Stories Of Hope Stories of Healing: Dr. Simone Gisondi’s Path to Recovery and Resilience

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 delighted to be joined today by Simone Gisandi. She wrote a great book called Against Medical Advice, which is her story of surviving stroke. Simone, thank you for joining me. I like to start by asking everyone who they are and where they're from.

Yes, thank you so much first and foremost for having me on your amazing show. I really respect the work that you do and first and foremost because the medical industry has not been very friendly to me when I was going through the stroke. So I greatly respect you and the work that you do to help people in the way that you do. So I wanted to get that off my chest right off the bat. So yes, I'm Simone. I am currently in Toronto in Canada. I was actually, I lived in Sarasota, Florida for a whole bunch of time, which was amazing and very healing. And I'm a holistic health practitioner. That actually came to be after my stroke when I went on a deep dive of what are some of the most natural and holistic tools that I can use to heal myself. The approach that was used from the medical industry actually got me a lot worse when I came out of the hospital post-stroke. So I just thought that it was a call for me to sort of take the reins on my health and on my healing. And I did just that. And it was just so wonderful and freeing that I thought, I'm going to make a career out of this so that I can help people find other tools. I don't think that there is, and as they say, all roads lead to Rome. So if we're looking to attain healing at the end of the day, we're gonna look at different tools. And I did just that.

So tell us the story. Where were you when you had the stroke and what was going on in your life?

Oh my goodness. Actually, I'll say this first and foremost, I didn't check any boxes of what would've put me at risk for stroke. That's number one. Number two, nobody Nobody in my family on either side, maternal or paternal, had ever had stroke, or we didn't have any kind of cardiovascular issues on either side of my family. So I'm the first. I was 35 at the time when it happened, and very athletic. I was a runner. I would go to the gym 5 to 7 times a week. So, and, you know, weights, running. Very precise with my diet. My medical doctor, when I would go for my blood work, she would always say, you have the most exemplary blood work that from her whole practice. So I didn't check any boxes. I, I was not hypertensive, so my blood pressure was actually on the low side, not necessarily low, low that I wouldn't be able to function, but a little on the low side. So there was nothing of any significance physically. However, and this is one of the most important things that people have to pay attention to, in my life, I was highly stressed because I was having marital problems. So the stress factor was off the charts and I was trying to sort of address it with going to the gym, eating properly, but not addressing the stress itself. And eventually it got to that.

I'm very curious. So stress always plays a role in illness. It's always fascinating to talk to people about their perception of stress because it's very easy to say, well, your blood number says this, or your blood pressure is this.

Yeah.

These are very concrete pieces of feedback for people, but stress is this kind of nebulous scapegoat. And I find that it's a funny thing in the integrative health world because, and I love my colleagues dearly, but they will do this thing where they say, well, it's your stress. It's just your stress. You just got to reduce your stress. And sometimes that's true. And sometimes it's not. And it's very hard to be the person in the seat as the patient. I know from personal experience. Having someone say, well, you just need to reduce your stress. And you're like, I know, but I'm doing that. Or what do you even mean? I'm not stressed. I have a, I have a patient I'm thinking of right now. He, his labs. I came to him. I said, look, your labs say that you're very stressed. He said, look, I don't have a stressful life. Listen, stop. You're a highly paid lawyer. You fly all over the country and all over the world. Every time I want to get you on the phone to talk about your labs or your case, you've just come back from the Masters or bore hunting in Patagonia, or you're going to Europe, or you're setting up a new office in Dubai, your idea of stress is totally broken. Your idea of a relaxing day would exhaust many people. So I really want to, I want to know if you had a telephone, you could pick up the phone and talk to yourself in the past, how would you explain your stress to yourself then and how it was affecting your health?

Such an amazing question because the way that we perceive stress varies so widely. It's like a spectrum to me. It's our, like a lot of people will, and I was prime example of that. I used to be like, go to the gym, wake up early, 5 AM club, do this. And to me, all of that was very positive. It was almost toxic, like looking back on it now, how toxic it was that I was so regimented and so rigid that I thought that I was doing all the positive things. Therefore, there would be a positive effect to it, but I was ignoring and not addressing the most important thing, which is what was happening in my marriage. Rather than addressing that, which would have probably been foundational to preventing the stroke or even addressing the stroke, I actually went into the direction of if I have a proper diet and if I have this and if I go to the gym and if I wake up at this time and if I, if, if, if, if, if, instead of addressing the most important thing. So the way that I look at stress now is different because back back then, I was, even when the doctors told me, when they chalked it up to stress, I was like, what are you talking about? I was doing all the right things. What stress are you speaking of? But the example that you just gave right now with the lawyers, yes, of course, a stressful case, being on a timeline to go here, to do this, to make sure it's like, we wanna be able to say bucket list stuff. I did this, I did this. But it's so stressful to constantly chase these things rather than be still, pull back, and be in a state of calm rather than chase things. And a lot of people think that what they do is a means of managing stress when in fact oftentimes having so many things on your plate is actually creating stress. I did have stress. I was like, maybe I'm not doing enough. Maybe instead of running half an hour, I should run 45 minutes. Instead of running at 6 miles per hour, maybe I should run 8 miles per hour. And maybe instead of lifting this, I should lift heavier, more reps, more this. Even though I was doing the right things, as you will, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself.

Did you have any kind of feedback, any kind of HRV monitoring device, any kind of sleep tracker, anything at all?

You know, I, I was wearing a heart rate monitor. Yes. When I was running, obviously right now we have the Apple Watches. I didn't have that at the time, but I did have one which was used by the runners. So I bought it from a running store and believe it or not, I remember I used to hit my, okay, I'm at like 180 beats and then I'd be like, I could do 190, let's go. Or, You know, like, let's hit 200 because I kept thinking that more is better and that doing more and hitting PRs, personal records, that I would like get, like I was doing better, whereas it was actually detrimental. And you really need to know when to pull back and what are the things that need to be kept in a certain balance, which is in large part why we have to work with experts because they've studied this rather than just try to charter territory that has never been charted before blindly, which is exactly what I was doing.

So imagine you're talking to yourself just before your stroke. What do you say to get yourself to slow down?

I'm, I'm really good with structure. I'm actually a very structured person. So even then, that was it. And that, that has stayed. It's foundational to me. I would probably say, okay, let's sit down and restructure your schedule. And I would say, okay, instead of going to the gym 7 days a week, let's only keep it at 5. And every time I would, just to go back to what I was saying, because I did say in the beginning that I used to go 5 to 7 days. When I would miss those 2 days, I would beat myself up severely. I'd be like, oh, you know, I lost gains and I missed out and I have to make up for this. So I would restructure my whole thing to say, okay, let's pull back. Studying holistic and integrative approaches to health, I could see how there is a time when you have to give your body a chance to, in the fitness world, there is such a thing where you kind of like deload. So you kind of like scale back to give your body a break.

So I'm curious, what do you think old you would say to new you if she heard you say—

are you kidding? She would push back. She'd be like, what are you talking about?

No, she'd get on her motorcycle and drive to the gym and think, that's right, forget older me, she doesn't know what she's talking about.

Yes, yes, very rebellious and stubborn, very much so.

So tell us a story. I want to know what happened. How did you figure out— how did you have this stroke?

Yes. I was having the marital problems and highly stressed. And I was, I mean, I've always been type A personality and a high achiever. So I wanted to be the good wife, good looking wife, you know, good mom, good looking mom, young, youthful, good employee. I wanted to check all the boxes and I beat myself up really bad for failures. One day it was a Saturday. I came downstairs from upstairs to make my breakfast and I was very regimented. Like Saturday was my leg day at the gym because I didn't have time restrictions. All other days were kind of built in a way that it's like, okay, well, I have to work around my work. So I would do certain muscle groups that didn't require as much time and as much attention on days when I was busier at work. So I came downstairs from upstairs to make my breakfast and my breakfast was very elaborate because I needed a lot of calories to be able to give me the energy to be able to do a very heavy workout. And legs was my heaviest workout and it showed. I mean, like my body showed the results. I did fitness competitions and won. And I came downstairs to make my breakfast. I started making my breakfast and then literally all of a sudden I collapsed in the kitchen. And what happened, it's like I was suspended in time. It's, it was a very mystical, I guess I could say, experience. I felt like I was suspended in time in a space that was just white light, very loving, positive. It felt like home. It felt like time and space didn't exist and you stood still. And then when I came sort of back to myself here, if you will, it just felt dense and heavy to be here and grotesque and all kinds of things that were not as calming as it was sort of on the other side. And I had no idea what had happened. And I just knew, and then my family kind of came because I was in the kitchen and everybody was crouched over me because I was on the floor. And it's, I couldn't understand what they were saying. They were speaking almost like a different language and I was trying to make sense of it, but it was also, I was sort of like the in transition between that world and this world. And I was trying to make sense of where I was versus where I am. What was that? Why was that? How long was I there? And then of course now being back here, and I kind of shook it off. I got up and I try to push forward with my day in a way that it was very ritualistic and in the way that I was already used to doing it. And got on my motorcycle, like you said, um, I mean, I ate, I got on my motorcycle, went to the gym, and I remember how hard it was for me to balance that motorcycle. I mean, those things are about 400 pounds and you balance them with your legs. And I was very proud of myself because I had strong legs having worked out. However, and this is something very important that people have to understand, when you have these really significant health events, there was such a drastic biochemical change in the entire body, given the significance of the event, that I was unaware of. It took all the energy and it put its focus on trying to mitigate what had just happened. So my legs were shaking, but I still made it to the gym. And this is why I'm such a big believer of mindset, because my mind had not accepted that something bad had happened. I was just like, I don't know. And I had a massive headache and I thought, oh, the headache is because I probably didn't sleep properly. I was making excuses for it and what had just happened. It was just a headache, moved on and went to the gym and attempted to do what I was used to doing. And I couldn't, my body was like, hell no, what you're asking of me is literally impossible. And so I wasn't able to and defeated, I came back home and that night I actually was having a party at my house and it was supposed to be celebrating my upcoming birthday, which was about 6 days later, as well as Canadian Thanksgiving. And I was in and out of two worlds because my headache was so severe. What had just happened in my head was so severe that I couldn't really function, but I pushed through it because again, the mind is so powerful. If I had known that I had just had a stroke, I probably would've been like, oh my God, I need to go to the hospital. I just kept pushing through, ignoring my headache. I drank that night. I drank alcohol on top of If I went on my motorcycle, I drank and I ate things I shouldn't have that day, that night. So then I pushed through it. And when I woke up the next day, pushed through the day, got back on my motorcycle, went to my brother's house and to my mother's house because it was Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. So we celebrate with all family. And then come the next week when we were going back to normal and back to regular life, work and such, I had a friend who came to help me clean up. From the party. There were glasses and plates and all that stuff that had been left that I had not been able to address and to put things away. And I collapsed again. And I, and I remember feeling like at this point my body was like, I, I could barely stand on my feet and I collapsed again. And so she called the ambulance and the ambulance came and took me to the hospital. And when I got, got to the hospital, of course I was unconscious. I just remembered that I came to with a doctor who had my eyelid kind of forced up and he was looking inside my eye with a flashlight. And I remember him saying, stroke, get her to CT stat. Like, so they wanted to do a CT scan or some sort of imaging to see what was happening. And so that's what happened. That was my, that was my stroke. That's how, that's when I found out that what had actually happened was a stroke.

So you went to the CT, you came back, and who was it that broke the news to you?

That's when it was, when they, when he pushed my eyelid up and he was looking in, I guess based on whatever what he saw, he said stroke. So I remember that word. It hit me so hard because, and it took me a long time, it felt like a long time in the hospital to actually accept that. Like, stroke? What are you talking? Like, that's so severe. Like, he's joking. They're making a mistake. This is why they're doing tests. I was kind of even in my mind making excuses. I'm like, of course they have to do tests because he's probably wrong. The hell? Stroke? Like, I'm 35 years old. Where is he coming up with this nonsense from? And then of course, and the, the The picture on the COVID of my book is actually my brain on your CT. So you could tell that it's a stroke. Yeah.

Yeah. So what did they tell you about the stroke? Where was it? How did it affect you? What were your deficits when you woke up?

I worked with a very amazing neurologist and I chased to find her because she was, she was just a doctor in the hospital at the time. But I wish that I could've continued to work with her afterwards. She was so wonderful. The rest of the medical team, they were very robotic in the way they did things. They were rushed. And I think that's one thing that I needed, just like a calmer approach.

What made her wonderful?

Her demeanor, her calm approach, and she talked to me as a person, not as a number or just another patient in the hospital that you do things to. She was so calm and centered. So the stroke happened here on the left side in my sort of like near the temple, as you could see on the COVID of book, the picture. But I remember when I went for one of my appointments, one of the doctors who was the lead doctor in that department there, his first name was Andre, and he did tell me in one of my appointments, he goes, if this would have been just a millimeter over, you would not be able to walk. You would be severely disabled. Anyways, so it affected my speech center. So that speech aphasia that I had when I was telling you that I couldn't even understand what my family was saying, then I couldn't bring words. I couldn't put sentences together. The words came to me in a way that intuitively I knew it didn't make sense, but I couldn't verbalize them. So that's called speech aphasia.

I think it's interesting that you had primarily speech deficits at a time when you were having such marital stress and discord, because of course that's all about not feeling heard, maybe not being able to, or feeling like you know how to vocalize your emotions. And a lot of women I speak to whose and I've had patients where their, their illness actually disappeared after a divorce or a breakup. So I really believe that, you know, the, the drama within a relationship can cascade out into illness. I'm not trying to blame your husband, by the way, just saying this has been my experience. And I think it's, it's fascinating how that mind-body connection works and exists in a way that the neurologists never talk about.

Yes. And, and I think that fundamentally, so I know that a lot of people take the medical route to heal. However, just Injustice to what you just said about the relationship aspect, and granted, we were young, obviously, that was, we were both younger at that time, but the approach for us was that I was trying to express how I was feeling and the, my unhappiness or how I was feeling in the relationship within the limits of our marriage. And my husband would say things like, 'Just let it go.' And I was trying to express that I'm hurting. I can't just let it go. It needs to be addressed. It needs to come to full closure. It needs to be— I need to be heard and understood. And we never had that because we were butting heads between I need to be heard and I need this, this, this hurt of what happened to go away and his 'just let it go, just let it go.' Oh, so one of the things that this doctor, this neurologist did, she took a pen out of her pocket and she said, Simone, what's this? And I could feel the word on the edge of my mind. I knew that it was a pen. I knew what it looked like, like my mind was kind of going a thousand miles a minute over, you know, that it's a pen, that it's used for writing, that it's, it had, it looked like it had blue ink, but I couldn't get the word. And it was just a single 3-letter word. I couldn't get it out of my, my mouth to just say say, that's a pen. So she would, she went through a series of this, like, what's this? This is a pen, this paper, so on and so forth. And I couldn't verbalize it. And then I remember my friend, after the doctor left, she said, let's just make a list of words that we could see, you could practice. And so that's how I knew. And then afterwards I did a whole bunch of speech therapy.

How did you feel in the hospital? How did it affect your mindset?

I was terrified. First and foremost, one thought that taunted me the most is that hospitals are where people die and there's a morgue in the hospital. So I thought most people, and I was trying desperately to pull out of my mind if I knew, if, or if I had seen statistics, people die in the hospital. How many people die from stroke? What if I die? What if I have another stroke? What if I die here? And I wanted so desperately quiet and calm so that I could, number one, think and be able to rest. None of which I had because in hospital settings you have a lot of people who are scurrying around. So just that energy was so disruptive.

It's a horrible energy. They're some of the least healing places in the world.

Yes. And I was constantly being poked and prodded. One of the biggest things that I have with the medical approach is that it's assumed that you'd be okay with that. But for me, I wanted to at least know, like, what's in that bag you're putting in my body, or what's in that injection. I was getting, they were giving me this subcutaneous little injection in my abdomen. Heparin, which was so painful with this tiny little needle, but it was the most—

Heparin?

Yes. And it was so painful.

Yes.

And were you able to walk? Uh, I was, they, I guess I was because I was going to the washroom, but they wouldn't let me get up.

Ironically, we give heparin subcutaneously to patients in the hospital to prevent deep venous thrombosis from immobilization. But of course then there won't be enough staff to get patients mobilized because if you just take a walk around the hospital floor It reduces your risk of deep venous thrombosis by the same proportion. This is just this nonsense of, well, the patient has a disease, we're going to give them the drug medication instead of actually staff the hospital appropriately so that we can mobilize the patients or use— there's also things called sequential compression devices that, that prevent that. Good hospitals, good doctors will actually take the time to not force the heparin on patients. And people who are under the gun and don't have adequate staffing in their hospital will just go through the the checklist and just say, throw it in there. We don't want them to get a DBT, which is, you know, it's sad that hospitals are run that way, but that's where the hospital administrators and the goons who run our healthcare system from Washington, DC have pushed it. I mean, obviously it's different because you're in Canada, but—

Well, clearly not. They did that too.

I mean, it's, it's just a different city, right? But the DC bureaucrats are not running your Canadian healthcare.

I would say that the Canadian healthcare probably fundamentally is run in the same way because because there wasn't consent.

That's what I, I agree. I agree. Yeah.

No consent, no informed anything. Post-stroke, when I came home and I started doing research, 'cause I wasn't even allowed to go back to work, that was a liability and a very high risk. I saw that what they had given me and the medications they had put me on was exactly the same that they were giving to these, let's say, overweight, hypertensive, 60-year-olds, women, let's, let's say, like we're even gonna put a gender into it. And I thought to myself, just from a common sense perspective, it just doesn't add up that would treat me in the same way that they treat those people, given the fact that we have different physical attributes.

So question for you, what was the story that you received from them regarding why you were sick? Did they have an explanation? You had a stroke because—

No, that's why I struggled a lot with that. And I was very frustrated that they weren't able to give me straight answers.

Did you push them? And what happened when you did push them?

They pushed back, which is typical. They, and what they concentrated on and focused on was discussions around the approach and the protocol they used. So they would say, you have to take this medication because if you don't, you're high risk of a second one happening. So basically they were using statistical data from, let's say, these hypertensive, overweight, older women, and they had been at higher risk given their risk factors, being hypertensive, being overweight, smokers, so on and so forth. And they projected that onto me. So they were saying to me that if I don't do X, Y, and Z, I'm gonna have another stroke for sure.

So what inside of you led you to say your model doesn't fit my problem? Your map and your directions are not the way for me to regain my wellness.

Okay. So when I came home and I was very lucid and like I was telling you, when I had that interaction with that doctor, that wonderful doctor in the hospital, my mind was, it felt like my mind, which is a non-tangible thing, was fully intact. So my mind was working just fine. It was just my brain wasn't working. Very different entities. So I was able to do a lot of research when I came home. I wasn't allowed to work, so I had a lot of time on my hands. So I went on a deep dive to see things. So I, I was looking at, let's say, what are natural blood thinners? Because they had me on blood thinners. They put me on Coumadin. They told me that I had to take this baby aspirin, that 81mg one that everybody's put on, which is exactly what I was telling everybody. Everybody was on those things because that was the standard of care. And then I realized, you mean the say that cayenne pepper and turmeric is actually gonna be able to give me the same effect with no side effects? Why didn't they tell me this? So I got mad. I'm like, you guys didn't tell me the whole story. You could have said we could do this, or why don't you go talk to a dietitian or a nutritionist and let's see what else, what other tools we could put in place. So I got very upset that I felt like I was duped or that they withheld information that they should have rightfully told me, which is why I'm a big believer in That's why I, I have such high regard for your work because you put it all there to say we could do this or we could do this. It's your choice and give me the choice. And to go back to what you were asking me about the hospital, there's no fresh air, which is one of the number one things that we need for health. There's no sunshine. Another thing that you need for at least for vitamin D, which is great for your immune system. There's no rest. Sleep is so important. That's when the body does a lot of detoxification and repair work. So I had none of that. So three of these major factors were taken away and then there was no support. It was just, like I said, a team of scurrying people that were overworked and burnt out that were just going through the process of poking me with needles, taking my blood, giving me my IVs, that subcutaneous shot, and that's it. They were just doing their jobs. Never once was I asked, how are you doing? How are you feeling?

I think it's very funny that you mentioned some of those things very specifically because William Osler, Osler, one of the great— he's actually Canadian. Osler was Canadian, but he moved to the United States. Do you know Osler?

It's so funny you say that because the hospital I was at was part of a group, and there is a hospital in Canada that's called the Osler, like William Osler.

Yeah, so Osler was one of the great American— I mean, American, Canadian-American. We poached him. He became the, the founder of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

No way!

I know. And he had this to say. He said patients should have rest, food, fresh air, and exercise, the quadrangle of health. And it's just such a sad, sad commentary on modern medicine that people like Osler are quoted in the hospital to this day. I find it deeply ironic they never quote that quote there, and they quote the most, I think, boring quotes from him. Same thing with Hippocrates. Hippocrates said things like, walking is a man's best medicine. Sometimes to do nothing is a good remedy. Illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue. They're the consequence of small daily sins against nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illnesses suddenly appear. Before you try to heal someone, ask them if they're willing to give up what's making them sick. You know, the greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it. All of these incredible sentiments that are all in the same vein. And what I find remarkable is how much Osler rhymes with Hippocrates. And great physicians, I think, all have this similar mindset and philosophy. And they're lionized as the greats, the founders of medicine and great institutions. And then they're completely ignored by the people who are technically their— what's the word I'm looking for—

their successors, their predecessors. Yeah, they never— and that, that's exactly how it was there. It was a regurgitation repetition of things they learned from textbooks in schools. And they never once actually even considered the human connection and how absolutely important that is. Except for that one neurologist that I told you, that's why I chased to find her after I came outta the hospital.

Yep. The few and far between.

Yes.

So you left the hospital, you started doing your own research. Now what I'm really curious about is you started doing your own research because I'm sure a little voice inside your head said there's gotta be more to it than this. Is that fair?

Yes and no. But I will say this, when I came outta the hospital, I was following the protocol they had me on, even though intuitively I felt that it wasn't good. And I was already kind of like, there was this just deep desire for me to, I just wanted fresh air and I wanted sunshine, but I was stuck there because I'm like, this is how you treat strokes. So when I came out and I started doing my research, I was actually on their protocols. I was obediently taking all the drugs they had put me on, but I could see that I'm like, I'm feeling really bad. I was not getting better. The only thing that was getting better was I was doing my speech therapy And that I was improving where that was concerned and I was very happy. So I took the optimism from that. I'm like, oh my God, I'm doing better. But I was ignoring. And then one day I realized physically I feel like crap. I feel terrible. I can't sleep. I couldn't eat properly. All the side effects of the medications were taking their toll on me. And then of course, when I went to the doctor, they wanted to put me on antidepressants or antipsychotics.

Because you're depressed. Depressed.

To what?

Feeling this way because you're depressed.

So yeah, yeah, so it's like, just let's just throw another medication at her instead of say, girl, go, go for a walk outside or something.

So terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible.

So that's what kind of led me, and then one day I just, I just sort of, I guess I reached my limit and I'm like, I'm done. Like, ever since this whole thing started, you guys fearmongered me. You guys didn't let me have access to sunshine or anything. You guys never once treated me like I'm a human being or that I have thoughts feelings, fear, anything to even speak to me like I'm a person. You guys were constantly pressuring me to continue my medication, to keep coming for tests that were just, we were going in a loop like, oh, okay, well, yeah, you still have to take this and you still have to take, we should try this. So yeah, so I just got mad and I'm like, there's gotta be a better way. There's just gotta be a better way. So I told you when I started looking that there were blood thinners that, or that there are foods that have blood thinning medicinal properties. I'm like, oh, Oh, well, in that case, and there's no side effects, well, let me try this. So I started to integrate these kind of things and I could see it. I'm like, oh my God, I'm feeling so much better. I started sleeping better. I started feeling more energy. My mood lifted.

But there's no evidence, Simone, that any of that stuff that worked for you works. Don't you know that?

I know I'm no evidence of any such thing.

Well, the trouble with the way that they practice is they say, well, there's no evidence. And we say, well, that's because no one is able to monetize sunshine and long walks on the beach. Are, they're mostly still free. And so, you know, until someone's able to make a fortune off of that, and then you'll see ads, come take a long walk on the beach. It's very expensive.

When Dr. Leland Stillman— if I would have even known about like fasting back then.

I know, I know. And I don't think people realize it's extremely hard to do those kinds of studies because you can't blind them. You know, think about it, right? With the drugs, they're like, well, it has to be a double-blinded trial. Okay, great. How are we going to blind people to take walks? What are we going to gonna do? We're gonna blindfold them. Some of you are going for a walk on a treadmill. Some of you are going for a walk. These are actually very similar. So it just becomes pointless. And the question is just always, how do we get the patient better? And, and there's such a lack of appreciation for what we call the fundamentals or the essentials of the practice that, you know, we really double and triple down on because we see that when people don't do these basic fundamental things, whether it's wiggling your toes in the grass or taking a walk on the beach or eating healthy food or getting sunlight in you buy first thing in the morning. There's probably over 100 of them that we really screen for and that we recommend, and then we specifically tell people to do. But when they do them, it's like setting the foundation right for building, and everything you, you do on top of that really rests upon it. And we had an interesting experience where we had Amy offer people hair tissue mineral analysis and supplementation protocols without coaching. So it was just, hey, you got a test, here's your protocol, here are your supplements, drop ship them to them. And then we had coaching plus HTMA and nutritional supplementation, and we got much better results with both. And of course we would see people coming in who'd already done the coaching with us or someone else, and they needed the supplementation plus a little bit of coaching because it's always needed somewhere along the line. And that's when we would like unlock people's results. I'm reminded for some reason of Meredith Oaks' podcast with me where she learned a lot of like the quantum biology, quantum health hacks, habits, whatever you want to call them for wellness. They got her 50% of the way to where she wanted to be therapeutically. And then she came in to work with us and she had personalized tailored supplementation protocols and also mercury amalgam removal. And mercury amalgams are really toxic, which is something that is increasingly talked about in the integrative health world. It's still, it's still not widely accepted. Affected their role in causing disease. But I have to say that some of the toughest cases in my practice are people with a lot of mercury, and we'll struggle to get them results until that mercury is out and their body's dumped a certain amount of their total toxic burden. I just had a patient who had some of her amalgams out, and she finally made some progress with her blood pressure after over a year of us battling to try and get it down without drugs.

This is one of the things that I learned overarching from my experience, is that the medical industry is so apt to add things, and they're not necessarily what the body or as the integrative and the holistic approach is to actually remove the things that have been added to the body that actually are obstructions to the flow of health. And this is why I'm so outspoken, and this is why I speak against the use of, especially the use of pharmaceuticals, because they actually impede the body to be able to carry out its functions in the way that it's been encoded and programmed to. So when you have these chemical synthetic things that you bring into the body and the body now has to shift to accommodate that. And you're taking the body out of balance and you're not able to get it to function properly. Organs don't function the same. They have to accommodate this. And, and that's why we have what they call side effects. You see it. There is an effect on the body that what it's not flowing the way it was in the absence of this. You added this. So I'm so happy that you said that because obviously like removing the amalgams obviously now stops the flow of this heavy metal doing damage to the body. And then afterwards, once you remove it all by detox, now you're going to be able to restore that— the function of the, the organ or the system back to how it's supposed to be actually running.

It's so funny, now that we're on the topic of Osler, I have— you're reminding me of more quotes from him. He said, the person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine.

Wow, that's so profound.

I know. And he said, one of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicines. Oh my God, you know, when you actually read the quotes of great physicians and you look at what's happened in modern medicine, you think, how did you guys lose the plot this badly?

No kidding.

I mean, you guys are, you know, did you bother to read these people and think about what they said? And the answer is they did not. They just pick and choose their quotes to justify whatever it is they're doing. And yes, Leland Stillman's to these ideals.

For me, when I hear you say things like that and I think of the medical industry is basically they ignore any of the very things, ironically, that they want us to trust. They want us to trust their studies, but why don't you trust what other doctors? And this is what I say to a lot of people, 'cause a lot of people are like, well, show us the studies. And I'm like, if let's say Dr. Stillman or Dr. McCullough or Dr. Malone is saying this, they're all educated in the same institutions. They went to the same medical schools like all doctors. Why don't you tell me why you think these doctors who are equally trained, equally educated, why are they saying different than the rest? Like, let's talk about that instead. Let, let's put aside the studies and let's, let's say, why is Dr. Stillman, who went to a, you know, reputable medical school and had to pass exams and is board certified, why would he say that sunshine is good? Tell me that. And nobody can ever answer those questions.

So you, you went home, you did your own research, you started to try things and what happened?

So I started to see really good positive results and I started feeling amazing. At least I could say physically because obviously the situation with my marriage was not being addressed. That was still there, but obviously this was such a significant and such a big event, medical event that, and this is usually what happens, you kind of like put all your attention and pour all of your energy in taking care of what's sort of front and center and acute, right? So I took that and I said, okay, like I have to heal my brain because I had to be able to function. I had to go back to work. I had to obviously to be able to physically function in the world. So I put a lot of effort into that. And then, yeah, so what I did when I saw that I had such positive results from the approaches of nutrition, I started, I went on and I eliminated everything that I was eating. So me and my friend went on this raw diet where we were just giving the, the body nutrients. So a lot of fruits and a lot of vegetables and smoothies and salads, like very high enzymes, clean organic, and from that, so obviously it gave my body a chance to detox. Like I just went, my health went exponentially better, exponentially. So then I thought, oh my God, this is it. So shortly thereafter I enrolled in school. So I went to nutrition school and I want to, to mention this because I know that a lot of the schools that teach these healing arts are suppressed and discredited. So it was really difficult, but I went to school and this school, everybody that was teaching there were naturopathic doctors or doctors that were practicing these other modalities of healing and acupuncture. And I learned so much when I realized that food pairing or food combining was a thing. And I started applying it to myself. I'm like, wow. So that, you know, don't mix this with this. And I started to see how much more energy I gained because I was able to liberate a lot of the energy the body uses to digest. So when you pair foods properly, You're actually helping the body digest much easier. So it doesn't take as much work on the body. So all of a sudden I had more energy. That was my first school that I attended. And then I came to Florida and I studied, I studied with Dr. Leland Stillman. He's a master herbalist and a naturopathic doctor. He actually worked in a lot of ERs and he had sort of like you, he had the modality of like he understood the medical approach, but he integrated a lot of the holistic and natural approaches with the patients. He's much older now, so he obviously doesn't practice that anymore. But what I— so he taught me detoxification. So I learned about how to detoxify the body. So I put a lot of that into my own healing because I wanted to take out all the chemical residues of the medications that I was on. I was on a lot of IVs when I was in the hospital. A lot of the contrast dyes that they used to be able to do all the tests for my brain and my circulatory system, because of course they were doing it like even in my legs and my jugular veins. And then I went On my dad was diagnosed with cancer shortly thereafter, so I went to school to study holistic cancer therapies, which is one of the things that I practice now. And being able to have access to all of these different modalities in schools, I'm able to see that foundationally, and I'm sure you probably agree with, with me on this, but if not, please correct me. Foundationally, it shows that when you remove what's obstructing the, the flow of health to the body and you obstruct the body's natural rhythms and abilities to function in the way that it's been programmed to function, you actually heal.

It's critical.

And whether it's for cancer, whether it's stroke, whether it's whatever it is, fundamentally that, that is what, what has to happen with certain tools being put in place depending on the system and on the organs.

And so you made a full recovery?

I made a full recovery.

How long did it take?

I would say that that happened over maybe 3 3-year timeframe.

You still had deficits at 3 years?

Well, because I was trying to detox and I, yes, I could feel some of the effects. I have to say that even to this day, there are still moments if I get stressed, I still feel certain slips of my speech. I'm like, what is that word? And it brings me back to that moment when it's like, what is this? And it's a pain.

Well, that's funny though, because I mean, how do you know that's not just aging?

I don't know that. Does that happen? Like, I mean, obviously this is the first time I'm this old as I am right now. Is that something that happened.

You've never been as old as you are now. You never will be again. That's very consistently one of the things that gets people to finally get off the fence and take action is I don't remember things the way I did. And these are even healthy people. And some of it is just a matter of, you know, you're used to being as young and as fast as you were. These are sort of like doctor's lounge jokes. You know, nobody gets out of this alive. What are you doing today, Dr. Stillman? I'm delaying the inevitable, right? Doctors have sort of a dark sense of humor because, you know, at the end of the day, All of the patients will die. You can't just say, well, it's aging. We're just getting older. We're just breaking down. You have to do everything that you can and that the patient's willing to do to optimize everything, right? And then there's a simple reality, as you understood from your experience with the stroke. You can only drive your car as hot and as fast as you can for as long as you can before you need to stop and make some repairs. I often talk about a concept called repair deficit, particularly in the context of autoimmunity, which we deal with predominantly at the practice, but stroke is very much repair deficit. And if you look at the fundamental underlying pathology of stroke, it's all about the same mechanisms. And I'm very passionate about it. As you may know, my son had deprivation of oxygen at birth, and so he's going through recovering his brain and all of the same tools, generally speaking, work. All the same principles apply. You're in a position with whenever you've had an injury of asking, well, is it the injury that we haven't fully healed? Or is it aging? And this is a new or evolving process. And you, at the end of the day, it becomes academic. It's all about what are we going to do? What are we going to change? What are we going to remove that's obstructing healing? What are we going to add that's going to speed healing along? And then is the patient willing to do that? Because at a certain point you do get lost on the therapeutic treadmill of, you know, I really don't feel like doing another biohack or another supplement or another whatever today. That's that.

This is my approach whenever I talk people also get to learn your own body.

Mm.

And the feedback that it's amazing because I was so attuned to it. And I have to admit, before the stroke, I was not as attuned to my body because I was so focused on the external factors, like the running, the working out.

You didn't talk about this, but the way you talk about your relationship with yourself, there were a lot of toxic traits traits there that end up being instilled in people by toxic people, narcissists, psychopaths. I'm not saying that those are the people who instilled them in you, but these toxic behaviors sort of emanate from those people and they sort of infect other people with them. And I mentioned that because one of the key things that you'll notice in people who've, who've been around a lot of psychopaths and narcissists is that they don't— they cut themselves off from their emotions because they're so painful, because these people are abusive. And they tend to focus on the external. They focus on how they look, how they appear to others, the car, the motorcycle, the job, the house, the PR, whatever it is. And a lot of people, their journey is as much about getting to know who they really truly are and how their body works and getting in touch with their emotions. And I now view our emotions as very much our compass. Not that they're unerring. You have to understand what the compass is trying to tell you, right? Because I mean, a kid can be angry and frustrated and throw a fit. Their compass is not telling them to throw a fit. And then helping them to grow up, so to speak, and become a mature adult is helping them to understand, well, why do I feel this way? What does it say about how other people are treating me, how my environment is affecting me, and how can I talk to other people, communicate with other people to get my needs met and avoid, you know, the outcomes that are causing me to feel this way? And we, we do end up talking to patients about that, not immediately or directly, but along the way, because if their toxic personality traits or personal behaviors or relationship with themselves, if it stops them from bringing in what they need to get healthy or getting rid of what is preventing them from getting healthy, then it becomes the constraint to getting them well. And on that note, any last thoughts for people?

What you just said is so fundamental because yes, so the Type A personality, and I was one of those, and I think the medical world very much emphasizes that and reinforces enhances it and confirms it and validates it for people because their approach is also very external and there's no inclination towards going inwards and addressing emotional wounds and things like that. But I, I was able to really get to know my body, especially because when you sit in a hospital, if you want to look at the silver lining in it, I was alone with my thoughts a lot and I was able to really tune into my body to be able to, to focus on the feedback that I was receiving. And now I know how my body reacts to stress. So it's very sensitive to stress. Now I'm able to, whenever I feel the stress coming on from whatever it may be, I'm able to mitigate it immediately rather than just wait until the worst happens, the catastrophic event happens. And a lot of times we are a product of all of our wounds. And I externalized everything in my desire to be loved and accepted for all the good things that I can do outside of myself. So if I'm gonna be able to be a, do a PR or run a faster mile, people are gonna like me more, which do you think anybody cares that I run a faster mile or I have a PR? Maybe it's just like they applaud you like in a fleeting moment and then it's gone and you still carry the wound and the pain. So it's fundamental that we address those factors as part of a holistic, which is why that word even exists. You have to look at yourself as the whole person, your emotions, your physical, your mental, all of you as a whole person, which is what I so desperately wanted from the medical world, to see me as a person, a whole person, not just a body.

Couldn't agree more.

Yes. Thank you so much. I really wanted to highlight to everybody who's going to be listening, thank you so much for what you do. I mean, obviously, from my horrible experience in the medical world with this significant medical event, I just want to really empower people to always go and find doctors like you because you're able to bring in what is medically needed, but in conjunction with the holistic and integrative approaches that are absolutely necessary to the healing path. So it's amazing that we have the privilege of having access to both, but people need to be discerning. So I empower people people to discern between what some doctors want them to do, which is strictly pharmaceutical-based, and what other doctors like yourself want people to do, which is let's take all tools and apply them to you and how it fits you best, because the outcome is always to heal you, not to sell a pharmaceutical.

Couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's great to see you. How could people get in touch with you if they would like to engage with your services or read your book?

Yes, absolutely. So my book is on Amazon, on, in all marketplaces, And I am most active on Instagram. My handle is Simone.Gisondi. I have a pretty good following. I follow holistic and integrative approaches and I put together custom-made protocols for people, which I saw that has the best outcomes and as it did for me and for my current patients and clients. And my website, SimoneGisondi.com.

Thank you again for joining me. Take care, everyone. We'll see you in the next episode.