What Your Autoimmune Diagnosis Really Means (And What Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You)

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 back with Amy Arp for another exciting episode about autoimmunity. So today we are talking about what your autoimmune diagnosis really means and what your doctor isn't telling you, which is a lot. Well, let's just say it varies, to be kind.

That's your— that's your—

I know. I, I'll never forget this story. I was in the hospital taking care of this poor girl who had a horrible flare-up. I can't remember if it was Crohn's or ulcerative colitis, but it was inflammatory bowel disease. And we gave her this massive dose of prednisone, and she'd been in and out of the hospital for months and had been struggling with these symptoms. And she just kept coming to the conventional medical establishment for answers and kept trying medications. And I remember she was thin as a rail. She had her boyfriend there, her family was in and out. It was clear to me that she was really suffering and she was really afraid of what it meant for her life. And I knew at the time that there was— there were things from the integrative functional medicine, environmental medicine world that could help her, but I wasn't sure as a resident who's not in charge. You know, as a resident, you're just in training and you, you Essentially have to do what your attending physician thinks is best regardless of what you think. And you can make a great case. And I've had, I have memories of, of, you know, an attending wanted to do this and I said, I really don't think we should do that. I think we should do that. And, you know, some of those worked out quite well. And you, you do actually have some times where you're not really being supervised and you have to make the right call, which is really what training is all about, stretching your wings and flying. I just remember thinking there's gotta be more that we can do for this poor girl than throw prednisone at this problem and then have her fail one biologic after another. And I was right. I stepped out of that world and started recommending that patients— number one, we do the right testing to get to the bottom of what they're reacting to. Sometimes you don't use testing, you just empirically recommend elimination of things that they may be allergic to. And I've met more people than I can remember now who their inflammatory bowel disease or other autoimmune issue disappeared when they started to avoid the right thing or take the right supplement protocol, or they finally got rid of something like their, their cavitations or their mercury amalgams or whatever was holding them back. And what I think If you— if I have to boil down my answer to this whole episode, it's what your autoimmune diagnosis really means is that there is a very significant combination of metabolic imbalances, toxic exposures, toxic burden.

Yes.

And pathogens within your body that are causing immune dysregulation and dysfunction. And this is resulting in your immune system attacking your own tissues in an attempt to repair damage that may not be evident on lab testing, pathology specimens, etc., or the damage is apparent apparent, but the solution and the root cause isn't. And as you approach it that way, then you can really start to reverse the underlying process and get people much, much, much better results, you know, lasting remissions without drugs. So that, that's the number one thing I want people with autoimmunity to understand is that you have a physiologic problem and you can eliminate the physiologic problem, which is treating the root cause of the disease rather than being dependent upon medications. And that's the disconnect between what doctors in most conventional settings, almost all of them, are telling patients and the reality that happens in clinical practice when you step outside of that paradigm. So that's the, that's the 5 minutes or less version of this episode. And now I want to kick it over to Amy because she's experienced this firsthand as a patient.

I was going to say that right there is what your doctor is not telling you. He's not telling you that you can actually emerge from this and you don't have to take medications and you can actually reverse this and feel good and live an amazing life. I mean, if you've ever walked out of your appointment thinking, so now what? You're thinking, okay, what do I do now? I was there. I remember that. I remember that feeling walking out thinking, is this it? Is this all that my life is going to be? These doctors are telling me I have to be on these medications for the rest of my life.

And I hasten to add, you know, you were told you're going to be in a wheelchair. You're not gonna have kids or likely not gonna have kids, try now. And you're not gonna be a doctor and you're not gonna get to practice. And you, so far you don't get to be a doctor and you don't get to technically practice medicine, but you're doing the next best thing, right?

Yes. No, but they, yeah, they told me all these horrible stories and, you know, they, they had said it's a little bit better now cuz now we have these disease-modifying drugs that you can take for the rest of your life and it really slows down the progression. And, you know, maybe if you go, go to school, you could have a really short practice. And because the dementia won't set in right away, I'm like, How is this my life? How is this turned overnight? It was just horrible. But I think one of the things that, as I was thinking about this topic, is it's— the doctors seem so convincing, and that's what makes it so challenging for patients. You know, I even recently talked to someone over the last couple of weeks, and, you know, she heard my story, heard that you can actually heal from some of these diseases. And she still was very convinced because the neuro— the doctor neurologist was telling her, you need to take these drugs. And it just is so interesting. It's almost more of a psychological thing. You know, you would know this more because you were in the hospitals with the doctors of just the way that they're talking to their patients, the way that they are treating them, and the way they're convincing them that they have to do the thing that they're telling them to do. And I remember I was there. I remember thinking, I, I probably have to do this. And then I would leave the office and get in my right frame of mind and think, there has to be something more than this. But when you're in there in the doctor's office, it's very convincing. The stories are very compelling, and you think, this is the only option I have. And so what we're here to tell you is there is a different way. And if you're going into those doctor's offices with whatever autoimmune diagnosis and they're telling you this is the only way, or you have to take these drugs or else it's going to get so much worse, we're saying there's a better way. There's a way where you can actually, as Dr. Stillman was saying, get to the underlying root causes of why your body is having these imbalances, why your body is having these malfunctions, things that are going wrong, and fix them. And then when you fix them, your body can actually let heal and allow itself to come into the balance, I guess.

It's important to note that there is a place for drugs. And the tough thing I think is knowing, and this is where I think in the, in the conventional world, it's very comfortable for doctors to just do what they know to do. And I must admit that when you have a doctor's mindset and, and That's such an interesting statement, but because people lack context as to how medicine became what it is, you know, thousands of years ago, Hippocrates said things like, the greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it. All illness begins in the gut. Let food be your medicine. Walking is a man's best medicine. Before you try to heal somebody, see if they're willing to actually give up what's making them sick. He had a very clear root cause approach. That's just sort of astonishing to read when you than have been trained in a conventional paradigm where it's drugs and surgery. It's just drugs and surgery. There's not— there's nothing about food, there's nothing about wellness, there's nothing about walking. And lip service will be paid to this. Oh yeah, of course we want the patient to do PT. Yeah, that's important, but it's not the thing that really solves the problem. And this got, you know, medicine really was terribly corrupted by events of the last 100 or so years where the pharmaceutical industry, because of the way patent law is written, made these insane returns on their drugs while also practicing what can only be described as economic warfare against anyone with an alternative paradigm. To the point that, you know, I remember growing up with a mentor who was a naturopath, and he would tell me stories about, you know, guns drawn raids at, you know, major supplement manufacturers. Like, why is the DEA raiding a supplement manufacturer with guns drawn? They're not manufacturing meth and trafficking people. They're not criminals. They're just supplement manufacturers. But there's been this massive push because these approaches are so effective that they can completely derail the pharmaceutical engine. And, and for some numbers and context here, the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry, last I checked, on planet Earth. More profitable than coal, more profitable than oil, more profitable than tech, AI, whatever. There may be some SaaS unicorns that are more profitable, I guess. I'm not an expert in this, but last I checked, pharmaceuticals, the most profitable, highest profit margins. Anywhere. And they're also such big companies, they've got massive market penetration, which means that just the numbers are staggering. $1.3 trillion is the pharmaceutical industry drug market cap last I checked. And the, the really crazy thing about this is if you look at the way autoimmunity is taking off, it's a 19.1% increase in prevalence per year right now. If you look at the increasing prevalence, the market for autoimmune drugs is expected to quintuple in less than a decade. And that means that farm— that pharmaceuticals for autoimmunity alone are expected to replace the pharmaceutical market entirely in less than 10 years. We're expecting to sell more immune-modulating drugs every year than we currently sell of all drugs. And you have to realize that this industry makes money on what's called a monthly recurring revenue system. So they get you on a drug, they keep you on a drug, you never stop it. And that's how they make massive, massive, massive profits, especially with some of these biologics. It's $1,000 a month cash that people's insurances may be paying or that they may be paying cash for the drug. So when you put that in perspective, like our programs, you know, and they vary in price depending on what we're including and how much time and how much access. And so I don't like to quote prices on things like this that are going to be what we call evergreen content. It's gonna be, you know, maybe watching this a year from now, but we're able to provide supplements, labs, and clinical time for less than the cost of these blockbuster drugs and get people results where they're no longer dealing with their diagnosis. So I was just reviewing Meredith Oak's case. She's done two podcasts with me. She was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, which is an autoimmune diagnosis, and I was struck by how little it took me to take her from, and in the podcast she goes over this. She said she got to 50% of her goal of wellness with the things that she learned from the quantum wellness world. So blue blockers, light therapy, sunlight, circadian rhythm optimization, things like that. But then she got to 80 or 90% with targeted supplements that we used in the practice. And I was also going back over her notes and noticed that we also did some allergy testing., and then we also, she actually ended up having mercury amalgams removed, which we forgot to talk about in the podcast, but I've seen such an impact to patients of that. And when you look at, that's huge, like the cost of all that, it costs a significant amount over a period of months. You're making an investment. However, you're then not out hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for expensive drugs for the rest of your life. And then not to mention the lab tests and the appointments and than the misery of— because usually what happens is the disease continues to progress despite the drug. You wind up on what I call the therapeutic treadmill of, okay, well, today I need 10 milligrams and tomorrow I need 100 and the next day I need 1,000. And now this drug's not working, so we're going to stop it. And so we're going to pivot to another drug. And now you're on 3 drugs, 5 drugs. Now you're on 10 more drugs to control the side effects of the 5 to 10 drugs you're taking to control your disease. And this is how the sort of standard operating procedure in the hospital wound up getting everyone on 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 drugs.

And they don't tell you that, though. They don't tell you, oh, these drugs are going to cause side effects that need more drugs to combat the side effects. Then, you know, you just continue on.

It's horrible. And what bothers me most about it is that in medicine, there's this idea of informed consent that I care very much about. And it has to do with transparency. It has to do with integrity. When I hear and think about informed consent, it means that you should know what you're signing up for. And when— what I saw happening in medicine was a complete lack of genuine informed consent. It was really being perverted by the profit motive, perverse incentives of hospitals, clinics, surgery centers, whatever. You know, I'll give you an example. Most back surgery that's performed in the United States is totally ineffective. It is an absolute waste of money. There's a reason why we do it. Patients don't want to hear you need to lose weight. Patients don't want to hear, in order to lose weight, you need to give up soda, you need to give up diet soda, you need to give up sitting on the couch, you need to give up watching television after dinner, you need to go to sleep earlier, you need to get up earlier, you need to go to the gym, you need to go take a walk at the beach, you need to eat healthy food, you need to do all these things. And people just say, well, I would rather spend 10 grand, maybe say a $5,000 deductible, and have a $20,000 surgery, or 20 grand, whatever it is, cash for back surgery, then confront my dysfunctional diet and lifestyle. And That's why healthcare costs are spiraling out of control and also why people are— and I don't think they understand when they do that, and this is part of what doctors are not doing. The doctors are not truly informing them of, yes, I know you want to do this, and yes, I can swipe your credit card and take your deductible to take you to the operating room. However, you're going to be back for another surgery in 3 to 5 years. Instead, it just creates this surgical merry-go-round, or as I called it earlier, the therapeutic treadmill. And the therapeutic treadmill is this image I have of patients who are They get on the treadmill and they think, I can do this. And then the treadmill starts to speed up and then they're out of breath and they're exhausted because they're on so many drugs or they're going to so many appointments or they've got so many complications from their treatment. And they don't realize they're much, much better off just taking a root cause approach because then you can get off of the treadmill.

Mm-hmm.

To go back to Meredith's case and to, you know, pointing out your case as well, Meredith doesn't call me every quarter for a new supplement protocol. I might want my patients to follow up more so we can continue to optimize and really keep them well. But it's a little bit the same way that I drive my car. Like, I'm sure that the guy at the shop— if I drove like a really high-end car, which I don't because I don't really care about my car, but if I did, the guy at the shop might be like, you should keep this in better shape. And I'd be like, I'm busy doing other things that I'm interested in doing more than I am taking the car to the shop. And I feel a little bit about that way about my work. I wish my patients would get more testing and do more of this and that and the other things so they could really just be really just so dialed in, right? But I mean, it's true.

I haven't been back to see the doctors who helped me on this journey.

But I, at the same time, I'm so gratified by the fact that they don't need to call me.

Exactly.

You know what I mean? That goes back to what Hippocrates said: the greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it. And I used back surgery as an example, but this is just everywhere— cardiology, dermatology, rheumatology, allergy and immunology. You know, I was blown away when I started to take on allergy cases which are very related to autoimmunity. And a lot of our autoimmune cases also have allergies. And I started treating these allergy cases the same way. And some of them would come back and say, yeah, I don't, I don't need that biologic anymore. I don't need any Allegra anymore. I'm off all of my allergy medications. I didn't expect that. It wasn't even the thing they were asking me to fix. It sort of would come up 6 months. Oh yeah, I take Zyrtec and Allegra every day because I have crippling allergies. You didn't mention this, but this root cause approach really works for getting people off of all this stuff. And I, I almost was a fellow— I almost— I was— I started a fellowship in allergy and immunology, and I left because I was so disillusioned with the paradigm. It was just so focused on this culture of dependency, you know, and it was not interested in how can we best serve the patient to eliminate their disease. And there were just, I mean, so many little things that bothered me about that that led me to actually open my own practice and work with patients for for cash, because when you pay your doctor, you're effectively their boss. And that means you get to say, this is the goal, I want you to achieve this goal, and I'll tell you if I can or cannot do it. And I said earlier that there's a place for medications. There's also situations and cases where— we've got a couple of cases in the practice right now where they've tried everything and they're still not all better. So it's not like this is— I like to be candid with people because I view that as part of informed consent. I view that as part of Transparency and integrity, you know, we don't bat 1,000. It's not possible. What we do do is tackle really tough cases, and if they're willing to really put in the time and the effort, we get them better and better and better results. And sometimes it's not an easy road. Some of the people I'm thinking of, they're having— they're feeling worse with some of the things we recommend. But as Amy experienced and talked about in her podcast, she felt much worse for a prolonged period of time before her symptoms remitted. Yeah, do you want to talk about that, Amy? Because that's part of why people don't pick this You know, door number 2, root cause approach.

I think first, a lot of people aren't even aware that some of these things are, can be underlying our diseases because doctors or other societies publish things saying the complete opposite. So I'll give you an example. When I was digging into some of this stuff, trying to get to the root cause of things, I was thinking, oh, maybe heavy metals are, you know, causing my issue. I had heard someone say that. And when I was going researching and looking, the MS Society posted an article that said Hey, heavy metals are no— in no way going to be causing your autoimmune diagnosis. If your doctor is telling you this, they're a quack. Don't work with them. Like, it was just like very plain and blatant like that. And I remember thinking, how can we even know who's telling the truth? And so maybe some of you were listening thinking, how do I know Dr. Stillman is on the right path? Because my neurologist is telling me, hey, I can't possibly do this, or this can't be the root cause, or diet doesn't matter. I was also told that from my neurologist. I asked him, 'Hey, what should I be eating?' He said, 'Anything, diet doesn't matter.' So not true. Your doctors are— so it's just, it's a confusing mix of things. And so I just want to acknowledge that first. When I was going down this road and taking all of these different things, I did feel way worse before I felt better. I knew that I would probably have some sort of detox reactions, but I felt horrible. I was— felt nauseous all the time, very sick, tons of brain fog. A lot of the symptoms popped up even worse than they were before. And I thought, how is this the path to healing if I'm getting worse? I'm getting way worse. I feel awful. And then little by little, eventually the symptoms did go away and disappear and it was awesome. But that's also just part of this, that as you go through this process, that is confusing. Again, it's very confusing.

How did you know you were on the right track when you were feeling worse?

That's a great question. I think it was when I remember very specifically I was taking, I was doing this one specific protocol and I had had urine. Mild urinary incontinence throughout this whole process. And I remember very specifically that there was one night where I didn't have to get up to go to the bathroom. And I thought, I haven't had to do this in so long. And I also, it was, you know, frequent urination, but also urinary incontinence. So I couldn't hold it and it would leak a lot of the time. And I remember as I was doing this one protocol, there were moments, nights where I didn't have to go to get up to go to the bathroom. That I wasn't leaking in my underwear. And I was shocked because it had been so bad for so long. And then I was thinking, I'm actually starting to get better. There's a moment, there's a glimmer of hope here. I'm getting better. And then slowly, as I continued the different protocols, there would be little moments of hope again, where I was thinking, or I would experience, I'm not as numb, or I can kind of feel this part of my body again. Wow, like, and then it just continued to get progressively better. And then Yeah, but I do remember that very specifically of waking up thinking, I didn't have to wake up and go to the bathroom. This is amazing.

That's what I look for is, is there, is there some improvement in a primary goal that the person has? And if the primary goal is just worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, I start to wonder, what am I missing? What could I be doing differently? Then it comes down to a lot of, with some of the more advanced stuff that we do is, are people willing to actually do it? And because, you know, you talked in your podcast at length, so we won't rehash it here. And if people haven't listened to that, you've got to go listen to it. It's so good. You have to be prepared to, in some ways, make healing a full-time job, but you've also got to be willing to just get outside your comfort zone and do things that people are going to think are weird. You're going to think they're weird, they're uncomfortable, but you know, at the end of the day, if you really want your life back, if you really want to not just be on these drugs for the rest of your life and hope for the best, it's your option. And that's why we do what we do. I really sympathize with people not knowing who to listen to because I've, you know, in my medical training, that was one of my great challenges because I would Yeah, and you know, I was kind of in and out of the conventional world for several years between training and postgraduate training. And, you know, I was really tempted to go back in and almost did go back in to be an academic research physician, but I just kept networking with people and meeting people and they said things like, you're wasting your time. You're not going to heal anybody in that system. It's totally broken. It's totally dysfunctional. You're gonna hate your life, essentially. And that is what ended up happening. I hated going to work every day because I felt like we were failing our patients. And part of why I have created all of the content that we've created is that I really want people to be able to— I provided as much proof as I could possibly imagine. You know, this isn't just Dr. Stillman getting up every day and speaking into the camera about his opinions, right? Not only do we have— I mean, not only do I have my medical background degree residency training, all of that, a couple of publications in the literature. But you've like— you run the program with me and you've been through it. You've got the MRIs to prove it. You have the receipts. We also have all these patients who are willing to come on to the podcast and give a testimony and say, this is what I, I saw, this is what happened, this is how I recovered from my illness when I essentially had no other options and was at the end of my broke but didn't have any better, you know, but didn't have any hope in the conventional system anymore. And between all of that, and on top of that, I really think people, if they just do the things that we— I write about on my blog that I'm publishing, going to publish in this book that I'm writing about autoimmunity— if they just do those things, they should see them bear enormous fruit in their life. That's how you know that this is real and that it's not just some opinion on the internet, because I really do— I see so much bad information, bad thinking, bad science in the integrative functional medicine, unconventional world, and a lot of it is just incomplete. You know, in writing my book, I'm reading a lot of other books on autoimmunity, and they're very incomplete. Part of why they're incomplete is that there's some sacred cows that the authors are not prepared to slaughter, and you have to be willing to kill the sacred cows if they are part of the problem. You know, kind of a brutal analogy, but it's real. You know, I sort of really, when you really get into the underbelly of medicine, there's just so much that is sad and dysfunctional and makes me uncomfortable. Butchered by Healthcare is one of my favorite books by a guy named Robert Yoho, whose Substack is great. He's an MD, he's retired, he was a plastic surgeon, and he just researches how corrupt the medical field is now and also how integrative natural medicine can really help people. And in his book, he talks about how the adult diaper industry subsidizes the patient advocacy groups for prostate cancer. Because prostate cancer surgery is one of the top causes of incontinence in men. And so the adult diaper industry makes a lot of their money off of— it's so dysfunctional.

Yeah, it's so—

patients don't know this, they don't hear this. You know, I always look at the magazines, the checkout at the grocery store, to understand what the average person is probably going to wind up thinking because it's what they're being bombarded with. And I always remind people, if you get something for free, you are the product. And I really believe that. And if you're not paying for really high-quality information, you're getting information that is, is not necessarily going to help you get better, which is part of why I try to deliver so much value in my information. I know that if I just deliver free information that's not actually getting people better, they'll be like, this is just marketing. We actually want to get you great results with our free information, which is how you, you know, how you develop a relationship and trust.

And to be fair, with some of those things, I would say not even doctors aren't fully aware of all that stuff either, you know.

They just get taught what they get taught, and then sadly they're taught that what they know is the truth and there's no possibility that they are wrong. And this is really, really just pernicious. It's so, so— it's— and it's bizarre.

There was so insightful to me when I was— when I went back to school and was at the medical school for a little bit, it was so insightful for me. There was no room— I mean, you finished medical school, so— but there was no room for any other opinion opinions except for what you were taught and you had to present in a certain way. And if anyone presented even like the opposite side of it, I remember taking, we had like some, a little bit of ethics and it was just like fascinating. You could not present the other side. People would laugh at you. It was just like, this is wrong. How, why would you even bring that up? And it was just, it was fascinating.

The like, yeah, absolutely. It's what happens though. And if you really look at how human nature is and how institutions work, You know, institutions are usually started by great people who have great ideas and they do great things. And then they try to make those institutions perfect and they fail because they're human and institutions are run by humans. And then the institutions become old and they decay and then they become kind of a joke. And that's just life. And, you know, I've seen that all over the place. I look back at old research, you know, 1930s, '40s, '50s, '60s, some amazing research was done. And then, you know, '70s, '80s, '90s on, the research just gets much more boring, academic. It's all about drugs. It's not about root cause medicine. And it was, it's been fun to talk to Russell Jaffe about this. Russell Jaffe's an MD-PhD who I've done some podcasts with. If people want to listen to them, it's mostly about nutrition. And Russell was a scientist at NIH, National Institutes of Health, doing a lot of interesting research on the immune system, on inflammation. And he and his colleagues at NIH saw this culture shift happening in the late '80s. And 45 years later, you know, we're seeing how dysfunctional medicine and research is with all the events the last 5 years, without getting into that in too much detail. This is just how life is. Institutions get old, they decay, they fall apart. And the institution of medicine in the United States is no exception. And that's what's happening to it right now. And so, you know, my goal is basically to get medicine back to its roots, which is this root cause approach, looking for what can we do to resolve disease and not rely on drugs. And if we do rely on drugs, how can we use them in a rational way where we're not just prescribing them as much as possible, or we're not just prescribing them and then just moving on to the next patient? Because that's what a lot of has happened in medicine, is that the profit model is the more patients you can see and the more you can bill and charge for, the more money you make. Which is why I don't operate my practice on that model. The practice is operated on a membership model where patient— patients pay a membership fee that covers a lot of our overhead, and that allows me to do a lot of content generation and a lot of— and also create behind-the-scenes resources and also provide better pricing to patients on supplements, on lab testing than they would be able to get elsewhere. And then they have access, more access to the practice, to me, shorter wait times for appointments, longer appointment types. All of this is built to help people get as healthy as possible and stay that way, which is how the system should be set up, but isn't. And that's why patients feel so frustrated, betrayed, unhappy, uncertain, confused. It's part of why our number one priority is making sure our patients are happy. They send us their friends and family. They remain patients. That's what I— that's good to tie this back to the whole informed consent thing. It's part of why we have a complex onboarding sequence. You don't just join the practice. You have to be considered for membership. We do that because we want to make sure we're working with the right people, that we can get them the outcomes they want, that their expectations are realistic, and that they're really in it to be as healthy as possible for the long term.

Absolutely. And we want to give people hope. I feel like that's like a huge part of what I love doing is just giving people hope that these things actually work, that you can actually get to a place of healing, recovery. Because I was almost there. I almost didn't do it, you know. I almost believed the narrative that the doctors were telling me because at that time I was not into holistic health. I was very much down the traditional medical path, was like about to go to medical school. I was like, you know, getting accepted and I was very, very close to not even considering it. And I remember thinking when I did find someone who said they had gotten rid of MS, I thought, that's impossible. How is this even real? Like this person, it can't be real. That doesn't even make sense. Maybe you can kind of manage it a little bit, but to really resolve everything, that's not really possible. And I remember just thinking so much because I was reading so many things that told me the opposite. And so if anything, I just want to give people hope that there is a better way out there, that there are tons of people who are probably not in the public eye who have done this, who are living lives recovered. They're just, you know, not shouting it from the rooftops. And I wish they would, but it is— there's a lot that comes with that. And so we just want to give you hope. And yeah.

Well, you know, even when they do shout it from the rooftops, it's, it's remarkable how when you're working in this world, how many people are just so— they've had an amazing story, they have an amazing testimony, they've got an incredible journey that they went through for healing. But it's the kind of thing that the, the media doesn't cover. And, you know, what is the number one ad revenue right now for major network television? It's pharmaceutical ads. And I, I like capitalism. There's not a better system in my view. So I don't have a problem actually with pharmaceutical industry advertising, but then they go through the regulatory framework and they stop us from really having true freedom of speech when it comes to health. Like for example, if I say the X39 LifeWave patch cured my patient's lupus, I've just made a medical claim.

Cancelled.

I've just committed a crime. I could go to jail. And we actually— I've never talked to you about this, I don't think, but I actually, I worked briefly at a practice in Manhattan during COVID and we were named by the FTC as a practice that had to— we got like a cease and desist letter from them because a website page said something about vitamin C and vitamin D being important for viral immunity. And a number of doctors were— the FTC went after them for this, which is absurd. I mean, it's just so absurd. And for, for people who don't I'll mention this as well because I forgot to mention it, but the pharmaceutical industry has such a strong track record of criminality. They've had so many lawsuits that they've lost. They haven't just been sued. They've lost criminal and civil cases. And you know that the system is corrupt because the penalties in those cases have never exceeded the profits of the companies, which means they're not really punishments. They're just costs. Like if every time a kid misbehaved, a parent just said, don't do that again, and slap them on the wrist, they're going to keep doing it. And that's exactly what the pharmaceutical industry has done, which is part of why now trust in them is cratering, because people are having so many negative side effects from drugs and pharmaceutical products. It's very sad that we live in a time of immense corruption in healthcare where the narrative has been so cleverly, diabolically crafted to get people and keep people in this system of disability and drugs and surgeries and not, you know, truly treating the root cause of disease. But at the same time, we've never had better treatments. We've never had more options. We've never had more tools, tactics. I look at the books I read when I was coming out of residency to, to get ready to have my own practice in integrative medicine. They were so anemic compared to what we do now. I've learned so much and I've incorporated so many more tools and so many more remedies and therapies. It's It's really fun. It's really exciting to get to work every day and to see our patients get better. Right. And to, to keep learning.

Absolutely. It really is. It's so fun to see when people improve and get better.

Yeah. I want to close with a quote from another Hippocratic quote from Hippocrates. He said, illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue. They are the result of small daily sins against nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illnesses will suddenly appear. And so I want to leave people with that because that's the That's the, you know, from the father of medicine in the West. That's how the cookie really crumbles. That's how it really works. And the amazing thing about that is if you can make up for and sort of, uh, and mitigate these mistakes you've made, you can get amazing results and you don't have to be doomed to this drugs and surgeries approach that really doesn't pan out the way most people want it to.

Absolutely. Because that's what your doctors are not telling you.

Mic drop. Any other thoughts, Amy?

No, that's it for today. We'll talk more on the next podcast.

Awesome. Thanks everyone for joining us. Take care. We'll see you in the next episode.