Stories of Hope & Healing: Healing Through Mineral Balancing with Clark Engelbert

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. I'm joined today by my dear friend and collaborator Clark Engelbert for another episode of Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing. If you hadn't figured it out yet, I love interviewing people who have inspiring stories of defying the odds and doing what doctors, gurus, experts, and society at large say is not possible. Clark's got one of those stories. And what's funny is Clark and I have been working together now for at least a year and a half, and we've known each other for, for much longer than that. And I've actually never heard this story in full. I've only heard him allude to it. And so Clark, thank you for joining me today. I like to start these episodes by asking people who they are and where they're from. So who is Clark Engelbert and where is he from?

It's the eternal question. Who is, who is Clark Engelbert? No. Yeah, I'm just a dude. Just a guy from Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. Born and raised there. And, you know, I'd say probably in my early 20s, late teens, I started to have some issues with anxiety and depression that were sort of exacerbated by, you know, being in college.

Was your life totally normal before that?

Yeah, growing up I had a great childhood. Um, mom and dad together, uh, they were really involved in my life. Mom was an educator. Dad, you know, would— he was, uh, like my T-ball coach, you know, and I played sports and did really well in school.

Would it be safe to say that you're one of those rare birds who comes from like a happy, healthy, well-adjusted childhood home?

You know, there were some problems here and there, and, you know, nothing—

no one— come on, everybody has problems.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. There, you know, there was bumps and blips along the way, but like, sure, for the most part, looking back on that as I've gotten into adulthood, I'm like, wow, that was a really good childhood, and I would hope that I could provide that for my kids.

You know, hashtag blessed.

Yeah. So yeah, growing up, things were pretty good, um, and did really well in school and, you know, played sports, had a huge friend group. And all of that. And things sort of started to kind of go off the rails when I got to school, when I got to college. Where did you go? I went to the University of Arizona, um, yeah, in Tucson. And, um, you know, didn't really have a clear direction basically in, in the first couple years I was in school. And so I was, you know, you could sort of think of that as like just being— I was adrift basically. For a couple of years. And so to fill that void, you know, I got really good at partying and, you know, you know, causing mischief with friends and that sort of stuff, you know.

So we unpack what partying means. What were your bad habits of choice? Because this comes into this. This is— we do this in our histories with people, you know. You know, were you drinking a lot of aluminum canned beverages? Right.

More than— it was more than that. Now I'm subject to this. Um, you know, it was a lot of alcohol, a lot of partying, some recreational drugs in there as well. Um, you know, but I think it was like a weekend thing for maybe the first year, year and a half, but then I was just increasingly more bored with school, um, and didn't really feel like I had a direction. The standard track of being in school and going into a 9-to-5, uh, or even, you know, I was working in a lab at the time, so I was thinking about going to grad school. That to me, I don't know why at that time it just didn't appeal to me. And I was like, I don't really know what I'm going to do, but I know on the weekends I know what makes me happy and, you know, how I can have some fun now. So that was kind of the teen brain logic and young adolescent brain logic that I was employing. And so, yeah, for a couple of years, just really got into partying, you know, drugs and alcohol. And it caught up to me. You know, by the time I was 21, 22, I was sort of burning the candle at both ends. At this point, I had a, I had a part-time job. I was in school full-time, like 15, 18 units, and then partying on the weekends with friends pretty hard at that point. And it was, you know, my body was sort of saying, we really can't handle this there, brother. You probably need to slow down. And I had some pretty serious panic attacks at that point around being 21, late when I was 21. And those were really the catalyst for a lot of things. Basically everything else that came afterwards in my life was the direct result of that period of time leading up to those panic attacks and then having them and really not getting answers from the medical system., you know, something, something dramatic happened physiologically, uh, and, and, you know, the paramedics had to come and sort of scoop me up from where I was. And it felt like something really wrong was going off in my body, and I thought I was having a heart attack. And that's sort of part of why this panic attack spiraled out of control. And I went into the emergency room, and they were not able to give me answers.

Did you have a sense of impending doom?

Oh yeah, that was the— well, that was the first time in my life that I ever really had that. I had been super positive, forward-looking, you know, up to that point. Was definitely a drift, but that was like a big turning point for me. And then especially going through the medical system, and it wasn't just that one instance, but it was going through it, you know, going back to the ER multiple times because I thought I was dying or having a heart attack. And them not being able to give me answers, that mentally really threw me into a dark place, basically.

What did it feel like in your body, that dark place?

Well, initially when I had these panic attacks, it felt like I was going to pass out and my body was like trying to shoot adrenaline, basically, you know, shoot those stress hormones through me to keep me sort of upright. And it just felt like this giant rush of something. Internally, and I didn't know what it was. So I sort of interpreted it, interpreted it as, well, this could be a heart attack. I didn't really know what anxiety was at that point, or I didn't know what panic was at that point. Had no idea. Didn't really have any history of anxiety up to that point. So it wasn't like— there might have been a little bit of like social anxiety, and, you know, I would use alcohol in certain situations to sort of quell that. Up to that point, but I didn't really know what that was. So it was weird, sort of like rushes after periods of time of just like really burning the candle at both ends that ended up in me sort of spiraling out of control mentally because I didn't know what was going on. And then no one could explain to me in the medical system like what was happening. And so I would leave like the ER after going multiple different times, or I'd go to my doctor's office multiple times. I mean, in the course of like a year and a half, I was in and out of the ER and my doctor's office maybe 20 times. A 21-year-old guy, that's kind of weird.

Increasingly, that's not that weird.

Yeah, exactly.

Especially now, sadly.

Yeah, yeah. Now all these years later. But at that time, it was definitely, it was definitely more mental, I think, than anything physiological, right? Because they would put me through all the different battery of testing, blood tests. They were I was sort of getting demanding and like, do whatever test that you can think of. And they were going to do exotic tilt table testing for my heart and all of this stuff.

You need some sertraline, Clark.

Yeah, right.

You have sertraline deficiency.

Well, that's interesting you say that because that's where the story is. Oh, it's not?

Is it not working? We just need to increase the dose, Clark. Did you not— we just go up on the dose. And then, if that doesn't work, we just add another medication. From a different class. And then if that doesn't work, we go up on that dose. And then if that doesn't work and you're still able to, like, you know, cogitate, we'll add another class of medication, and then we'll increase the dose of that. And eventually you won't have any problems that you can verbalize because you'll be a vegetable, right? And then we declare victory.

Wow.

Then we just make sure that we keep the refills flowing to your, your retail pharmacy. And this is the sad state of mental health in America today. I wish it wasn't so tragically funny. And here we are.

And that's pretty much exactly what happened in the next phases.

Still as old as time.

I can't say that exactly like that because I went to my PCP so many different times and they were like, well, Clark, at that point I was sort of hoping for a diagnosis of cancer or something. To that I could hang my hat on. Truthfully, when I— by the time I was 22, I'd been through this.

Like, I'm laughing, but it's not funny because it's, you know, I've had patients come back to me after they started an SSRI and they've said like, I've never been— I've never wanted to kill myself, but I started that and I wanted to kill myself. Never, never ever tell me that I need to try that drug or anything like it again. It's not funny because they are linked to suicide. They are linked to, um, but it's, it's like, you know, and I, I hope people don't take this the wrong way Doctors learn to joke about these things because it's so dark and you live in it day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. And sometimes you feel like you're, you know, you just sort of sit in awe of the psychiatric industrial complex and you think, this is plain as day, this is a broken playbook. It's not helping these people, it's hurting them. Who knows how many people kill themselves, get involved in violent you know, violence, homicide. Um, they crash their cars. I had a patient who came to me, um, very late in her course of battling depression over anxiety, and I just looked at the case and I said, you've already spent tens of thousands, if not more, on your health. You know, your husband's pawned his car to pay for integrative medical treatments. Your labs are terrible. I did my best. Two weeks later, she had jumped off a bridge. So, and I mean, you know, I'm here today with you because this is all too common a story, and your story is a great story about how, you know, this doesn't have to be a life sentence, but you need a game plan and you need a coherent strategy in order to beat it.

100%. And yeah, so, so kind of to go back, um, on the timeline, you know, I started to go to— I, I just had been through my PCP in the ER, kind of knew me by my first name at that point at the hospital. And they were like, I've been there too.

Hey, Clark, back again.

Back again. Yeah, just here. I just had another meltdown. No big deal. My PCP and like her and his PA were sort of just like, well, Clark, you know, we don't know what else to do for you, but we think you have anxiety and depression. And so we're going to give you an SSRI and we're going to give you a benzo. And, you know, the remarkable thing about this is that it actually worked for a little while. Maybe not the SSRI, but the benzo really did work. In the short term.

There's a reason that they're a very popular drug of abuse. They're highly effective. They're also highly addictive. And you will gain tolerance.

Exactly. And that's, you know, guess what happened next?

And not to mention, like, talk about a tire patch. You know, this is not a long-term solution. This is not a root cause treatment.

Right, right, right. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the thing that is so, I think, misunderstood about medicine by most people is that they go into their doctor and they think that this is a root cause approach or they're going to actually solve their problem. It's really short-term symptom management, but that's what it was for me. And I was under the impression at that time that, you know, these people with white coats who were prescribing medicines knew exactly what they were doing.

I studiously avoid wearing a white coat. I don't even own one anymore.

Yeah, yeah.

I just show up in a polo these days.

Yeah, seriously. But, you know, so I got on the— I got on those drugs initially. They helped. The SSRI was weird. I cycled through a bunch of them. I got referred to a psychiatrist, of course. And so we were playing with the dosing and playing with the different types of drugs, of course, because that's all they really know what to do, you know. And a year into this, I was dating someone whose mom was a nurse. And, you know, God bless this girl's mom, but her mom was like, you know, Clark, that medicine that you're on, the benzo, you really shouldn't be taking that long term. And I had no idea up to this point, but I was like feeling sort of at that point, interdose withdrawal from that medicine and weird, feeling weird and just getting weird feelings in between the doses and almost like having panic attacks to an even greater degree than I had before.

Right.

So at that point, I kind of started to go down the rabbit hole a little bit and started around like when I was 23, 24, started to get into, okay, well, maybe this is— maybe medicine isn't really the way.

Did you start to Google your problems, Clark?

And well, back in that time, you know, back in the long, long ago, 2009, it feels like eons ago.

Isn't that a quote from, uh, what is it, Land Before Time?

It is, I think it is, yeah. Wow, really dating ourselves a little bit.

Oh boy. Come for the stories of hope and healing, stay for the witty banter and the '90s jokes.

Yeah, yeah. So, we were doing this thing called reading books at the time. And so, I would go to Barnes Noble and these other places and Borders before they close and would get books on how to deal with this stuff naturally and sort of went down that rabbit hole a little bit.

You should confuse your Google search with a medical degree, Clark.

100%. 100%. And you know what, things started to turn around when I started—

how about that? Tragically, now that Google is totally co-opted and you, you go there for like, you Google anything health related, it's like just the most boring derivative, like, you could be dying, but you might also be fine. Go to your nearest ER or book a consultation at whatever clinic has paid to rank high enough in our Google algorithm for you to have a number in front of your face. It's sad because there were such good resources out there, and this is part of why I decided to start the podcast. It's part of why the Substack blog stillmanmd.substack.com is what it is. People don't realize, you know, if you're out there as a consumer looking for answers, you're way— and you're not interested in the mainstream narrative that Clark and I have been, you know, brutally making fun of for the last 10 minutes, then you're way better off going to my Substack or like Pierre Kory's Substack, Midwestern Doctor, any of these other great Substacks, uh, and looking up what you're looking for. Because, you know, I've spent my whole life, or at least a, a lot of it as an adult before Google went bad, last 4 or 5 years looking for all the best stuff and finding it. And it's in places like Substack, GreenMedInfo— shout out to my dear friend Sayer G—

X.com now.

Where?

X now.

Yeah, X. But who knows? Wait 5 minutes.

Well, I know. We'll see.

Yeah, we'll see. Anyway, back to you, Clark. Yeah.

Yeah. So I started to realize at this point around 24, 25 in like 2009 that taking drugs long term was not a solution to this problem and it was potentially making the problem much worse in the long run. And so I figured out, like, I Googled or came across this thing called the Ashton Manual, which is this— it's a, it's sort of a guide written by a PhD over in the United Kingdom for how to come off of benzodiazepines so that they don't kill you when you come off of them. Right. Because you can have some very, very serious withdrawal effects, especially if you come off a benzo that's short acting. Right. If you just pull yourself off of something like Ativan or lorazepam or Xanax, that you've been on for a while, you can have some serious, serious problems. And the idea with this was that you were supposed to transition over to a longer-acting benzo and substitute that and then come off really, really slowly over what is called a long taper over a year or something like that. And so I sort of got into that. My life was kind of chaotic at this point. I was a professional musician, so that wasn't really conducive.

You tried to make a living making music, or you did make a living making music?

I did. Good for you. I was successful at doing that. Yeah. Yeah.

A few.

So somehow got through, somehow, you know, was able to do that while having all these problems.

Um, you know, but there's a lot of musicians with a lot of psychiatric problems making it real big, Clark. You can't rule out that that actually worked for you.

Yeah, exactly. And a lot of musicians sort of let, you know, that's what drives them in many cases.

The demons. Yeah. They keep them, keep them motivated and creative in many ways.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it was sort of conducive to that, but just to my overall health, it wasn't really conducive to that, you know. And so my life was pretty chaotic at that point. I tried to come off of the benzos with the guidance of a psychiatrist and really, really slowly. It just didn't work. Basically, my life was too chaotic. And eventually, you know, I started to read a couple of different books. One is called The Diet Cure and The Mood Cure by Julia Ross., and she has a clinic over in, uh, Marin County in San Francisco that deals with like amino acid therapy and using amino acids as precursors to neurotransmitters. So I went to her place, uh, and worked with Julia for a while, got some relief, but was still having a really difficult time with the benzos, the inner dose withdrawal, you know, and what to do about that. Um, that didn't work. And then in 2012, I went to this place called the Health Recovery Center which was run by Joan Matthews Larson, who wrote this book called Depression Free Naturally. And one of the— she comes from sort of the orthomolecular school, like Abram Hoffer, Pfeiffer. And we were doing IVs of, you know, high dose like magnesium, glutathione, vitamin C. And it was at that clinic that I was able to come off of the benzos and the SSRIs after I'd been on them for about 6 years at that point. So I had to be on— I had to be under pretty strict supervision for that. And I was on like a phenobarbital to help prevent seizures if they were to come up. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So it was pretty— but it was what at the time they called it a rapid taper. Right. And it was a 6 or 7 week taper off of these medicines that I had been on for about 6 years up to that point. Quick. So that was pretty— I would, I would call that experience it was good. I knew I had to come off of the drugs because my personality and everything, you know, that I thought of as like me had, had sort of been blunted, muted, and been taken away essentially at that point just by my battle with this drug, you know, needing it, staying on it, but hating being on it, um, and that sort of thing. I really think of like the benzo as the one that was really quite a bit worse than the, the SSRIs I'd been cycled on and off of. So I came off of both of the medications. It was hellacious. It was pretty brutal. There was a lot of like vomiting and other pretty brutal symptoms and stuff like that. But I got through it and ended up back home in Arizona in late 2012. But at that point I was on like 50 different supplements. You know, the Orthomolecular people just throw everything at you.

Classic.

Right.

Suitcase.

Right. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly— I had to—

Would you like to be put on autoship?

Right, right, right. So, so I was sort of in this situation again, which was a little weird and precarious because it was like I was on now just 50 different supplements. I wasn't on drugs, which is good. That was a huge win for me. But I still felt like shit and I was like, well, how is this going to end? Right. I'm going to take supplements for the rest of my life. Yeah. And I didn't feel great, but Joan was a really cool lady and had this connection with this other lady named Pam Killean. She wrote a book with Joseph Mercola, I think called The Bird Flu Hoax. So Pam had a little place in Joan's book talking about like zinc and copper balance and hair tissue. And I was like, that's really interesting. So I picked up Pam's book Uh, she has her own book, uh, it was called Addiction: The Hidden Epidemic, and she had her email in there. And I was like, you know what, I'm gonna email this lady and see what this is about because this sounds really interesting. Um, and I had also been introduced to someone at, uh, the Health Recovery Center in Minnesota who had done a hair analysis. Um, and they, they kind of talked about it a little bit at this place, and it just sort of piqued my interest., and I got home and I was on FMLA leave at this time, not doing much and just sort of incapacitated.

Truthfully, that's Family Medical Leave Act for those of you who are not hip with the lingo of chronic disease.

So, um, I was kind of at home not working and trying to figure things out, uh, again, um, and came across Pam's stuff, emailed her, and I got my first hair tissue mineral analysis and started mineral balancing in early 2013.

What was your first pattern?

Deep bowl pattern, like super high calcium-magnesium ratio, like 33 calcium-magnesium ratio, 0.88 sodium-potassium ratio.

Talk about spiritual defensiveness.

Yeah, it was spiritual defensiveness. It was a super low N/A/K ratio, you know, and reflecting that crazy wall that I had just been through.

Now, you mentioned to me at some point that you tried, when you started to learn about this, using high-dose zinc with disastrous effects.

Yes, exactly. That's part of— like, I read Pam's book and there was enough sort of information I got at the Health Recovery Center that I was like, well, maybe zinc is just the root of all my problems. I got sort of diagnosed pyrroluric, had high blood readings for kryptopyrroles.

Maybe we need to give people a little thumbnail history on this. So people know, really the last 100 years, we've discovered 98% of what we know about chemistry, which is still probably not very much in the grand scheme of things of what we one day will know. But we started to use different minerals, you know, nutritionally. And the flatter— I don't know, the, the, the people in the conventional medical world who, um, are still living in this like drugs and surgery paradigm that's I'll leave that there. Yeah, they don't understand that you can have these massive effects with minerals and that people will develop what I would describe as really functional mineral deficiencies. So you look at their blood level, they're not, you know, dealing with a severe copper or zinc deficiency. You do get that if you test enough people, by the way. I've seen it plenty of times. That's why I do blood and urine and hair testing sometimes, or I'll do blood and hair, and then sometimes I'll do other things. But the point is you'll give people these high doses of minerals and you'll get these amazing effects clinically. Now, this led people in the orthomolecular world to go to super high doses of minerals. The word orthomolecular, they drew from the Greek ortho meaning correct, and they were thinking, well, we need to focus on getting the correct molecular basically blueprint for humanity, for an individual patient, whether that's vitamin C or zinc or whatever. So you go to orthomolecular. Which really has fallen out of vogue. No one's really kind of— very few people are carrying that standard. There's still an International Society of Orthomolecular Medicine, which I think puts out great content and information, but it's very focused on high doses of things, which has a place and can be very, very effective. Um, but Clark and I both had the experience of taking care of people who were in that paradigm who did not get better, and that's exactly what Clark is talking about. You tried high-dose zinc because you heard it was good for you and it might be the root of your problems. And what happened?

Yeah, I started out with an NADK ratio at 0.88. And as we know, in mineral balancing, we can use zinc sort of strategically to balance a high sodium potassium ratio because zinc is a sodium antagonist. Right. And so that's good for some people. Right. And that's sort of critical to understand in the mineral balancing paradigm., but it can also hurt some other people who have a low sodium potassium ratio or an existing low sodium level on their first—

The big picture here though, Clark, for people who really don't know any of this stuff is that the minerals all play with one another in ways that are not obvious and that you don't actually see unless you do hair testing. And that's why the vast majority of people are in the dark about the fact that you can use lower doses of minerals and vitamins in order to get better or at least the same I would say better effects than at doing or working at high doses, leaving aside the scenarios where a high dose is appropriate based on other criteria, which is a totally another story and also like a topic for another podcast. And the, the point there is that, you know, really this whole paradigm of, of they all play together and you have to look at it as a complete mineral picture totally overturns the paradigm of we've got a low zinc, take zinc. You've got a low copper, take copper. We call that replacement therapy.

Exactly, exactly. And that's, you know, it's just this idea that the, that all of the elements in your body exist in a system and interact with each other, right? That's the idea with minerals. And that, that, that whole idea wasn't even really sort of discovered or fleshed out until the early '70s. And it's still, at least in the literature, right? There were some very brilliant clinicians who were onto this and using this idea. But, you know, formal study of this idea really didn't occur until the early '70s. And right, we can talk about that, you know, if people want to. But it's sort of still being fleshed out in the literature. But everyone knows that zinc and copper interact. That's because there was a couple famous researchers who proposed this idea that elements in biological systems would interact with each other that had the same chemical and physical characteristics. And these two researchers by the name of Hill and Matrone proposed this idea, this hypothesis, and then they experimentally demonstrated it. And that's why we know now zinc and copper and other elements interact with each other in biological systems. But that idea, we can expand that and we use that sort of expansion of this idea in mineral balancing which is that all of the elements, not just zinc and copper, but most if not all of the elements interact with each other in this broader mineral system. In the literature, they call this the ionome or the metalome, and that includes heavy metals that interact in that system as well.

And vitamins also play into this, as do amino acids.

Vitamins interact with all these elements as well, right? But that's sort of the crux of mineral balancing. It's the recognition that these elements interact within the broader system. And actually what's being regulated by the body is not necessarily these individual elements, but the system of elements is being regulated. And you might see weird things happen in the blood as a result of this that don't make sense. But we can sort of make sense a lot of this, or a lot of it on an HTMA hair tissue mineral analysis test.

So back to your story, you started mineral balancing in the context of hair tissue mineral analysis with Pam, you said?

Yeah, Pam Killeen.

Pam Killeen.

And what happened? You know, I was pretty bad off for a while, but things were slow going. But in the first, like, 6 to 9 months, I started to actually go through my first elimination of a heavy metal. And at that point, it was nickel.

Don't fast forward. Give us the first, like, 10 days.

First thing, I don't know if I could remember that with that much precision at that time.

What I'm really looking for, because I love this part of the podcast, is When did you realize this was different? When did you realize you'd found something as profound as what you now know it to be?

Probably like 2 or 3 months into it. I was having a panic attack and I took what, you know, the supplement called SBF formula for fast oxidizers, and it brought out of a panic attack almost immediately.

Wow. Better.

Better than benzos had. You know, I was like, that to me, that was a really dramatic moment. There was so much compelling information. And in theory, I was like, this has to work. This is so brilliant. But that kind of moment early on that I was like, this supplement that they're giving me for like my fat oxidation rate and low NADK ratio is actually working to bring me out of something that I had struggled with for you know, at that point up to a decade.

Yeah, something you said there I want to unpack. You know, everybody's got a good theory for why their protocol, their system, their whatever is the best or is great or works or whatever. And everyone, you know, you can find the people who do better with the thing if you treat enough people, and that's how you generate the positive testimonials, and then you get new clients or patients or whatever. And that's why it's okay and it's normal that the world is full of people who say, we've got a great approach, you should try it, And then it's just a matter of what's the success rate and how profound is the benefit and how consistent are the results. And, you know, every therapy's got people who don't get the results they're looking for in the timeline they want, and they, they flunk out and they move on to something else. And maybe that works for them, maybe it doesn't. But it's— I think it's remarkable, and obviously why you and I work together, is that I had a very similar journey, not in my own medical history, but basically I went through the orthomolecular and the high doses, and then I found mentors who use lower doses, and then I I finally ran into you and I said, huh, this is really interesting. And then I did the hair testing myself and saw really profound results personally. And then I thought, wow, this is a way more— is a better test in many respects, particularly because of aluminum, which we'll talk about. But I, you know, then I just converted my whole practice to all we do now is hair tissue mineral analysis with rare exceptions. And obviously we still do blood testing, which is very useful. But it's a really profoundly powerful paradigm. So, so it was in 2 to 3 months you noticed that you were having in this experience with SBF where you aborted this panic attack, which is amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. So to me, that was a huge moment. I was like, well, okay, this is really something that works and I'm just going to keep doing it. And the promise to me by Pam at that time was, you know, it's going to be a long haul to heal and you're going to eliminate metals. And that's the idea behind this approach. And that's what's causing at a low level these issues that you're having with anxiety and depression. And so up to that point, it had been maybe about half a decade, 5 years, where I had pretty persistent suicidal thoughts as well. And so that was another sort of watershed moment in my mineral balancing program because I went through a nickel elimination about 6 to 9 months into this. And the suicidal thoughts went away after I went through this nickel elimination completely. And they had been pretty persistent, invasive, intrusive, and really just upsetting because it felt extremely real and I didn't know where this was coming from. So that was another huge moment for me. But then there was another moment as well early on where I started out with a really high calcium magnesium ratio. And in mineral balancing, we call that spiritual defensiveness. We say that there's something going on in your life, um, or a lifestyle habit or something that causes that ratio to be out of balance. Um, and it can cause a person to be very defensive in their, in their sort of rationalizations and wanting to persist in whatever that thing is. And I had been in a relationship at that point that was super destructive, wasn't working, um, and I was still trying to make it work no matter what. And I remember Pam sort of coaching me through this. She's like, Clark, you're probably going to have to let go of that relationship. It doesn't really sound like it's that good for you. And I was sort of in denial for a couple of months, and then I went through with it. I ended the relationship, and my calcium-magnesium ratio came down almost immediately thereafter as well. So it was those 3 things in the first 6 to 9 months that happened, and I was like, holy, this is unreal. How can they say that the calcium-magnesium ratio is like this lifestyle ratio?

It sounds like— we joke about how it sounds like astrology when you get into it, and it sounds hokey and weird and unbelievably dumb. It's a little unbelievable, but then you start to work with the reality of it and use the protocols and recommend them to people, and then people come back to you and they say things like, I feel more connected to God. Or this relationship that I've been struggling with for years, suddenly I found a path forward that works for me. And I've restructured a business deal, renegotiated a business partnership, ended a toxic romantic relationship, made peace with a family member. And that's something that really, to me, it touches on the re— the nature of our reality as, you know, beings that are foundationally, fundamentally made up of proteins and amino acids and fatty acids and carbohydrates and vitamins and minerals. But the minerals are the spark plugs of life, and overwhelmingly, pound for pound, you know, um, on a per-milligram basis, the minerals are the most powerful things. And, you know, the flip side of that coin is that the heavy metals are the most toxic things. Even in the chemical weapons world, you know, We took Trichothecene 2 toxin and made it a chemical weapon. The United States DOD, that is. And that's as toxic as mercury, depending on how you're exposed to it. But that's the purified toxin, not the molds that make it. And that's really interesting because people don't realize this. They're talking, and this is something that's happening right now, you know, on social media. It's January 2025. This will probably come out in February or March of this year. And people are talking about, well, it's this dye and it's this. Seed oil and it's this, whatever.

And it's this.

And the deeper you get into this, the more you realize the metals are way more toxic than any of these things on a pound-for-pound basis. And that's why, you know, we actually don't have good tests for looking at any of these other pollutants. We really don't. And I wish that we did. And I would love it if we had them next year, a few years from now. They should be available, but we don't have them right now. The hair is an amazing test for seeing heavy metals come out. We've, you know, shown people in other resources that we've got tons of before and after tests where you see these massive eliminations of heavy metals coming out. And that's the other thing that I think really, for me, solidified my, um, my, my conviction that this is a profoundly powerful modality. Is the number of people who their aluminum level would skyrocket. You know, nickel, mercury, lead, it would go through the roof and they would feel worlds better, right? And we didn't have to resort to all the other things that we see happening in the integrative health space that may have value but often are, in my opinion, kind of a sideshow to the fundamental work of balancing minerals and eliminating metals.

Yeah, and there's a lot of wishful thinking, especially in the heavy metal space, where people don't really know how to measure them well. And even people that use hair testing don't really know how to use it correctly to that goal of heavy metal assessment. But then a lot of other people that are recommending things in the heavy metal space especially, it's a lot of just hope and pray that something happens and they're not doing diagnostics to actually track eliminations as they're happening. Right. So that's another really cool aspect of this. When we use the tests in sequence over every 3 to 4 month time cycle, you can actually see stuff being eliminated so that it's not just us saying, well, you're going to eliminate heavy metals and we hope that you do. And if you feel like crap, maybe you are. We can actually show you on the subsequent hair test you're eliminating aluminum or lead or these other metals.

So on that note, Clark, get back to your, your story. What was the sequence of events and what was your journey like out of where you were still struggling with your health, still struggling with your mind? You start this mineral balancing journey and what happens?

So I get through that first year, 9 months or so, and I'm sort of like, this is unreal. I can't believe I don't have suicidal thoughts anymore. At this point, I was still in Tucson, Arizona, trying to figure things out, right? Because I had been a professional musician. I was sort of getting back on the saddle there and, and getting back into that. Um, and this was around 2014, 2015. Um, and, and things just started to— my mental clarity started to come back. I wasn't having panic attacks anymore. I was back at work. I was, you know, playing guitar again in bands professionally. Um, you know, but I was sort of at a point where things were shifting. Like, my political beliefs had changed pretty dramatically at this point.

Yeah, mineral balancing may make you more of a libertarian or conservative.

Yeah, it was having that effect, right? Because elimination of these metals really has a profound effect on your mind. And so I started to go through that more. I went through a copper elimination. Started to eliminate some lead, um, and decided to move at that point from Arizona. I had family and friends up in Boise, Idaho. So early 2016, I came up here, um, and was still on the program, like, still doing pretty well, eliminating a bunch of lead, like, consistently over the course of, like, a year and a half. Um, and so I felt like my mental faculties were coming back. Anxiety just generalized anxiety that I, that I had went away as well, which was super cool. Um, and I went back to school, um, at Boise State, enrolled for biochemistry. Um, I had been at the University of Arizona for a couple years in nutritional sciences, um, but sort of just became captivated by all the theory behind this through Dr. Wilson. Um, and at that point I kind of made a choice. I was like, well, I really want to do this professionally, mineral balancing. And it had such a profound effect at that point that Dr. Wilson had a training program at that time, and I went through it and I was like, well, I'm going to start my business. I'll put off school. I'll put off finishing school in biochem. I really want to start this business. I was super passionate about it and had been so transformed by it that I was like, I can always go back to school if it doesn't work out. So that was sort of 2018. Now at this point, I'd been at Boise State for about a year, 2 semesters, and then I decided, started training with Dr. Wilson. That took about 6 months. And then I sort of got rolling with this idea for Nutritional Analytics, which is, you know, the, the hair testing business that I have. Where we use mineral balancing basically. And things continue to— I just have stayed on the program all along the way and have continued to eliminate like lead and other metals. Like last year I was eliminating a ton of aluminum finally. I had not been through aluminum eliminations and we'll talk about that maybe on a separate discussion but— or separate podcast. But, you know, consistently things have just gotten better and better and better and better and better. The longer I've stayed on mineral balancing, the more metals I eliminate, um, and sort of led me to this point now where I've been doing it professionally, started this business in late 2019, um, and started posting stuff, uh, around these ideas in 2020 and haven't really looked back since. And it's been kind of a rocket ride since that period of time. Yeah.

And went from not having a business to having a business that has more business than you know what to do with.

Yeah. And, you know, along that track, I think 2022 is when things really started to take off. I think we met then. I got on Matt Blackburn's podcast and a bunch of other podcasts. Cameron Borges, right? We know Cameron. Yeah. And things have just been taking off ever since.

Before we get into that, let's, let's unpack what the process is, because I find that, and you know, I think I've— I don't know where, but I think in our previous webinars and talks about this, I haven't— I've talked about this, but to give people some ideas, I talked— I learned about Clark some time ago. HTMA had been— that's hair tissue mineral analysis, if we didn't mention that earlier— HTMA had been on my kind of list of things to look into. I am a— I, I sometimes joke that specialization is for doctors who don't want to try to know everything, and that's not my problem. So I sort of want to try and know everything in the integrative health space, which is why that's the name of the podcast. And I can't be an expert in everything, so I do refer out. But I started to look at HTMA, and I said, well, this is really interesting. And then I sat down with Clark and looked at the protocols he was using versus the ones that I'd been trained in from prior mentors who'd— some of whom also studied HTMA. And I said, this is interesting in how similar it is, but I liked the protocols after I tried them that, you know, Clark introduced me to. They were very, very minor modifications to what I was doing before, and it was based on different testing. And that's how we ended up connecting. And then we started this training program for people a year and a half ago, which we'll link to in the description. And if people, you know, uh, don't see a link or, you know, want to find out more, stillmanmd.com, go to the contact form, we'll get you hooked up. But you know what I think I see very consistently is people don't understand this process. And, and I have this case in mind that recently she didn't renew at the practice after we ran annual labs for her, and then we waited a year and we did another round of labs. She did not book follow-up appointments. She did not repeat hair testing in the year. She did not do any coaching calls. She did nothing from the first appointment to the end of her membership when we redrew labs, and her labs showed zero improvement. And this has become something that I try to avoid in the practice because I view every person that I don't get massive success with as a negative testimonial. And I'm very serious about getting the results that we set out to achieve in the people who come to see me, because that's my reputation. That's what I, you know, rely on to bring us new patients so that I can continue to do what I do and not have to go work at some miserable, you know, woe-begone hospital. So Anyway, she didn't understand something that I now really try to walk people through, which is this process of, you know, you get your hair test, you do supplementation based on the hair test. Getting a hair test and treating it for more than 3 to 4 months is like, you know, basically having your car aligned or your tires balanced and then going to the shop and saying, well, last time it was too much this way or too much that way, do it again. You're not the same person. You need to do repeat testing. So we retest every 3 to 4 months because you change, the protocol is not the same. And we need to have continuity between the tests. Because if we have these big long periods where you're not on a protocol, people tend to either not make progress or they actually go backwards. And this was another thing that I saw happening is it was a little bit like getting a car out of a ditch. You can push it back onto the road, but if you don't get it all the way back onto the road, you're just almost out of the ditch. And so, your case is a great example of that. You continuously mineral balanced and it was part and parcel of or integral to your success, right?

Yeah. And, I think the analogy that you use there with cars is a really good one. It's almost like going to your car mechanic and being like, "Okay, I'm going to come this time but I'm never going to need this again based on this one like visit. That's not how it works with mineral balancing. It's similar. We do the one test, we give you a very specific protocol to balance or manipulate mineral levels and ratios into balance. And then we want to see or evidence that that's happening based on the retest, but also want to track heavy metal eliminations as they happen because there's no one else doing that. And if you go through heavy metal elimination, you're not going to feel great. You're going to want evidence that that's happening. And so, you know, we can use the retesting to that end, but it's sort of like, this is a long-term approach. It's more like a path than it is like a single point destination. But you'll, like with me, I noticed significant changes sort of incrementally. And then, you know, those changes after like 2 or 3 years, they added up to something really significant. And I look back at when I started to be like, whoa, I was a completely different person at that point when I started. So, it is far more incremental and part of that has to do with metal accumulation happens really slowly over time in people nowadays.

Yeah, except for the occasional injection of heavy metals.

Yeah, exactly, which I don't know, can we say the V word here or—

Let's just gloss over that, Clark. I think people will know what we're talking about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's how people are accumulating metals now at really low dose thresholds, but consistently over decades. And metals are so toxic, the body tries to engage in this trade-off where it will either try to eliminate them immediately or store them away in tissue. That's very difficult to mobilize metals from once they're stored away., you know, so that's very, very important to keep in mind. It's very difficult to mobilize metals that are stored in tissues like bone, in your kidneys, in your lungs, in your liver. So unwinding this process of accumulation that's occurred over decades is gonna— it's a long-term solution, but the results I think that we can get are quite a bit more profound than most other programs out there.

I agree. And that's why, you know, it's very common for us to see people who've been to multiple functional integrative practitioners. They test blood levels, they test urine levels, they may get some success. You know, some of those practitioners have much better protocols than others. But what we see very commonly is they've stalled out with previous methods and they're not getting the results that they need in order to achieve the goals that they've set for themselves. And mineral balancing, you know, it has to be said and repeated that there's sometimes when you start a protocol and someone has immediate results, but it's frequently the case that is just as you said, it's small incremental improvements over a long period of time that cannot be dismissed, but the consistency has to be there or you will not see the results. Consistency of dosing, consistency week to week, One of the most common reasons I see people not getting the results that they want is they didn't get their supplements on time, they didn't do a long enough program, they didn't retest frequently enough. And the people who get the best results are the people who are the most consistent. And I try to spell that out to people before they engage our services so that I can sleep easily at night knowing that I told them what was necessary, whether or not they followed through on it. And then we do our best to give them the structure they need, you know, in terms of our reminding them, hey, you're due for this, you're due for that, we recommend this, we recommend that. Please book this consult. We try to give them that structure to maximize their chance of success, particularly when they're busy. They need that accountability and that level of touch. So Clark and I, a year and a half ago, created a hair tissue mineral analysis coaching program where we train people how to do this. You don't need to be a medical practitioner, you don't need other certifications, licenses, etc. We'll teach you how to do it, we'll teach you what we know gets results for people. Time and again, repeatedly. We'll show you, you know, how to interpret the testing, how to get the testing, how to walk people through the testing, how to create the supplementation protocols. Again, links to that will be below. Again, if you need links, go to my website, hit the Contact Us form, we will get you plugged in. We've got a course that you can take at your own pace. We've got a course plus coaching program where you get an hour call with us, a group coaching call to go over tests, from the people who are in the course. We go over all of them together so you get to see other people's tests and, and hear their stories. And then, you— we give you the protocols and you take it from there. We've got tons of material in the course, Q&As, how-tos, the essentials of how to get results for yourself, for clients. And then, we have a practitioner mastermind and we have a path through that for you to be certified by us so that you can order the tests, order the supplements, and start your own business in this, which of course, as Clark can testify, you know, for him, it's now your full-time job. No, um, you didn't need to go through some kind of fancy school with a six-figure price tag. You didn't have to do some long, arduous training program. We do insist on people doing a certain amount of time with us, and we don't just certify anyone. You've got to pass an oral exam with us. So we are not— because we found in the space, and this is something we need to talk about actually, there's a lot of people in the space who do not know what they're doing, and it's giving it kind of a bad name. And that's why we often find people have already done hair tissue mineral analysis, but they didn't work with someone qualified and well-trained. And so they have this bad idea of what it is. And there's a ton of people out there who are just running paid ads to these hair testing kits, and then they give you an automated reading and people get terrible results with that because a lot of the time they're just doing, oh, this is low, so we give that, which is often contraindicated. But you don't know that or you don't understand that if you don't have the training that we were offering people.

Yeah. And I mean, a lot of people that have come through our program so far, we've had a lot of people come through now, maybe over 100. They have done previous hair tissue mineral analysis courses, you know, and there's a lot wanting in those. And a lot of that is I've seen many of them. They're just sort of like either PDF documents or the underlying theory behind, you know, mineral balancing and HTMA interpretation is not really there to the same degree that it is, I think, in our program. And a lot of that has to do with coming from this Dr. Ek school of thought and understanding mineral interactions and, you know, some higher-level concepts related to HTMA. But yeah, the program is, it is pretty rigorous, right? We want people to come through this and to actually be able to go out on their own and, and say with confidence to people that they can work with you, they can work with people on their own. Um, and if they're coming through our program, it's really important that we make sure that you have that, a certain level of competence of your own by the time you're done. Um, and I don't really think that, that, that sort of level of conscience is there in a lot of these other people that are just kind of hoping to make money. Yeah, they're big—

Do you have a credit card? Would you like to take our course?

Yeah, give me the number now. You know, it's like operators are standing by. So it's, it's to, to get certified, right? You know, we have a— it's like almost 24 weeks of working with us directly, an hour a week for 24 weeks, and the exit exam. Um, you know, we've done this now for over 100 people. We're getting pretty good at it.

Yeah, I mean, if you show up and do the work You will, you will be able, you will know how to do what we're teaching you, and you'll be equipped. So long as you've really, you know, paid attention, taken notes, worked hard, you'll be able to get people amazing results just like we've gotten for people.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if anyone has been following me or Dr. Stillman, um, on social media the last couple years, like, we're consistently posting case studies, um, and testimonials from people that have just done really well in these programs. That's really what it's about. At the end of the day, there's a lot of programs out there, whether it's like Ray Peat or circadian biology or mineral balancing. At the end of the day, there's good theory behind a lot of these approaches that sound extremely smart, including our approach. But at the end of the day, it's like, does this actually work? For you. And it works for me in a dramatic way.

What's funny you mentioned that, I get a ton of patients in the practice from the Quantum Biology Collective whose training I actually helped create, and I'm— I work with them and it's a great training. But what we've found is the people from that group in the sort of quantum world, when they fail to get results with that paradigm, they find me, and then, you know, by extension you a lot of the time. And that's where they get results because the quantum paradigm is very anti-supplements, no sup— no lab testing often, and they're, they're missing the boat. And it's part of the problem with a lot of the approach that people in that world have ended up taking because of who got big in that space of, for example, eating tons of mercury-laden fish, which we then see coming out in their hair testing, which coincides with anxiety and racing thoughts and all these mental illnesses, which we then see abating when we deal with metals. So sign up for our course, sign up for the training. We love doing it. We have lots of positive testimonials, happy people. We would love to take you guys on. Any closing thoughts, Clark?

I think that's pretty much it. You know, I think we've— yeah, I'm sort of looking forward to the next one that we'll do, the next sort of podcast that we'll do on aluminum. I just did a space the other day on X, had over, I think, 1,000 people tune in. But when it comes to metals and diving into the specifics of heavy metals, which I love to do, aluminum is probably the most important one. And there's a lot to say. There's a lot of very recent research done by some really brave scientists, imaging studies corroborating a lot of these theories that aluminum is associated with neurological disease and especially Alzheimer's and autism.

Yes, a very inconvenient truth for many people.

Right.

And a story for another day.

Exactly. We'll get into that on another podcast, but I'm sort of looking forward to that and, you know, looking forward to reopening this, this group coaching program that we have.

Yeah, we took a winter hiatus.

Yeah. Yeah, we all had a bunch of stuff going on, obviously.

Right. Right.

You know, super stoked to get going again and the group setting is very fun. There's a lot of people. You get to hear questions from a bunch of different people, and it's weekly. It's an hour, sometimes maybe runs a little long, but it's hands-on, uh, learning. It's not just learning from some AI chatbot or, you know, learning from a PDF. Yeah, you're going to learn from experts that have been doing this for years now and gotten phenomenal results.

Right. So thanks everyone for tuning in. We look forward to training many of you in our Hair Tissue Program.

We'll see you there.