that's what I'm wearing right now and what I've been using every month. All right everyone, thank you all for your questions. Premium subscribers, thank you for your subscriptions. Patience, thank you for being patient in the practice. As always, you can get your premium subscriber and practice member discount on the supplement store. I've given you plenty of information about how to use some of these things today. I hope you'll make purchases and I appreciate your purchases. They help us to produce content that can help more people. Thank you all and take care. Have a great day. See you next week.