Stories of Hope & Healing: Dr. Sina McCullough

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 my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode.

Hello everyone. Dr. Stillman here, back with another episode of Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing. Today I am joined by my good friend, Dr. Sina McCullough. Sina, thank you for joining me. Am I saying your name right?

Yes.

Okay, good.

Yes. Thank you for having me.

So I like to start by asking everyone who they are and where they're from.

All right. Well, I'm Dr. Steena McKellar, and originally I'm actually from California, but right now I live in North Georgia in the beautiful foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

Excellent. And you have a great story of falling ill. I like to ask people before they got sick, what was going on in their life? Where were they and what were their hopes and dreams?

Oh, that's a great question. So I actually was sick from the time I was in the womb, we found out later. So I was born with chronic constipation and I couldn't digest like breast milk or goat milk. They tried everything. I ended up being on, um, on soy formula, unfortunately. Um, but, and then from there I had, um, I continued with the chronic constipation. Well into my 40s. And it progressed from there to chronic ear infections as a child. But, you know, nobody pieced it together. It was just, that's what happened to some kids. So I got tubes in my ears, um, which seemed to help some. Either that or it just shifted to another part of my body. So I progressively got worse until I was in college. I was an undergrad at UC Davis And that's when the symptoms started to really interfere with my social life because I started having gastrointestinal symptoms that they labeled as irritable bowel syndrome, which of course we know is now just a catch-all group for saying, we don't know what's wrong with you. And they wanted me to take Tagamet every time before I ate a meal. And I was like, I'm like 20. I'm not going to be dependent on a drug to be able to eat. So I refused to take it. I asked them to dig deeper. I said, this can't be the reason why I have problems with my gastrointestinal tract because it's not a lack of a medicine that's caused this. So what's the real root cause? And the gastroenterologist told me he just didn't know. So, you know, being an undergrad, not knowing a lot myself, I just kept going and, um, And it was, it was really frustrating because it seemed to have no rhyme or reason. Like, sometimes I could eat pizza from like the local college joint and I'd be fine, and then the next week I'd go eat the same pizza and from the same place and I was buckled over in pain. I looked like I was 5 months pregnant because there's so much gas, you know, so much bloating. I'd have constipation and then followed by diarrhea. It was, it was horrible. So This persisted, and for about 20 years I kept seeking help from Western medicine doctors. I saw so many specialists that I lost count. I had so many tests done. I had endoscopies, colonoscopies, breath tests, urine tests, fecal tests. I mean, I even had a blood test. I had allergy tests, sensitivity tests. At one point, I even had exploratory surgery. And because we were so desperate, no one can figure it out and nobody actually had any answers. And so at this point, my symptoms were progressing. It moved beyond just gastrointestinal symptoms to chronic sinus infections. It was like every 6 weeks I had another sinus infection. I was chronically sick. So if anybody had a cold around me, I would catch it and I would get it for like twice as long as everybody else. Um, and then I had other symptoms, like I had the bumps on my arms. Um, I started to develop sensitivities to numerous foods. At rock bottom, there was like a short list of foods that I could actually eat. Even foods like apples and bananas would make me sick. So, which was crazy. We think of like apples as a healthy food, you know, they can even help if you're exposed to radiation, but They all made me sick. I also had a tumor on the white, or the sclera, of my eye. I saw many doctors for that because obviously I was concerned to lose my vision. And all they could do was give me anti-inflammatory drops, so more medication. And they told me that they didn't know what was causing it, but they could guarantee me that that tumor would grow over my, my cornea and it would blind me. So that was real reassuring. And And I also ended up having 5 miscarriages, which they again were like, you're super healthy, we don't find anything wrong with you. Like they even tested and they said your biological age is years younger than your chronological age. So we don't know what's happening here. They, and they kept saying, we think you're just stressing too much. And then the last gastrointestinal doctor that I saw after about 20 years, of looking for help told me that the symptoms had to be in my head. So at that point, I decided, okay, if I want to heal from this thing, I'm on my own, you know? So, and my husband and I, you know, we hadn't just been sitting idly by. We had been searching the scientific literature and trying to find answers. And like I said, this was almost 30 years ago when it started. So things like leaky gut were not in mainstream speak. You know, it was very rare. We found it in the scientific literature and we were theorizing about, okay, I think I have leaky gut. Why do I have it? I think it's probably man-made chemicals, you know, like artificial colorings and flavorings and GMOs and pesticides and herbicides. So I went all organic and, and then we theorized that it probably was also gluten. So I went gluten-free and, you know, back then gluten-free wasn't really a thing. Like there was a little section in the grocery store, like its own little stand with a few supposed gluten-free products, and that was pretty much it. So I lived off of those along with, you know, regular food like Whole Foods. But, um, the— something happened that was really interesting. When I first started eating those gluten-free foods, I felt better, and we thought that this is it, it was just gluten all along. Well, then a few, probably weeks or months later, all the GI symptoms came back. I learned later that that's actually a thing. It's called gluten-free whiplash. So yeah, it was— I wouldn't know either. Like, now, um, I'm a certified gluten-free practitioner because of how much I learned and how devastating gluten can be for people, for some people. So what I learned was all grains have gluten, including corn and rice. Well, what are most gluten-free, even certified gluten-free foods made from? Corn and/or rice. So what happens is you stop eating the main staples of gluten like wheat, you know, so it's wheat, barley, and rye, and sometimes oats is what usually people say contains glutens. So you stop eating all those things, you start to feel better, but then when you eat the corn and the rice, you're introducing a different type of gluten. There's not just one type of gluten. We, um, the FDA's definition of gluten centers around alpha gliadin, which is the primary gluten in wheat. But what happens is there's hundreds and possibly thousands of different gluten proteins. So when you stop eating the wheat, you stop eating that type of protein that's been irritating your system. So your system starts to recover and then it takes it a little bit of time to become aggravated enough from the new type of gluten protein that you're eating in the corn and rice to actually initiate more symptoms. So it's— that's why it's called gluten-free whiplash. You know, you're kind of taken by surprise that you have these symptoms again. But all of these products actually contain a form of gluten, and the FDA hasn't done anything to update this label. Uh, it's, it's actually a very outdated label. It came from the winter of starvation in like the '40s. So, and that's actually a really cool story that there's a pediatrician in the Netherlands and he actually was the first to link wheat to celiac disease. So in '40, 1944, roughly during this starvation time of the war, this doctor observed improvements in his patients. So he, he basically had children in this hospital And once there was a wheat shortage, and that's saying it nicely, like they were basically starved. Once the wheat was taken out of their diet, these children who were hospitalized, they were so sick, they were improving. They were getting healthy again, even though they were starving. So he figured out that connection between celiac and gluten. Well, it just so happened in that country at the time, the staple foods were like wheat and rye. So he characterized gluten as being contained in wheat and rye, and the FDA latched onto that definition. And so that's what we're stuck with today. So when you walk into the grocery store, if you think that you're getting a certified gluten-free product, odds are you're not. You're actually consuming gluten in that. So what happened with me was I figured all that out, but then the— but the symptoms started to get better, and then I got sick again. And we figured out, eventually we figured out that the rice that was in these gluten-free products gave me arsenic poisoning. So yes, I had arsenic poisoning.

Hold on. First, I want to know, when you were going on this journey of learning all these things, how did you investigate this? Was it the internet? Was it the the library, where were you finding all this information?

Oh, that's a great question. So we had to really dig deep and piece it together. Cause like I said, we didn't have all these podcasts talking about these things back then. So we actually started with the scientific literature and actually my textbooks from grad school. We were trying to find an answer in there, which by the way, there were no answers there.

We need some background here.

You have a degree in Oh yeah, I have a PhD in nutrition from UC Davis. Um, and so that was the ironic part about this whole thing, is that the cobbler's kids not having any shoes. Yes, yes. Yeah, I graduated from one of the top nutrition schools in the country, but I didn't learn— and I learned— I don't want to like put it down because I learned a lot of great stuff. Like, I'm an expert now in biochemistry, right? I taught biochemistry. Knowing biochemistry helped me heal because it helped me figure out what was happening. So there are a lot of great things that I learned, but there was a lot of information I learned that I have found out was not accurate. So for instance, the dietary guidelines are completely inaccurate. And lo and behold, like most Americans, I was following unknowingly the dietary guidelines when I got sick, right? These are ingrained in our system since elementary school. Oh yeah, I didn't even notice that. Yes, yes. So things like that were, you know, were just— were they— they were not accurate. Uh, so I ended up having to reteach myself. We didn't learn about gluten. We didn't learn about what's really in the food that's making people sick. We learned information about like how they discovered this vitamin, how they know they have this mineral, like trace. If you eat a hamburger trace the biochemistry through the body. So I got it, I can do all that, but nobody actually like pulled back my veil and showed me, hey, this is actually what's in the food, these are the adulterants, these are the contaminants, this is what to look out for. So I didn't actually know what was making me sick. So I started with those books and the scientific literature, and then as I got sicker and sicker, I was in my 30s and that's when these online free health summits were just springing up. I mean, I would listen to about 40 to 60 hours a week of these free online health summits, just trying to piece the puzzle together. Yeah, it was, it was intense. I did this for— yeah, I did it for years and years. Well, you know, to be honest, the reason that I stopped everything and spent so much time trying to piece this together is because we knew I was gonna die. I had reached a point, I, I talk about motivation, right? Like I didn't wanna die at this point. I had had two, two of my three children. After every child I got sicker, which makes a lot of sense. And I was to the point where, um, this is when the last specialist I saw said that it was all in my head. And so I didn't know where else to go. I had exhausted all those resources. And we all, the whole family ended up getting the flu. And this is when I hit rock bottom. They all recovered. I ended up having to go into the hospital because I fainted and they had to give me fluids and all this stuff. So I spiraled downhill from there. I got to the point, Dr. Stillman, that I could not hold a cup. I couldn't wrap my hand around a cup. Because my hand was too weak. I couldn't stand long enough to make a sandwich. I couldn't walk up the stairs without getting winded. Every time I would breathe, it felt like my ribs were gonna break. And every time I chewed food, it felt like my teeth were actually gonna fall out. So I was really at rock bottom. I was to the point where, I remember it so vividly, my husband would go to work and beforehand he would get our two kids situated downstairs with food and drinks on the coffee table because they were very young. And so that way they had, they had sustenance throughout the day. He would turn on a learning show for them. He would some days have to pick me up from the bed and carry me downstairs and lay me on the couch or on the floor, whatever I could tolerate. And he would set up the laptop and that's where I would lay there all day streaming these live health videos, trying to save my own life. And so, um, I remember what happened was my breaking point was, um, I was in the bed one day and he was going to go to work and I was like, okay, I'm going to make it down the stairs. I, you know, I was a competitive athlete for much of my life and so I was like, mind over matter, I can do this. You know, I was in so much pain I could not lift the sheet off my body to get out of the bed. And so I just started crying. So I'm like, I've exhausted— I started crying and just crying out to God and praying for him to help me find the answer. I told him, I've exhausted all my resources. I've used all my education that I know of, looked through the scientific literature. I've done all this. I'm watching these health summits. I can't figure it out. And so I made him a promise that if he saved me so that my kids wouldn't grow up without a mother, that I would spend the rest of my life helping the rest of his children be healthy and strong. And I kid you not, my husband brought me downstairs that very day. I heard something on the Health Summit. It was like within 5 seconds I heard it and I was like, bam, that's the answer. And I never looked back. It was incredible. And so I started healing from, from that point on. And to this day, It's been over a decade. Oh, go ahead.

What did you hear? You can't leave us with a cliffhanger like that. That's not fair.

Well, you know, it was truly remarkable. So I heard the voice of a specific functional medicine doctor, which is crazy because as I said, I would listen to 40 to 60 hours of talks a week, every single week. And I did this for over a year. So I heard this man's voice, and in 5— within 5 seconds, it was like the spirit spoke to me and said, you need to call him.

Uh, is this person going to remain nameless?

Oh, I can name him. Who was it? Yes, it was Dr. Peter Osborne.

Never heard of him.

Yeah, he's out of Sugar Land, Texas. He is incredible. So what happened was, um, so this was totally a God thing because he had just released a book and it was a bestselling book. So he was on a book tour and he was in Texas, right? And this is before like people did a lot of telehealth stuff. And I was like, what? Oh my gosh, I can't even fly to Texas to go see him. I can't get out of the bed, you know? Anyhow, I call the office and I was like, I know this sounds really weird, but God told me I need to have an appointment with Dr. Osborne, that he has a piece of my puzzle. That's going to help me heal. And they said his waitlist is 6 months. And I said, I'm not going to be alive in 6 months. Like, we knew, we, we knew what was happening. And so they go, well, we could put you on the waitlist, but there's no guarantee. The very next day they call and they said they got a cancellation for that next day. I was like, whoa, this is totally God opening these doors. So anyhow, it was amazing. Because as soon as I started talking to him, for the first time— I'm like, I'm about to tear up again— for the first time in over 20 years of looking for answers, somebody believed me. He believed me. He didn't think I was crazy. He didn't think I was making this up or that it was in my head. He said to me, "We're gonna get you better." And that's what I needed. I needed that little bit of hope. Somebody who believed me and someone who thought it was possible to actually heal from something as debilitating as what I had. And so what I didn't know, what he taught me was I didn't know about functional testing. I only knew about Western medicine, Western medical tests, and which have a lot of shortcomings, I found out. So because we did all the tests, like I said, they were like, you don't have any nutrient deficiencies. You don't have gluten sensitivity, you know, everything's fine, we can't find anything wrong.

It takes, um, it takes about 5 minutes to interpret that workup.

Exactly. Anybody can look at that. Anyone can look at it. Yeah, even the reference ranges are, uh, you know, like not accurate and politically driven. So, um, so he taught me about this functional testing, and lo and behold Like I said, I showed up with arsenic poisoning, but get this, I also showed up with 15 nutrient deficiencies. I was so deficient that I was borderline for both pellagra and beriberi.

What kind of testing did he do for that?

We did the ELISA, uh, you know, the ACT ELISA test for the food and chemical sensitivity.

Oh, you mean Russell Jaffe's test?

Oh, I'm not familiar with that name.

Eliza ACT Biotechnologies.

Oh, is that— was that created by him?

Yes, Russell. I just interviewed Russell like 2 weeks ago.

Oh my gosh. Okay. Yes.

What a small world. It is, I think, the best test. Sadly, Russell's— well, unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it, it's a really good test, but that means it's expensive and that means it's grossly underappreciated in the world of integrative medicine.

Yes. Yeah. And I mean, insurance wouldn't cover it, right? So it's out of pocket, which is also an impediment for a lot of people. Um, we were at the point where my husband was like, we'll pull everything out of savings because, I mean, literally you're going to die. So what are we going to do? You know? So that's what we did. So we did that test. Um, we did a, um, a urine chelation test. So pre and a post test with a chelator. To determine that I had the arsenic toxicity. And we did— he tested my white blood cells for nutrient deficiencies, and that's what came back with 15 functional deficiencies. And as you know, beriberi and pellagra were largely eradicated by the mid-1900s, and we're seeing a lot of this come back, you know. So, and both of those, like I said, can lead to paralysis and death. But the crazy part about it is that I had all those deficiencies. And look, I formulated supplements. It was my first job out of college, so I knew the best of the best supplements, and I was taking them regularly. And but my gastrointestinal tract was so messed up that I wasn't able to properly digest and absorb them. So I ended up with these nutrient deficiencies. And I see in my own practice that's very common. You know, by the time someone gets to me, they're pretty much in a bad state and Western medicine hasn't helped them and, you know, they're desperate like I was. So by the time they get to that point, everyone I see is deficient in several nutrients. I mean, it's— even though they're also taking vitamins and minerals and some of the best on the market. So anyhow, so I made changes, you know, using the functional testing they found. That's how I found my final triggers. I should add before that, because I was— have a PhD in nutrition, I tried every dietary protocol that I could, that I could think of, that I was trained in, that I could come across on the market. I mean, GAPS, uh, the Candida protocol, diet elimination, reintroduction. That's the thing that helped me most because I knew how to do that. But what I didn't understand at the time was that there was delayed onset, um, you know, of sensitivities. I didn't know that you can eat a piece of food and 2 to 3 weeks later have some sensitivity pop up. So it made it very confounding when anytime you're doing diet elimination reintroduction. So I was able to eliminate a lot of foods that I couldn't eat, but I wasn't able to identify the final triggers, food triggers, until I used that test that we were just talking about. And I'll tell you, it was things I didn't think of. I Bay leaf. I was sensitive to bay leaf. And so we're told, a lot of us are told, oh, if you're sick, consume bone broth. Well, what do a lot of people put in bone broth? Bay leaf. So, so I actually induced the sensitivity because I was consuming so much bone broth while I had leaky gut. So there's these things I just couldn't figure out by myself, but I tried all those protocols. I mean, everything. I mean, that was my training, you know. So I needed those tests to help. So what happened was I removed those final triggers. We did an at-home natural chelation protocol to remove the arsenic.

Which one?

It was Chelamax. That— it's one of Dr. Osborne's products himself, a Chelamax product. And then also I added different foods in there like cilantro, you know, things because I'm more about natural. I only did the supplements because I was in the dire position and I couldn't get in the kitchen to actually make the foods that I needed to make. So I did the supplements. Um, so I did that and, um, I supplemented to replenish the missing nutrients because I was so deficient in those. Um, vitamin C was a big player for me as well. Um, I also had, um, mold toxicity, uh, so I had, you know, mycotoxins in the body. Vitamin C really helped me to get that out of my body. I used frankincense a lot and turmeric. So because the pain was so severe and I didn't want to take Tylenol or ibuprofen or any of the man-made painkillers, I was— I did not want to take it because I knew what that would do to my gastrointestinal tract. So this is when I started going more natural and learning about herbs. So I really switched a lot of herbs. So what happened was in 3 days of just removing those final food triggers, I was able to get off the floor in just 3 days. Within 3 months, I was actually outside ripping bushes out of the ground, like doing heavy-duty gardening work. And within about a year time period, I was back to normal. There was no pain anymore. There was no inflammation, nothing whatsoever. It's been almost, it's just over 10 years, so just over a decade. And I just keep getting healthier and healthier. I have no markers of any kind of disease in my body. I'm healthier than I was even in my 20s. I have more energy than I've ever had in my entire life, even though I turned 50 this year. You know, I had, after I, you know, I had the 2 boys, my first 2 kids when I was really sick. Well, I had my daughter, my 3rd child, um, at the age of 45, and she's the healthiest of all of my children. And I recovered the best from, from that labor, actually, at 45, right? So I don't believe in all these labels, like you have to have your kids before, you know, the age of 35, or all this problem. No, no, no. It is what you believe, right? You, you create your own reality. So the interesting part, I think, for me about my healing story is that it, it wasn't— I had to look beyond the physical triggers. So I think of disease as like an onion, and there's all these different layers to the onion, and you, you need to address all those layers, but you really need to make sure you address the root cause. Because what I have found in my experience is that if you don't address the root cause, you can get someone into remission, but it's really hard to get them to fully heal. So What God showed me as I was healing and use it, finding all those physical triggers. So like, for example, foods that I was sensitive to, because hardly anybody that I see is allergic to any food, we're sensitive to the foods. It's totally different tests like we mentioned. So food triggers, there's potentially micronutrient deficiencies, there, there's often heavy metal toxicity and or mycotoxin toxicity. And then you have things like EMF exposure. So mitigating that, you know, going through personal care products, cleaning supplies, you know, all those things. These are all on the level of physical triggers. Once I removed all those, I felt amazing. But the problem was, you would say I was in remission at that point because, for example, if I ate too much sugar, even if it was fruits, or if I was stressing out too much, I would get pain in my right forearm, right? So a symptom of the autoimmune condition that I had would come back, which by the way, I never said that. I was diagnosed with an advanced stage of rheumatoid arthritis where even in my 30s, I couldn't wrap my hand around a cup, you know? So you would say that I was in remission. And the crazy thing is in our Western culture, people would rejoice. Medical doctors would rejoice that somebody made it into remission, right? This is the goal. Like, if you have an autoimmune condition, they're like, well, I don't know, we might be able to get you into remission, maybe not, but we're largely gonna manage your symptoms with medications and such. Well, I decided I didn't wanna stay in remission because it's a space of fear. I lived in constant fear. If I do this, if I eat this, it's gonna come back. And so I actually decided mind over matter. That I don't believe in remission. So to me, remission is just a limiting belief. It is a man-made definition, and if you believe in it, you might settle for it. And I wasn't willing to settle. I wanted full healing. It's possible. The Bible talks about full healings all the time. The medical literature talks about spontaneous remissions, spontaneous healings, all the time, even in conditions like stage 4 cancer. We have numerous, like, decades and decades of scientific medical journals, peer-reviewed, documenting that cancer is, quote, not a rare occurrence. So I said, well, if you can reverse cancer, clearly—

Sorry, did you mean to say cancer spontaneous remissions are not a rare occurrence?

Oh, sorry. Yes. Yes. So sorry. Yes. Healing. So healing from cancer is not a rare occurrence. Thank you. Yeah.

I have to say, I don't think anyone would dispute the, the idea that can— cancer is not a rare occurrence in 2025.

Yes. Yes. No, no, no. They said, okay, so let me actually read it to you. There's a 2011 review of cancer remissions and full healings, and they said the spontaneous healing from cancer, quote, is now accepted as an indisputable fact and is not rare. So I thought, man, if you can heal stage 4 cancer, you can certainly heal rheumatoid arthritis, right? So, so that's what I did. I prayed about it and I said, I asked God, okay, you got me this far. What am I missing? What's the missing piece of this puzzle that's going to get me out of remission and fully healed? And it was amazing. It was like fireworks going off in my head. He showed me this roadmap of how to do it, and I followed it, and that's how I got fully healed. That's why for over a decade now I have been fully healed. And what he showed me was the root cause lies on the emotional level. So you have to address the— you address the physical triggers, Um, and that actually helps you to provide more clarity so that you can address the emotional root cause. But for every single chronic autoimmune condition, there is an emotional root cause. It often stems back from childhood, but also in the womb, in the first 2 years of life, attachment trauma or attachment disorder. So then I dug deep and I'm like, what's this happening with childhood trauma? We call them adverse childhood um, adverse childhood events. And that's really when the magic happened, is because you realize that at the root cause of all of these conditions is fear. It's this fear that we're not good enough, that we're not loved, that we're not worthy enough. And on some level, everyone relates to this. We all strive, right? Most of us look for external validation. We're constantly chasing this carrot. And then even when we achieve said goal, it's not enough. We gotta push, we gotta do more. A lot of us are these perfectionists, right? And why? What are we seeking? Why is it never good enough? We keep seeking and seeking and achieving, achieving. It's never good enough, you know. I remember saying, like, even after I got my doctoral degree, then I got offered this great job right out of college. I was the director of research and development for a supplement company, and I was like, I'm just— I'm still not happy. Like, why am I not happy? I kept having to achieve more and more to get that small dopamine hit for a moment, and then I went back to not really being happy. Another word for that is content. Content or joyful, right? Why do I not feel grateful? If somebody has meditated, like say you've tried to meditate and it's just like not working, and you try positive affirmations and it's just not working, that's often an indication that we have a dysregulated nervous system which stems from, in large part, childhood trauma or the attachment disorder that you can experience in utero or the first 2 years of life.

We see this a lot.

Yeah.

And we strongly encourage patients to address it. We have a number of— you know, it's interesting because people come to us not for that per se, they're looking for the biochemical, biophysical cause of their illness, which of course we'll do everything we can to identify, but it is very, very consistently we see that people will do the emotional work and then get those results. And likewise, people who don't do the emotional work are always kind of on this treadmill of sort of running away from their disease.

Yes, yes, yeah, I see the same thing. And, you know, I think a lot of it is because of the perception of modern culture, modern medicine, and modern science. We think of the body as a machine and is made up of chemicals. And so when you go see a doctor, what are they doing? They're running lab tests to test your chemicals in your body. So we have been actually conditioned to believe that the body is a machine and that We have these chemicals inside, and if there's something, like, if there's something wrong, one part of the machine has broken down. So we segregate the body into different components. That's why you go see different specialists for different things. But really, the body works together, and one thing affects everything in the body. And in fact, we now know that the body creates its own light. So the body actually creates biophotons of light. In every cell. And have you already covered this?

You're like, just fine. We've known that, but it's funny that you say we've, we now know. Do you realize we've known that for over 100 years?

Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, when I say we, I'm talking about modern scientists. I group myself in, cuz I'm a scientist. Yes. So like I group myself in the modern scientists where like we weren't taught this in, yes. In school, like in science. But when, yeah, if you, I started digging into scientific literature And they have counts from like people in the 1800s talking about this, all these experiments that were done. And actually, people who you would consider like Western scientists used to believe that there was this like unifying field that organized all of our energy. And then you got the reductionist thinking that came into play and they got pushed to the fringe, you know. So now we're this society that's built on this reductionist model. And I'm not saying chemistry is not important, right? There's the physical triggers that we can certainly identify. But what I'm saying is you keep chasing the chemistry and you go down this rabbit hole and I see it all the time. People get stool samples tested for like microbial dysbiosis, for example. And then they're like, okay, well, I'm deficient in, I'm low in this microbe, this bacteria. And blah, blah. So I'm going to take all these different probiotics. Well, then they get tested again, like 6 months, 12 months later. Now they're deficient in a different microbe. Like now they're imbalanced in a whole different microbe. Um, the same thing for micronutrients. And so, so my point to them is you need to look beyond the physical. Yes. Do the work on the physical level, right? You need to eat clean, breathe clean, drink clean, but you know what? You need to think clean, right? Everything has to be in balance. Your perception creates your reality. So I started out by learning about the biofield. And that's how I— that's what God showed me was that get off the chemical for a minute and go on to this biofield that we actually have this electric field running through us. And it's cool. We have these little— actually, I can show it to you if you want. Have you seen one of those, um, energy sticks?

No.

I actually happen to have it right next to me because I was just using this for my kids. This is, um, a little kid energy stick. It's like a little science experiment. So it's part of a circuit. It's an incomplete circuit, so it has a battery in it and it has a light. And once the circuit is complete, right, so once there's enough— once there's electricity running through it, it lights up and it makes noise. So I put one hand on one end and then watch this. Cool. See, so this is an easy way to teach kids that there's energy running through our body. So I take this actually on talks because a lot of people haven't heard this concept, and when I start talking about the biofield, they're like, oh, that's woo-woo. Well, you know, the biofield was actually labeled by the National Institute of Health. They defined the biofield, and so this is a Western accepted concept now. It's in the scientific literature. Thousands of papers have been published on the biofield. And so this little demo I showed adults to let them know, you do have energy running through you. EKGs, EEGs, these all measure electricity running through the body. And Einstein said that anytime electricity is running through the body, you create electric field and a magnetic field, which we call the electromagnetic field. That is your biofield, the collection of all your organs, all your cells generating electromagnetic fields is your— is collectively called your biofield. So the way I explain it, this is how, this is how God showed it to me, is that when you're holding on to what we call low vibrational frequency emotion, that would be like fear or guilt or shame or anger. Those emotions, they're not just something you feel, they are energy. And energy carries information. Like, this is basic physics concepts. Energy carries inform— information. Your field is just energy. It actually carries your memories and it carries your emotions. So if you're holding on to anger, for example, it's in your field. It's an energetic vibrational imprint in your field. And why that is so important is because it's carries information and it sends that message to your physical body. So picture that you have kind of this globe, like this bubble all around you. And if you have a message coming to you from this bubble that's saying like fear, right? Anger is really, the root cause of anger is really fear. So let's use fear as an example. If you have fear imprinted in your bubble and it's sending the message of fear to your body all the time, what kind of physical body are you going to build? You're going to build a physical body that's based off of fear. It thinks you're in danger. That's why I call these emotional tigers. We've heard of the physical tiger example, that, oh, you see a tiger, you go into fight, flight, or freeze, and that's a, that's a survival response. Well, we have emotional tigers of fear imprinted in our field that send a message to the body that there's danger out there. So now you're going to be producing pro-inflammatory cytokines. Um, you know, you're going to, you're going to have cortisol released. You're going to be in fight or flight the majority of the day. And so that leads to disease. That's, that's already associated. We know that happens. Chronic fight or flight leads to disease. And so what I tell people is the, the instruction manual for your body is not actually in your DNA. It's actually in your field because you can do all the physical changes you want, but if you still have a message of fear being sent to your body, you're going to be creating a body built on fear. It's going to respond as though you're still in fear, and so you, you will develop another disease. This is one reason why people will say, oh, I'm in remission, yay! And then like years, maybe 10 years later, they get another disease. Or, you know, because they're not actually addressing the root of the problem. If you practice forgiveness, for example, you can change the energetic imprint. So I brought up spontaneous healing from cancer. One of the top ways that people spontaneously heal from cancer is through a major act of forgiveness, and this is also biblical, as we know. So they will forgive, that energetic imprint leaves the field. And the way I see it in my mind is that then it makes room for emotions that have a higher vibrational frequency, like joy and like gratitude. Because if you ever notice, it's really hard to be afraid or be angry and be grateful at the same time. It's almost like you have room for one, right? One of them takes over. So, um, I work actually a lot with clients similar to you with actually helping them to identify these traumas that have happened to them, which is really just a fancy way of saying your nervous system got overwhelmed, right? So I help them identify these overwhelms and we work to release them, which is really crazy. Just like you, I mean, I was trained in nutrition. You would think that I would be basically doing the physical work on the chemical body, but all of that now is so— it's so well known. Like there's not a big mystery to those steps on the roadmap of reversing a disease. The part that people usually need help with is this emotional part, because a lot of us have not been taught, um, emotional intelligence and forgiveness, including myself. That was the hardest part.

Yeah, I would say that it's well known amongst those of us who do this work. Yes, full-time professionally. Sort of the, the nuts and bolts of the system and the process of getting people well.

That—

and that's— but the thing is, there's not actually that many of those people. You know, we get patients in who have seen— average patient in the practice had seen 5 other practitioners before they saw us.

Oh yeah.

Many of them—

are you talking about they saw 5 other alternative practitioners?

Frequently, yes.

Mm-hmm.

So, and the reason I bring this up is just that there's, there's such a variety of— and this is, this is, you know, because of stories like yours, people flocked to functional and integrative medicine, but we saw a lot of people just kind of do a weekend training, slap that on their logo.

That's right.

So there's just a lot of, you know, and then the other thing is there's so much hope put into it. That I have lots of patients who come to me, they've spent so much money with other doctors, and then they spend less money with us and get better results because we just focus on being efficient and we focus on really high— I would describe them as high leverage opportunities, like the ELISA ACT Biotechnologies test. We often— the allergy test that you did, we often bring that up with patients because it's such high leverage, which, by which I mean a small amount of effort, not putting bay leaf in your bone broth, not drinking coffee in the morning, cutting rice out of your diet. I've seen all these things make a huge impact on my patients, but it's not on everyone, like you said. And you know that he's got hundreds of analytes in that test, and you just cannot predict what it's going to be. We had a recent case about a year ago, actually, now, corn and coffee. She would never figure that out on an elimination diet. I mean, she might have figured it out if she'd gone super basic, single ingredient, all cooked from scratch at home, but it was so valuable to her to see the lab, to know that she had to avoid that, and then go through the work of actually eliminating it. But the other thing I wanted to say is that I really see— when you start giving people the things their bodies need to heal and become what we might call the highest expression of themselves, I see that they're able to then engage in the emotional work much more easily and readily. It's almost like you're, you're blocked from accessing these positive emotions when you're really sick and when your body is really diseased and inflamed. And that's part of what I think is so interesting right now as a society. We face a really challenging time where people are so sick, they're having trouble accessing these positive emotions. And things like forgiveness. And that's why there's so much chronic anger and division. And that's, you know, we see it in the practice, a lot of, of that coming out in terms of people's cases. Uh, but that's maybe another story for another day. And so, Sina, we're coming up on time here because we both have something at the top of the hour. Parting thoughts?

Um, I agree with everything you just said. I think that there's also frustration because we were— believe— we were led to believe that the system is something that it's not. So there's a lot of misplaced expectations on the modern medical system, and that was one of the big things that I had to address in my own healing journey because I was very angry that none of them could help me, um, and that they basically said I lied, you know, when they said it's in my head. So once I realized that I had this misplaced expectation, I became empowered, you know, and I realized, okay, it's up to me. I'm looking in the wrong place. Like you said though, when you go to the alternative space, there's still the same issue. There's some really great practitioners, and then there's some that aren't. There's some that aren't, and I think they're well-meaning They just have different training, just different experiences, different amount of intuition that's placed into it, different belief systems. So, um, I— because I worked in the alternative space too, trying to find a practitioner to help me, and it took years to find one. And even now, I'm very particular about who I interact with because you can tell right away that some of them are good intentioned, but they really just don't know what they're talking about. So I agree with you 100%. It's— it could be very frustrating for people. That's why you have to vet them. Don't just trust that, oh, it says functional medicine, so they must be good. They probably have my answers. Interview them, like vet them, get on the phone and talk, or email them if you want, and even talk to their receptionist. And that's what I started doing and just asking all these questions. How do you do this? What kind of test you do this and whatever? If they want your business, they will answer. Like, they won't— they don't have to give you all the answers, like, oh, take this test and do this. But they should have case studies that they can be able to provide you for sure.

You know, increasingly, this is the job of the private practitioner, is to explain their methodology before you even call the office, because it's now so easy for us to create content that goes out on podcasts and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram. And so People typically who signed up with me in the practice to be patients have consumed hours and hours and hours of content. They understand my philosophy. We're very much aligned. It creates a ton of efficiency in the practice because we're not at— we don't find out 30 minutes into the first, you know, appointment that we have a different philosophy. They want us— they thought they were going to come out with antibiotics for chronic Lyme, and I'm more interested in using something, say, natural. To deal with it, and we may not agree which is the best route to take. And so I find that to be very valuable. Um, but then you find that there's, it turns into like a sort of a sales and marketing game of who's got the best sales and marketing engine out there. And then we see increasingly, I think, a lot of, um, uh, just a lot of, a lot of inflated prices for things.

Yes. And inflated claims.

Oh my gosh.

Yes. Yeah. So I don't, I don't do marketing. Like I have my little, my little website. I don't really advertise stuff. Like, I mean, you know, I was fortunate. I met you through Hilda and you came to our Polyphase Summit and you're, you're just incredible. So, uh, that's how I meet different people is, is through my friends who I trust. And that's how my inner circle grows. But I, I'm not into the marketing. You know what I think? And I mean, so I don't make a lot of money because I don't do the marketing part of it, but that's not where my heart is. I basically gave it to God and I said, okay, I'm here. I'm your servant. You bring to me the people who you think resonate with me and need my help. That's it. Like, you know, and, and I'm fine with that. It works well for me, you know? And at the end of the day, I can look myself in the mirror and know that I'm standing in in God's light.

The best practitioners work based on referral. Yes, yes, we focus on that very heavily. And, uh, it's very much the case that people come in with the whole family, often as not.

So, oh yeah, oh yeah, because, because people know, people know once you're genuine and once they're getting results from you, oh my gosh, they— you're— that's gold. They just found gold. So of course they're going to want to share that with their friends and their family because everybody wants everyone to be feeling good and being healthy. You know, no one wants kids to be sick, for example. So that's what I found that really works. Just be genuine, be yourself. Don't, you know, fall into the trap of, oh, I need more money, or, you know what I mean? Like, money doesn't buy happiness for sure. I mean, we spent a lot of money to heal me, and you know what I realized during that whole journey? Because I was on the corporate, um, path, right? I was raised, it's all about money. It's about climbing this ladder. And I was doing it and still never happy. When I got really sick, what I realized matters most is relationships. You know, that's what, you could be the poorest person on earth and you could be the happiest because you have good relationships, you know? So I'm not into this whole, let's compete for market shares of, you know, of all the sick people. There's a lot of sick people. Like there's too many even for us. If I was run out of business because there were no more sick people, I would throw a party.

Like, that's honestly how I feel. I would come. I would be there in a heartbeat to get on a plane and come see you. Sina, where can people find out more about your work?

Yeah, I have a website, um, dr.sinamccullough.com, and there you'll find my podcasts. I have a podcast that I co-host with Joel Salatin from Polyface Farm, um, and I blog on there. Um, I'm a health columnist for Epoch Times, so you can connect to those columns through my website as well.

Thank you for joining me. It's great to see you.

Thank you.