The Hidden Power of Minerals: How HTMA Can Transform Your Health 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 with Clark Engelbert and Amy Arp. We are having our last Q&A for our current round of HTMA Secrets, which if you don't know, we run a course, it's called HTMA Secrets. It is enrolling now. StillmanWellness.com, sign up for the email newsletter. Amy is sending out emails for enrollments as we speak.

I'll put the link in the, the chat.

Great, great. Not quite as we speak, he's here, but, um, soon and ongoing until enrollment wraps up, probably next week. Yeah, uh, we're going to be skipping Labor Day, but then our Q&As will start up the next week, 2 o'clock Eastern time on Mondays for 12 weeks. And what we do in the course is we go over HTMAs and we explain the patterns that we see and we dispel a lot of the myths confusion, noise that we see out there in the space. Because good Lord in heaven, there is a lot of confusion about this test, what it is, what it's about, what its power is. And we might as well talk— start there for today's talk, because we'll be going through about 20 minutes of conversation about what the test is and why it matters, and then we're going to jump into questions from the members of our current, uh, program.

Mm-hmm.

But, you know, Clark, this has come up in conversation for me the last couple weeks. Just the other day I was sitting down with a colleague who, you know, is doing functional medicine, and he said, you know, I just took this great course in basically blood testing analysis, and it was really helpful. I'm now using it in my practice. And he talked about the hair testing, and he said, well, it's not reliable, and it's It doesn't basically mean anything. And yeah, we see this all the time. Here is the thing about hair testing that I want people to know if they've never heard of it before. 99% of people who've ever looked into this and, and talk about it do not get into the depth or detail necessary to get the true value out of the test, right? Like somebody saying I tried driving a Porsche and it didn't work for me. Well, is that because you got into the Porsche and you're used to driving a Prius? Because I know that I've driven a Prius. I've never driven a Porsche actually, but I imagine that the pickup's a little different. And you know, there are cars that I've driven where I'm like, wow, there's actually more— this picks up so fast, it's actually kind of hard for me to drive. And that's the thing about HCM, you have to really get into understanding the patterns and analyzing them if you're going to actually get value out of the test? Clark, I know you have a lot of thoughts on this topic.

Yeah. There's a lot of variables that we have to consider when we're assessing a hair analysis that sort of speaks to the depth that you're talking about where a lot of people even in the space using the test have not gone into the depth that we have and the others that came before us that really paved the way and laid the foundation for Mineral balancing, which is essentially this from people in our course who would come in and say, I trained with so-and-so, and we would ask them, did they get into this level of detail?

No, never. What did they teach you? And they taught them what is replacement therapy, which we'll talk about in a minute, right?

I mean, it even starts before that. It starts with just the sampling procedure, right? If you take the hair sample in an improper way, that can totally skew results. If you send it to a lab that washes the hair, uh, with heavy solvents and detergents, that can skew the results. I think another big aspect of this, which is we haven't touched on as much, but there aren't really well-accepted ideal values across laboratories and across different research groups for what is ideal. And, part of the challenge with this is that with the hair, the minerals vary so much more than they do in the blood. So, the variance is way, way higher because it's a tissue compartment. Things really can't go too askew in the blood without there being a serious problem immediately. In the hair, there's very high variance with the mineral values. So, determining ideals and quality ranges is very difficult. We follow the approach that Dr. Paul Ek sort of laid out in the '70s, '80s, '90s. Oh, glorious.

Tell the story of Ek. It's a great story.

Yeah. So, he was a biochemist, a research biochemist, and he had sort of picked up on some early research in hair analysis which started in the '50s and '60s. And, he started to become aware of this test in the '70s and he started to basically just test a bunch of people using this test, this new test. He didn't know what he was doing. He had no idea how to interpret it correctly. But he basically figured out on his own after combining a bunch of other scientists' theories together that you could use the hair test for the purpose of mineral balancing and to do a stress analysis on the body because that's essentially what we're using this hair test for, especially the first 4 elements. We can use those first 4 elements and the balance of those elements and the ratios thereof to track the phases of the stress response as laid out by Hans Selye in his stress theory of disease. So, there's a lot of layers to this. Not only is the interpretation approach vastly different, but we have to nail down these variables like the sampling procedure, the analytical technique at the lab, what you wash the hair with at the lab as well. If you're washing with acetone or acetate, really heavy solvent detergent.

Also, what you wash your hair with at home because things like water softeners will throw this off. Selsun Blue will make your selenium levels just wildly elevated.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, there's a lot of minefields in this. And so, a lot of people throw up their hands and they go, "Well, there's too much complexity. There's too much— it's too many variables, uninterpretable." It is actually interpretable. And, when you use it with this or through this mineral balancing lens for the purpose of mineral balancing and with the understanding of how these elements interact with each other, that's really where Ek took this, um, it's seeing thousands of people and doing thousands of tests.

And that's the thing, is that it seems uninterpretable at first, but here's the thing that naturally happens if you start testing the hair for anything: you make the mistake of thinking that because something is low in the hair, it is low in the body, and because it's high in the hair, it's high in the body. And that's not true. This— I explain this to people because you have to understand that the hair is an expression of yourself. You literally express this from your skin, and that means that if your body doesn't have enough energy to express the minerals into the hair, it is not going to do that. And so what you'll very consistently see is high levels of things in the blood that are not getting out into the hair, like iron, and vice versa. You'll see just very strange patterns in the blood versus the hair, and that's part of why it confuses people. But then if you do enough work, and then you also supplement people based on replacement therapy, which is what we don't do and what doesn't work in long— in the long run for people, but works often for people for 3 to 6 months. I've seen over and over again. Um, what will happen is if you give someone replacement therapy, let's say you give them tons and tons of zinc, you'll see the sodium level go down. And that's what Ek figured out by trial and error, early pine— other early pioneers. And that's where You know, people, and you do enough tests, and you give enough supplement protocols, you figure out, oh, we give this and it deranges that. We give that and we— it deranges this. Mm-hmm. And then you can actually start to really make some conclusions about what happens in the test because the thing about the hair is that— is it complicated? Yes, 'cause it comes down to all your hormones because those have effects on your hair follicle. It comes down to nutrients coming in. That has effects on the hair follicle. It comes down to toxins and endocrine disrupting chemicals and all these things in life. That we can't quantify, but they all show up in the hair in a different way. And it might not mean that I can say, well, you've got a low potassium level because you are an anxious nervous Nelly who never eats potatoes. But I can come up with, okay, well, you got a low potassium level, you got all these other levels. Here's what we do to help you feel and function better. And then lo and behold, you see that as you do this over and over and over again— and I've been doing this now for over a year, you've been doing it for 10 years, right, Clark?

Yes.

You see that as people stick with the program and the protocol, which isn't just supplements, it's also a diet and a lifestyle change, that's very important. You cannot out-supplement a bad diet.

Mm.

What you'll see is that people's levels tend to come into balance and they tend to come up or down into the ideal ranges.

Mm-hmm.

So mine a year ago were not as bad as others I've seen, but they were all over the place. And then they progressively come more and more into balance. As I've gone. And I see that with patients, you see it with clients, we see it with people. And that's the amazing thing about HTMA is we get this validation, but you're never gonna find the academicians in the ivory towers of, you know, our modern world looking at this because it's far too complex for their, their incredibly reductionistic minds.

And, and to that point, there was a review done a couple years ago, actually a little more than a couple years ago, like 2018, on the totality of the hair analysis literature. And, what this review found was that a lot of researchers, high-level researchers made the mistake of assuming that mineral deposition into the hair is uniform like it is in the blood. However, that's not true because it's a tissue test. And, if you take a hair sample from further out on the hair, 2 to 3 centimeters, and then you take a sample right at the scalp, what a lot of researchers assumed was that the mineral value should be the same regardless of where the tissue is sampled on the hair, which is completely untrue. And, a lot of this research, the academic pursuit of this has been confounded by this massive mistake that a lot of researchers have been making for the last 40 years. And so, there's a lot of conclusions and— a lot of acrimony in the literature and scientists going back and forth fighting about whether it's reliable, whether it's valid, whether it's reproducible. And yeah, the fact that even high-level researchers have made this basic mistake highlights, you know, you really have to be on point with all of these different variables that you keep in check so that you can be sure to get reproducible, valid, and consistent readings.

Absolutely. And we see that all the time. And it's because frankly, I think that scientific research has very much become commoditized.

Mm-hmm.

A hundred years ago, Einstein made his reputation for his entire life on basically two or three papers.

Hmm.

And that was it. Now he obviously did a lot of important other work, but now people are being hired and fired in academia based on the number of papers they publish.

Right.

And this just is incentivizing the publishing of poorly thought out papers. And there's also a lot of politics in this. Like, I'm reading this great book right now, it's called Estrogen Matters, and it's a book about how basically the whole story about women's bioidentical hormones has been butchered because of complexities that are similar to this. Like, for example, they will often use progestins in hormone replacement. And then they'll say, oh well— and for those of you who don't know, we use hormone replacement to combat or resolve symptoms of menopause, right? Because when menopause is when women's hormones drop out and you can give them back and the hormones go or the symptoms go away. Very simple concept. But this has become confused because what will happen is, say you— then this is exactly what will happen in the studies— is instead of using the natural bioidentical progesterone and estrogen that women's bodies make, They will use or they will administer something like estrogens that are not made by the body or metabolites, the estriol, which, you know, I'm not gonna talk about here whether or not that's good or bad. It just is. But also progestins where they've changed the progesterone from its natural form to another form, which is not the same as the body's. And there's a lot of literature showing that these progestins are very harmful and should never be used clinically. But no one's ever substantiated that progesterone is bad. So people will say, oh, we did this study with estrogen and progestins to treat menopause, and the women did worse or had this complication or that complication or didn't get better. But that's not fair because it's not the same as the progesterone their body's made. So you see this all the time because medical literature— the medical literature has become commoditized. It's about how much can you publish and what high-impact journal can you get into, and there's a lot of money at stake. You know, and this is one of the things about— like, it was, it was very clear that back in the '90s and the early 2000s, there was just a coordinated attack on bioidentical hormones by people who realized that if these things took off, they would totally crush drug sales to menopausal women. Because if a menopausal woman has all the symptoms of menopause, it's like over a dozen problems that they wind up with. So they go to psychiatrist for their antidepressants, and they go to their urologist because they're having frequent urinary tract infections, and and then they go to, you know, the cardiologist because they're having palpitations, and then they go to their primary care doctor because they're having night sweats, and then they go on and on and on. But if they just go on bioidentical hormones, a lot of those problems will go away. Now, we are going to be talking about this one, Estrogen Matters, this book, and we're going to be talking about this book, Happy Healthy Hormones, on the podcast, stillmanmd.substack.com. You can listen anywhere the podcasts are hosted, like Spotify and Apple. I'm going to be interviewing Rosen Sweet, Dr. Rosen Sweet, who's the author of Happy Healthy Hormones, and I'm going to be going through the book Estrogen Matters with Amy to really unpack this. Sign up, tune in, stillmanmd.com or stillmanmd.substack.com. And that's next month. So anyway, back to the hair.

Yeah, yeah. So there's just, you know, if we can list out— I'll list out the variables that are really at play here that confuse a lot of people. Starts with taking the hair sample correctly, getting it from the scalp, getting it. And, and if you do want to do research, if you want to use it for research purposes, comparing, uh, similar samples to one another, right? Not taking hair from like very, uh, uh, at the end of the hair and comparing it to hair at the scalp. That's a huge mistake that researchers have made. So it starts there. Then at the lab, um, the analytical technique that they're using, atomic spectroscopy— and this is really getting in the weeds— the different types of analytical techniques that are used. I won't get into that and bore people to death, but that's an important variable as well. There are higher or more higher sensitivity techniques that are more useful. So, that's not standardized between the labs, right? So, that's very important as well. And then, whether or not you wash the hair at the lab with heavy solvents and detergents, washing the hair with acetone and acetate washes out the water-soluble elements, right? So, that's extremely important for our purposes because sodium and potassium are two of the most important readings that we can get on the test. So, those variables are very much at play, the hair sample, the analytical technique at the lab, are they washing the hair, are they not washing the hair with heavy solvents and detergents. And then, once you actually get the test, establishing those ideal ranges and those ideals. Right? That's a huge problem, I think. And we are of the opinion that Ek solved for this because the work that we're able to do is so good and so reproducible that his ideal ranges and values are pretty much right on. But then also, the last variable, probably one of the most important things, is this idea of how we're interpreting the test. So, it's really those 5 variables. That are— that lead people to a lot of confusion and to draw a lot of different conclusions about hair analysis and throw their hands up and go, "This is too much. We can't— we can't use this." So, but once you try it, I don't think you go back. Yeah.

It's too fun. It is.

It works too well. I mean, you guys see on my social media, I'm like a, you know, a total tyrant about this. I rarely bring in new modalities into my practice. I'm so passionate and on fire for mineral balancing because it works so well. And, I've never worked with anything that has been this reproducible and has worked this well across so many different people.

Ben: Yeah, I'm with you. And, I've told you this many times, but I came into this very warm to the idea that Avis had value because of past mentors who'd, yeah, indicated that it had value. But also because the protocols that I ended up landing on in the functional medicine world were very similar to these protocols. They were based on blood tests, and I came to the conclusion that that was just not— it was— can I still use blood labs? Yeah, I can, right? They're helpful, um, but Man, it's a different speed.

And when you— when we started talking, you had sort of been coming, I think, from the school of the replacement therapy a little bit.

Yeah, I, I, I think that's, um, I, I think if anything at this point what I've seen is that I will very, very rarely find someone— like, we just had this month a low copper in the blood in the practice.

Mm-hmm.

So that's gonna be a really interesting conversation. You know, what's going on in their gut? What are they eating? Are they not eating? Because usually what I find is that when someone's got a truly low copper in their blood, mm-hmm, and, and it's maybe 1 in 100 copper levels that we get is really low.

Mm-hmm.

There's something really wrong there. Mm-hmm. Um, so the replacement has a lot of value when the levels are truly low, right?

When there's an extreme deficiency state. If you have a goiter, you need to take more iodine, or if you have some clinically manifested symptoms, you need to. But this is definitely much more about Optima. And after you resolve the deficiency, what do you do then to deal with more chronic and longstanding problems? That's really where hair analysis and mineral balancing shines above all these other approaches.

Let's get into some of these questions here. Um, so one of the questions was actually kind of what you just— you were alluding to, but one person's asking, how long should I continue with Endomet supplements? So I know you both have had different time frames of that. I think this person has maybe been on them for about 10 months, but what would you recommend for people? How long should they be on the supplements?

Well, first of all, when someone says I've been on say like this brand of supplements, right? The key thing here is understanding that you are— I, I say that no physician treats a patient twice. They're not the same patient, they're not the same physician. And this is one of the big things that blows my mind. Somehow people get it into their heads that they need to take this supplement for the rest of their life, right? And that doesn't work. I cannot tell you how many people I've seen in the practice where they've been on the same supplements for 10, 15, 20 years. Maybe they've been different supplements, they're reinventing the wheel, but I look at them and I'm like, listen, like we had a case this summer, it was very sad to be frank. It was— she's taking a ton of copper in a supplement, wasn't even— it wasn't really a ton, it was, but it was, it was enough. And this is kind of the point, is it was enough that it drove her copper levels up to like the 170s in her blood. Which is extremely high, extremely high. Like, I've had hospitalized patients who were dumping copper that was that high, and they were out of their minds. And she was in a really bad way. And I look at the supplement protocol that she's on, and I'm like, this is not working for you and is clearly part of the problem right now, so we need to drop that. And anyway, so the point is, um, I don't recommend supplements for more than 3 to 4 months at a time, and You know, if someone says, look, I just can't do consultation every 3 to 4 months, I get that. That's where I would say, okay, really focus on your diet, and then when you can do supplementation and testing, then do that. But it's not wise to just keep taking supplements for long periods of time. Now, for me, I've been on mineral balancing now for a whole year, and before that I was doing other supplementation protocols that, as I mentioned, were similar. So to me, it's a question of how hard do you want to drive your car? Because what we find in the practice— the medical practice, that is— is that the people who don't see all their problems go away with mineral balancing are the ones who are the most stressed, and they find that the better their nutrition is and the more tailored their supplement protocol is, the more resilient they are. So they're not, you know, losing ground. They're at least maintaining what gains they've made, if they're not making small incremental gains every quarter. What I'll see with people who are able to reduce their stress and engage fully with a really healthy lifestyle, which is a whole nother— I mean, we cover this in the course in spades if people really want to find out more about it, and I encourage them to. Um, then they get really amazing results, and then it's a question of, well, how far do you want to take these results? And Clark can tell you that he's just had a whole summer of eliminating aluminum.

Whole year. This whole year I've been eliminated.

Eliminating aluminum, and he's been on this for 10 years. So there's a huge burden of metals in the body, right? How do you get them out? And you're gonna see that they continue to come out even after 10 months, let alone 10 years.

Yeah. And that, that sort of speaks to, well, okay, is the question about, well, how long do I need to do the program? How long do I need to do the supplements? I think, um, what we need to think about is what is the purpose of mineral balancing? The purpose is to basically eliminate your toxic metals. In my mind, This program is the most potent and safe heavy metal detoxification program on the planet by far. It's not even close. So, we know that metals are difficult to eliminate. You've been accumulating them for decades likely depending on how old you are. And so, it takes a little time to start to mobilize those really toxic elements. I think that most people should be on a program anywhere from 2 to 3 years. You know, with the, with the retesting every 3 to 4 months, if we're talking about ideally what, what you should be doing. Now, when I work with people and when we work with people, this is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure type of thing. If you want to be on it for a year, see what you can do in a year, that's, you know, there's no harm, no foul there. Um, but if you really want to get at the bulk of your metals that you've been accumulating, and that's another hard sell, I think, for some people because quantifying the heavy metal problem in each individual is very difficult to do, right? Much less the broader environment, which is— it's very difficult to do that. We have a lot of circumstantial evidence.

It's impossible. I mean, I said this yesterday on a call that we were on. I said, you know, if you were really going to figure out someone's total body burden, you'd have to do something like a bone biopsy.

Right, right. Exactly.

It's not a practical way to track where you're at. Now, actually, to be fair, I wasn't— it just occurred to me that you could also do things like provoked urine heavy metals testing.

But yeah, I've done that. I've done that.

Yeah. And I'm thinking about doing more of it in my practice. But then you get into this place of, well, you know, how much more money are we gonna spend on all this? And how often are we gonna do the provoked metals testing? And we always talk to people about, well, what's your goal? And the other thing we see is that maybe they achieve their goal. Like, I've had people come into testimonials with me and say, I'm 100% better. And then 3 or 6 months later they're right back where they were. And it's not that what we did didn't work, it's that they fell off the wagon. And almost always it's they didn't continue with the supplementation protocols. And it's not that when— and that's the thing about, about health and wellness is that, you know, we say that the absence— we say that health is not the absence of symptoms. And the truth is that you can be symptom-free and just about to break down, just like your car can be about to go through a serious catastrophe, right? And yet you're driving along like nothing's wrong. And that's why you don't— you know, you take your car to the oil change every so many thousands of miles, right? I mean, hopefully you don't show up after 3 or 4 years of driving it around and say, I don't know why it smells funny all of a sudden, right?

Right. Without having ever done any maintenance on it.

Yeah. So, so the answer is retesting is critical because you have to iterate the supplement protocol for best results. And you are not going to build resiliency without multiple rounds of, of, even though you may get out of your acute issue, you're going to have to be really careful about not sliding backwards.

And it's really, it's really also a question of like, how far do you want to take this? Because I've been doing this for a long period of time. Last couple of years I've been doing really, really well. This business of mine, Nutritional Analytics, has been doing really, really well. I could have stopped easily and just been content to just live my life and move forward and continue to do what I'm doing, but I've stayed on the protocol and have been eliminating a ton of aluminum this year. And, the level of mental clarity and the leaps in my cognition and these sorts of things have been even more impressive as I've gone on. So, I don't think a lot of people really are clued into how far they can take this and how deeply you can improve these things about your mental capacity and other things, your energy level because people are born with toxic metals and they don't know any different, right?

I notice how different I feel on and off the program. Yeah. And, I've tested it.

Same.

I'm sure that's subjective, but How do you want to feel? Do you want to feel your best or do you want to feel not your best?

And do you want to feel sort of at a level where you didn't even realize you could get to? That's really, I think, what we're talking about with mineral balancing. It's like, yes, you can feel great, but you can get to a level that, you know, maybe we improve your IQ by 20 points at the end of this, right? That's possible.

You heard it from Leland Stillman. You like dropping claims like that. 20 points?

How much, how much, how much lead and aluminum or in the brain?

A lot of people say, I couldn't think through how to go to the grocery store, and now I can do what I was, you know, doing in my professional life. So I've seen people come back from just amazing amounts of brain fog and fatigue. Yeah, but, uh, yeah, it's, it sounds— I mean, when you say it like that, it just sounds too good to be true, but then again, we have all the testimonials to prove it.

So, right. And I Agreed.

Okay, next question. Is there something we can do to make the Paramin easier to digest other than chewing it? I've noticed one that passed right through me. I tried chewing it, it tastes awful. I've also heard that calcium supplements are hard to digest. Are there any— all right, thoughts?

Crush it up with a mortar and pestle.

Number one though, hang on a minute. Yeah, if someone says that they're passing a whole pill, then my first question is What's going on in the stomach?

Hmm.

So we have to ask that question for obvious reasons. And then with that, it's a whole nother, you know, kettle of fish for how you deal with that if there's true low stomach acid. And then there's also the question of transit time, right? So there's a big difference between, you know, going to the bathroom or moving your bowels once a day and moving them 4 or 5 times a day. Your transit time. And you can calculate your— the simple test to check your transit time is you take, you know, 10 capsules of activated charcoal after a bowel movement, and then you watch and see when they come out because it's going to be dark black in your stool. And so, you know, you'll find a really wide range. Many people who think that they're not, uh, constipated are in fact taking 48 hours to move a bolus of food through their colon. So they might go to the bathroom every day, but they don't realize that that food is in the— it's in transit for 48 hours, not 24. It's not about how fast the cars go into the tunnel, it's about how fast they come out. So that's something to think about, and that's not something I can give you advice on on this webinar.

Yeah.

Clark?

Yeah, I mean, I think crushing, crushing up the pills in a mortar and pestle. You know, put it in a food that you like, you know, try to get it in. I mean, to me, these are minor concerns because what you stand to gain from this is so much, like, figure it out.

You know, that's the other thing though, is that I think they're changing the formulation now. They are, because this has been such a consistent complaint. Yeah, yeah. And it actually, to be honest with you, the fact that the company's been around since, what, the '70s, Clark? Yeah, and they're changing the pill size now. Actually makes me wonder if— because the truth is there's a non-zero proportion of people in my practice who can't take pills because of genuine medical issues with like their esophagus, their throat. It makes me think, wow, maybe this pressure on Endomet is from the fact that there's way more people now with these, you know, GI issues than have been in the past, which is sort of a sad comment on the state of the American public's health. That's part of why, I mean, this is our solution to that.

Right, right, right, right.

Yeah. That's interesting. Next question. Have you seen any particular mineral or metal patterns with chronically low DHEA? This is something I saw in my recent labs.

Yeah. So, well, I mean, I'll speak to this because I do get DHEA levels. Um, DHEA correlates inversely with cortisol. Particularly over long periods of time. So your cortisol goes high and your DHEA tends to go low. DHEA tends to get exhausted. So the more stress you're under, the more diseases you have, the more poorly nourished you are, the DHEA tends to eventually just tank.

Hmm.

And all your hormones can eventually tank if you're under enough stress and exhaustion and whatever. But as far as an actual pattern with DHEA, I haven't observed one Robustly, and that's partly because of the retracing phenomenon, which we cover in the course, which people should take, but because it's a fascinating issue and I— it's just too, it's too big of a concept to unpack here in the time that we have. But what you'll generally see is that you can expect people who have really terrible ex— I call them exhaustion patterns in the HTMA, 4 lows, 3 lows, sympathetic dominance, minerals across the board.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, particularly poor eliminators in general are gonna have lower DHEA levels, right? You would expect. Um, but then you get into the other side of that, which is that higher DHEA goes along with things like PCOS and insulin resistance, and that's because of altered metabolism and excretion.

Hmm.

So the answer is— the short answer is no. Um, but it doesn't mean that the DHEA doesn't matter. We do supplement that in the practice in people who have low levels.

Yeah, I was gonna say I haven't really tracked that in my practice for obvious reasons. I'm not a medical doctor, but you would expect that those burnout patterns and/or maybe extreme fast oxidation, something like that with really high cortisol would be inversely correlated with that, with the DHEA.

Next question. It's a big one. We'll see how much you want to answer it. Do you know why retracing happens? I'm curious why we would experience the symptoms in reverse chronological order of when we experience them.

So, yeah, I know you just said too big of a topic to unpack. Clark, take it away.

Yeah, I mean, I think, um, with retracing, in order to heal something, like, you have to go back through, um, whatever it was that you went through in order to heal it. And what a lot of— in a lot of cases what happens is that people's energy level is so low. Let's say if they go through a traumatic experience, they can't process that experience fully. So, it gets either repressed, suppressed, stored in your tissues out of your conscious awareness. In order to heal that, you have to take it from the chronic state of it being sort of in your body, right, not fully processed. You have to make it acute. In order to move through it and process it. It's sort of like with people walk around with latent infections that they don't fully process. And, that's another good way to think about this. You have to take those infections, raise the energy level. That's the key. As you raise the energy level with mineral balancing, you're taking these things which were chronic infections, PTSD-like events, heavy metals, you're taking them and the energy, the upregulation in your energetic systems that mineral balancing is causing is taking these things from a chronic state and making them acute so that they come up to your conscious level of awareness where you have these symptoms, memories, whatever that were associated with that. And that's how your body processes these things. So it's a matter of How does healing actually proceed? That's really, I think, what the question is. You have to go back through and give the body enough energy to process those things. And when you give it enough energy, you, you know, it comes up and you process it. But that's what the retracing process is essentially. It's going back through all of those things that you've been through in these different mineral patterns throughout the course of your life.

So number one, what is retracing? Let me define that quickly for people who may not know who are watching. So retracing is this phenomenon that you'll see where, uh, people who are going through genuine healing processes will feel emotions and they'll feel like they did at past times in their life. And let me give you a really clear example. Because I've had this happen now with many patients. They, uh, come to you with— let's call them— let's say they've got headaches, and you knock out the headaches, and all of a sudden they're feeling great, they're doing better. And then all of a sudden they've got allergies that they had— or haven't had, I should say— for 20 years. And they say, did Dr. Stillman cure my headaches only to make my allergies come back?

Well, Right.

Doctors, this is— here's the thing. Conventional medicine does not recognize this as a process because conventional medicine is not even trying in most cases to activate the natural healing force of the body to get well.

Right.

Conventional medicine has devolved into a game of pills and surgeries, right? Oh, your gallbladder is not working, we're going to take it out. Oh, your appendix blew, We're gonna just cut it out. Not that that's wrong, but that's all that is offered. The question is not asked, how do we activate the body's natural systems and energy systems? How do we nourish it? How do we, you know, bring up its, its natural innate potential to resolve illness? And the reason for this is very simple. When you cure patients, you lose customers. So if you put somebody on a drug that costs $1,000 a month, you have a $12,000 a year Patient. Boom. That's the whole pharmaceutical company business model, and they've been rapacious about this. And if you think this is a conspiracy theory or you think I'm not being fair to them, you just need to go read all of the books that have been written on this by editors of medical journals like Marcia Angel or Richard— I think it's Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ. He wrote The Problem or The Trouble with Medical Journals. Go listen to it or read it from pharmaceutical industry insiders. Anyway, so most doctors have no idea what, what this is, and they never run into it. And for this reason, most people, most members of the public have no idea either. And then because most functional and integrative medicine doesn't take this very root cause approach, most of them don't run into this either. The first people to run into this that I'm aware of were the homeopaths, and they called it— they came to codify it as Hering's Law. And they didn't use hair tests, obviously. At the time, but they codified as what's called Hering's Law, which is they said that illnesses proceed from outside of the body, the mucous membranes, the skin, to deeper and deeper and deeper into the body. And you do see that in real terms, right? So somebody shows up, they're, you know, over there, they're— maybe they've got skin rashes in their childhood, and then they start to gain weight and they get metabolic syndrome. They're adding adipose tissue in their subcutaneous fat. Then it goes deeper, they start to get kidney issues or heart issues or brain issues. Anyway, so illnesses do tend to do that. Um, it's not like the eczema is traveling into the subcutaneous fat, is then traveling into the heart or the brain or whatever. And that's part of why conventional medicine like doesn't get this. They're like, no, these are separate diseases with no root causes. Have fun taking medications for the rest of your life. The power's flickering here, by the way, just in case you guys notice. We're having a big thunderstorm, so if I cut out, that's why. Anyway, the homeopaths commented on this, and then we see it with hair tissue mineral analysis, which is why I sort of perked up when I started to hear that and think, wow, if we can do that with this, then it's got to be really good. And obviously all of that is, you know, medical heresy to the conventional mainstream, but we're here because that their model is totally broken and dysfunctional. So, right, right. And You know, why do you see that happening? I would say that as the body is properly nourished, it tries to resolve problems in order of its priority. And what's most pressing is what's most acute. And then as it resolves that, it goes back into these tissues where problems have been stored. And this is one of the things that you'll notice, like in conventional medicine, you suppress all the symptoms with drugs. It doesn't mean that the cellular process has been arrested. What will also tend to happen is diseases tend to burn out. They lose energy. They lose momentum. Uh, and that also means that disease processes or patterns change over time. So anyway, yeah, it's fascinating to see this happen and it's, it sounds totally spooky and woo-woo and out there, but then you have patients come back to you and they say, hey, you know, I haven't had abdominal pain in 20 years, or I haven't had I haven't had knee pain, or I haven't had this pain, or I haven't had this problem or that problem, and what's happening to me?

Right.

And the answer is your body is going back and is trying to now resolve this issue that it didn't— you didn't resolve that issue 20 or 30 years ago.

It was suppressed.

It was suppressed because your body didn't have the energy to deal with the problem.

Exactly.

That's one thing about suppressing symptoms that just is such a losing battle. That's why, you know, the it is innately normal for humans to live, you know, so long as they've got basic routine hygiene, uh, for decades, you know, into their 70s, 80s, 90s, hundreds. That's not that hard to do, particularly if you've got a little bit of emergency medical care, you know, slap a tourniquet on a bleeding limb, or, you know, be able to support somebody through an acute GI illness where they've lost a lot of fluid, or give them a little bit of antibiotic to get through a pneumonia, uh, that's really easy. And then people start to live into their 80s, 90s, and hundreds. And it's very normal despite all that for people to hear to die earlier and earlier. You know, now we're being told that sudden adult death syndrome is normal. I mean, that, that was not a thing when I grew up, right? So anyway, that's the end of my rant on that.

Yeah, wonderful. Any other thoughts on retracing before we go on to the next question?

I think we hit it, yeah, pretty great.

Perfect. Okay. Is there a course or book you might recommend if I wanted to study nutrition and biochemistry more deeply?

Well, that depends on how deep you want to go. I mean, you could just go back to school and go to, you know, for biochemistry and yeah, there's a, oh gosh, there's a really good handbook. I forget the name of it, but it's clinical. It's like along the lines of like clinical biochemistry for Dummies. I forget the author. It's Goldberg, I think, is the author. That's a pretty good one. It's still pretty dense if you want to study that. But there's nutrition textbooks that you can pick up. There's biochemistry textbooks that you can pick up as well. If you really want to go deeper, I would consider either going back to school or picking up the textbooks that are that are, you know, out there.

I've really liked the people I've met from, uh, who trained with NTP, Nutritional Therapy Program. They don't get into HTMA, so they're just bread and butter nutrition. That's a good place to start. And I don't know a ton about their program, so I can't totally vouch for it, but I've always liked the people I've met who went through that program. And we've trained a lot of their grads. I mean, not that many proportionally, but We've had— I feel like I see that. Yeah, we monitor in our program all the time on people's tests.

Right.

So there's that. And then, you know, it's honestly, if you just follow the right people, Clark, myself, Chris Masterjohn, we usually reference all the great books. I mean, we're doing more and more book reviews on our podcast now. So it's worth tuning into that because we will be covering a lot of nutrition, but there's just so many, it's hard to pick one. I think the best one to start with has to be Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price.

Right, right.

Definitely. If not, maybe Pottinger's Cats.

If you are really interested in this, I know Masterjohn has a list of books that you can—

Does he?

He, he, yeah, a couple years ago he, he wrote a blog post or a Substack on this. So, I would Google that.

That's great. Someone was asking, "In my last sauna session, I didn't see any of the metallic-looking residue or black residue that I usually see on white towels. What could this mean, if anything, about my heavy metal load?" Yeah.

I mean, that's sort of a— it's kind of a random question, but when you towel off and you have these weird colors. And, I've had clients report green sweat and other stuff. I mean— Wild. It could be metals because metals are pigmented. And, as they leave, they could have a color depending on what route of excretion. But, it could be— most people have a lot of toxic chemicals, synthetics, biologic toxins. It could mean anything and everything. I mean, you're probably excreting something gnarly, but we don't know exactly what it is.

Ditto.

Great. And then, I've had a ton of questions this week about the HTMA Secrets program. So, let's just wrap up with that and then any last thoughts you have.

Yeah, let's talk about it. So, Clark and I a year ago, a little bit more, I can't believe it's been a year now, Clark. I know.

It's been just kind of a blur.

So we sat down, we recorded several episodes. We've added to that now. I think there's probably over a dozen, maybe 20. How many is it, Amy?

Yeah, at least 15, 20. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's a ton of material, uh, and we put it together in an HTMA training program and it's called HTMA Secrets and it's been through a number of different iterations. So you're gonna hear about different structures for the program in past webinars that we've done. But we eventually settled on, uh, what we're doing now, which is HTMA Secrets is a 3-month program. Uh, it's $996, Amy, isn't it? It's 3 monthly payments, 3, whatever it is. Yeah, $332, 3 monthly payments. And during that program, you get a hair tissue test, which we will send to you, and you can send to them in the mail and get results back. We'll go over those with you in the course. And talk to them— talk to you about what it means and how to deal with it, including supplementation protocols. Uh, and we'll go through everyone's test on group coaching calls. So if you're not comfortable with that, this course is not for you. We can still do hair tissue mineral analysis for you. I think Clark is still accepting new clients at nutritionalanalytics.com. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And we are still accepting patients at stillmanmd.com. So you can do hair tissue testing through us that way. But the course is really about, uh, it's for highly motivated, highly curious laypeople who want to be able to potentially then branch out into doing this professionally.

Yes.

Or maybe paraprofessionally, if you want to look at it that way. And then it's for serious practitioners, either prospective practitioners or practitioners in training, or people who already have some kind of practice that this could fit into. Who want to take what they're doing to the next level. We've had all kinds of different people in the program. It's been really fun. And yeah, we love it. It's a really good time. And people have given us rave reviews, which we'll be posting ongoing.

There's, there's sort of a path to certification that we, we haven't waffled on, but we've changed a little bit as, as we have had more people come through the program. We're trying to really optimize that for people. So, there's a— the path to certification is you go through the group coaching, which is 12 weeks with us. You get the standalone video course, HTMA Secrets, which is 6 hours of us going back and forth talking about different health conditions and how we view them through the lens of HTMA. You go through the 12-week training program. And then, we also have this program called the HTMA Mastermind that we are we've instituted recently for people that have been through this first level. We think of it as like level 1, that first 12-week coaching cohort. So you have to go through that 12 weeks of the group coaching with us. And then there's the HTMA Mastermind that you have to go through for 3 months as well. And then at that point, you can do an exit exam for a fee or you can do 3 more months of the HTMA Mastermind, which is basically just practitioners coming into group coaching calls every week, asking specific questions about the cases that they have, whether they're their own or their clients that they're working with. So there's a lot of hands-on interaction here that we're trying to use to get you more prepared for dealing with people in the real world. Which is really, you know, it's one thing to like read stuff and even taking our video course is sort of like the primer for all of this. Right? But getting that face time with us 12 weeks in that first coaching program and then the additional 12 weeks in the mastermind plus the additional 3 if you want to stay in it, it's really important to sort of go through. But that's the pathway to certification is you get the video course, HTML Secrets, you go through the 12-week program with us, level 1, I guess we could call it. And then you do the HTML Mastermind for 3 months. And then you can do an exit exam or do 3 more months of, of the Mastermind. So that way we get, we get you for long enough to review enough tests to get you proficient to work with people in the real world. Because once you start working with people in the real world, you're going to see things that you've never seen before and you're going to need to be really on your game in terms of analyzing the tests, implementing the supplement protocols, and actually working with people to help them successfully navigate the mineral balancing process, which is probably the most difficult. And getting all of the patterns memorized and that sort of thing is important, But when you actually start to work with people and what I call navigating the art of mineral balancing, right? When someone goes through a healing reaction, how do you get them through that? It's really, really important that you've had a lot of experience with us in these two 12-week group coaching cohorts to set yourself up to do this because there are other HTMA courses out there. But they're not hands-on. They don't interact with the people that have made the course.

You're not really being trained.

You're not really being trained. You're getting written material to like look at and go, okay, well, here's what's going on. But then there's this, all of this other, all these other layers that you haven't been trained on that are crucial if you're actually going to do this in a way that is actually helping people and, you know, doing it in a way that keeps you at low risk and your clients as well, because, you know, we want to make sure that this is safe for everybody and you get through it successfully.

And there will be— that's part of why there's an exit exam if you would like to be certified by us, right? We are certifying people who really know how to do this well.

Yes, that's one thing that we kind of came up with right after having run this a couple different times is There's a lot of courses in the space that, you know, aren't that rigorous, I would say, putting it nicely. And really, we want to make sure that we're— that the bar is set really high for this because, you know, we also want to make sure that HTMA and mineral balancing has a good name out there. And I do feel like it hasn't had that same level of prestige or good name because there's just a lot of random programs out there that are kind of just like, "Well, here's a PDF. Go, you know, that's the course," right? That's not what this is. It's a lot more in-depth training and really getting you ready to do this in the real world.

Absolutely. Yes.

So, just to summarize real quick, "HMA Secrets" is the first course. Anyone can join. Yes, you can be a practitioner wanting to learn, an aspiring practitioner, but you can also be just someone that wants to do group coaching with Dr. Stillman and Clark. So, I just want to clarify that. Anyone's able to do that program. And then the HGMA Practitioner Mastermind is reserved for practitioners or aspiring practitioners that want to get certified. So just to make everything clear. And then if anyone has any questions, um, you can email me. I'll put my email in the chat. Uh, you can sign up at the link that I put in the chat earlier, and we're excited. We'll be starting the next cohort on September 9th. So you have another week to sign up and then we'll be closing that off.

Thanks everyone for watching. Take care. Have a great day. We'll see some of you in our next program.

Can't wait.