Why Healing Isn’t Linear

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.

Do you feel like doing more to make yourself healthy or recover your health makes you feel worse? We see this all the time in the practice, and today we're going to talk about why. So it's very consistent in our practice that patients come to us with a significant symptom burden. They're losing the ability to walk, to see, they're extremely fatigued, they have lost some kind of vital function of their body, whether it's their smell, they're losing their ability to control critical bodily functions, we'll leave it at that. And so they're very motivated and focused on recovering these abilities and this function. These are not mild, minor, or occasional symptoms. These are really severe daily things that they're struggling with, and often they've been battling with them for years, And they're coming to us because they're very concerned with where this is headed for them. What's their future look like? And also, what does it mean about their body that they have this much burden of disease, particularly when that many of them are in early life, they're in their late 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. They have decades of life to look forward to, let alone if they're in their 60s and 70s and it's getting really worse, rapidly progressing. And they wonder, what is my final chapter of life going to look like? Right? Especially when they've spent so much time, energy, sacrificed so much in order to have a really amazing retirement to look forward to, right? So we see this all the time. And one of the tough things about the human body is that when it's accumulated a significant toxic burden and a significant amount of metabolic imbalances, whether they're nutritional deficiencies or nutritional excesses, and the body's developed perhaps infections, significant levels of parasites, or major imbalances in the microbiome, is that when you start to move things in order to get people better, they paradoxically feel worse. Right? We explain this as the toxins are coming out of cells and tissues, the microbes are being— or parasites are being killed off. When these things are killed off, they actually release toxins because guess what? One of the ways they slow down the immune system and stop it from correcting imbalances in the microbiome in the first place is they release toxins, right? You may have experienced this yourself. You had a cold or a flu, you took, say, some kind of antimicrobial, you killed off some portion of not only infectious microbes but parts of your microbiome that were normal healthy commensal, right? And you felt worse, right, before you felt better. You've also experienced maybe an acute toxic exposure, right? You were exposed to something like paint fumes or gasoline fumes or something like that, just routine daily life. This can happen. And you may have noticed, I feel worse, right? Well, that's the same thing that's happening when they're coming out of your cells and tissues where they've been carefully stored by your body over years and decades since they were originally encountered. Another thing that's really interesting about this is defining the difference between toxicity and sensitivity. So I'm gonna unpack this a little bit because I think it really confuses patients. Over here you've got somebody who, when they eat tons and tons and tons of a food that we know is toxic— just call it, you know, in general, processed food— like, who doesn't feel bad when they eat an enormous meal of processed food? The only people who feel normal or say that they feel well when they've eaten an enormous meal of processed food are people who only eat processed food, and they just don't know any different. They've forgotten what it is like to feel healthy. Sad, but it is what it is. And then you have people who, they like walk by the food that they're sensitive to. They look at it, they think about it, and their symptoms occur. And I'm exaggerating a little bit, but also not, because you, you can create symptoms with your thoughts, and that's a whole other can of worms we're not going to get into today. But what's the difference between these two people? One of these people has a system— we're going to call it the immune system, but I think it's much more broad than that— where the immune system is reacting to something in the environment, the diet, the lifestyle, right? Personal care products, foods, beverages, versus a toxic effect. And distinguishing these things in your mind will really help you understand, okay, I'm sensitive to this or allergic to this, you can call it what you want, versus this thing makes me feel bad because it is a poison. Different things, different responses. We call them dose-response curves. Okay, so what do you do when you're doing all these healthy things and they're making you feel worse? And sometimes you may have noticed you do very little of something that makes you healthy or healthier or helps you recover your health, and somehow it makes you feel worse. And you think, gosh, if I can only tolerate, say, half a drop of chlorine dioxide, or if I can only tolerate, you know, one capsule of the mineral supplements Dr. Stillman has given me and recommended to me, then how am I ever gonna work up to the full dose that's going to be effective? Well, you just have to understand that a journey of a thousand miles really does begin with a single step. So you have to get started. And then we have to think through, well, what is our overall approach? And when I think about the approach to therapeutics, I now think about it and the teaching tool that I use that honestly I came up with like 4 weeks ago, maybe 6 weeks ago, but it, it really hit me. And when it hit me, I thought this is the best teaching tool I've ever thought of for health and wellness. And I've thought about this a lot because little known fact, I actually ran a board review course for med students in medical school and then residency and a podcast. And I also worked for one of the most successful United States Medical Licensing Exam test prep companies, which was Firecracker before it sold to Walters Lippincott, but that's another story. Maybe not very interesting to you guys. I don't know. I include these personal anecdotes because this is all totally unscripted. Anyway, I've thought about this a lot. So the analogy or metaphor that I now use to teach and think about therapeutics is what I call the Tree of Life, which also has very deep resonance for me as a Christian because it's got this biblical root to it. Pun intended, root. And the Tree of Life, I look at as, okay, life is like a tree. You have roots. The roots have to go deep into the ground. They have to be healthy and you want them to be thick and strong, right? Then you have the trunk of the tree and then you have the branches of the tree. The trunk in the heartwood is what I look at as principles and character. I've found that people who don't have good principles get terrible results no matter what they do. And that's a big topic for another day. But I've found that to be true. So they get a place in this way of thinking about health and wellness. Then the roots of the tree are your daily habits. And so the more of the daily habits that we know are healthy that you're doing every day that support and are foundational to good health, the stronger and the thicker those roots are going to be. And the easier it is for the tree to grow, the faster it's going to grow, and the more resilient it's going to be. So you can't expect a tree to stand up when the roots have been rotted out. Who would expect that? No one. No one with any concept of physics and trees. The branches of the, of the tree. What are the branches? I look at the branches as where the therapeutics lie or hang, I suppose. Maybe. I don't know. The grammarians in the crowd can correct me or give me some pointers on this one. Anyway, so the, the branches of the tree are where the therapeutics live. And what I found interesting as I thought more and more about this was, okay, the branches are each going to have a root. So for example, one branch of therapeutics that I love is oxygen-based therapy. So oxygen-based therapies would be hydrogen peroxide, ozone, hyperbaric oxygen, but the root that corresponds to that is breathwork. You've got to have optimal breathing mechanics. Breathing mechanics and breathwork could be viewed as a therapeutic in and of itself, but at the end of the day, even if you're only— even if you're thinking about it also as a therapeutic, there's still an element of it that is a daily habit, how you breathe moment to moment, day to day, hour to hour, right? So as I started to contextualize this tree of life, I also realized that patients, what they're really fundamentally coming to us for is what I look at as what the bark and the sap of the tree do, which is what I call diagnostics. So diagnostics is, okay, there is a branch broken here. There is a root broken here. And if you know anything about trees and how they behave, it turns out that the sap goes to the broken limbs, the broken roots, and tries to heal it, tries to fix it. But notice that it's going to draw on resources that are coming from the roots. Which, you know, take in minerals and other compounds from the soil and the leaves, right? Where the CO2 is being fixed as C1, CNH2NO carbohydrates, right? All, all components, all parts of the tree work together for the good of the tree. What patients are looking for is what's wrong with my root system. They often don't realize that that's where we need to start. And I recently saw a case in the practice. Actually, I won't say I saw them. Because I actually saw their wife and she tattled on him. She said, he wants help with his sleep, we've got to get his sleep, it's, it's a mess, it's a wreck, it's— we've tried everything, he's on every drug I could imagine, every supplement I could imagine. But it came out that he was at night— and this is very common— he was going back to his iPad. And he's wearing blue blockers, but he's still using his iPad at night. And that is so common. That's somebody who's reached the end of all the branches, and he's getting all the therapeutics on those branches, all the fruit, to try and fix his sleep. But the root cause of his sleep disorder is fundamentally light. We had a wildly difficult case in the practice where the gentleman refused to sleep with the lights off. Now don't ask me how he got started sleeping with the lights on. I asked him, I don't remember what he said. It was not a good reason. But I just remember thinking when I found out this guy sleeps with the lights on, I thought, dear God, help me. I don't know if just biophysically anything I'm gonna do is gonna matter, because this guy is telling his brain that he lives on, I don't know, a planet where there's no night. How does that affect everything that I'm trying to do with hormones and supplements and nutrition and diet and lifestyle and biohacks and all the rest of it, right? So that's why the roots are so important. And when people say, I feel worse when I'm, I'm doing things to make myself better, I always want to go back to the roots, because the roots really help you to deal with what we might call shifts in how your body is feeling. The people with the most optimized diet, lifestyle, daily routine, they universally do the best, and their healing is almost always the gentlest, the fewest bumps in the road, fewest detox reactions, and so on. And it's the people who climb to the end of the therapeutic tree's branches, you know, to extend this analogy, right? If you go too far out on a limb it will break. And you'll see this with therapeutics. And I look at that as adverse events with, with therapeutics. If you feel like whatever you're doing and always is always making you feel worse, we have to look at these fundamentals. What is going on with your daily habits, your daily routine? And then we have to look at the therapeutics. And so long as the habits are there to support going out on longer— because if you have a deep-rooted tree, it will get bigger and stronger and thicker branches, right? And then you go out on the branches gradually, starting at the lowest hanging fruit. And part of this is, I think maybe it's a cultural bias, but I find that most of my patients are gratified when I hand them a simple solution, a diet or lifestyle change that will do what otherwise a supplement or a prescription will do. I think that's very cultural. I think it's perfectly commonsensical, but common sense I think is tied into what your culture is. So we start with the low-hanging fruit of, okay, you're going to change your diet, you're going to change your lifestyle, you're going to do these little simple things like restoring nutrients in your body that are absent, right? And then we go further and further and further out on the limbs into more and more esoteric, difficult, time-consuming, and costly interventions. Now, I will say, and the case I'm thinking of here is one I saw recently, there are many of you out there who are doing everything right. You're doing the 3 10-minute walks, you mitigated your home to EMF, you eliminated all of the potential toxins and bad things that are in your kitchen and your medicine cabinet and your bathroom cabinet. You've done everything. You feel like you're at your wit's end, right? And you're wondering, what do I do next? Well, for those people, we really do end up at a sort of crossroads where there are many different roads that they could take. And I call this, when I get there with patients, the cutting edge of integrative medicine, because nobody has a crystal ball. And also nobody has the data necessary to say, ah, well, you are a, say, middle-aged man with what fits into the category of chronic fatigue syndrome who also has X, Y, and Z lab abnormalities. And therefore the thing that's going to work best for you statistically is going to be this, that, and the other thing. Nobody has that data. It's all expert opinion. It's all anecdotal. And frankly, a lot of it is what is accessible to you? What makes sense for you? What fits into your lifestyle? But I lay out this menu of options, things we can try next, because I'm convinced that if we try enough things, we're eventually going to find the thing that's going to move the needle for that person. Meanwhile, we always want to be doing the things that we know gradually over time are going to restore underlying physiology. And what's the trend as we do that? Well, very common trend in the practice is for patients to come in, feel worse, begin to become increasingly skeptical that what we're doing is worthwhile or is going to work, and feel disillusioned. And then after a period of months, we've repleted the nutrients, we've eliminated the toxins, we've eliminated perhaps infections that were there. They may have been hidden, they may have been identified, they may have been clear, they may have been, you know, very murky, occult, right? Hidden. And the patient starts to finally really see themselves blossom. I'm thinking of a case right now. We're hoping to have her on the podcast for Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing episode soon. I'm very excited about that. And I hope, as you can see, I'm very passionate about this and I have thought obsessively about this for years because I really want to create for people this journey from variable states of health with variable, you know, various different illnesses and diseases, a really clear journey from there to optimal health with a very clear then roadmap of how do you maintain that health. And in order to do that, you have to think through all of these different factors that affect it, your various different categories and classes of therapeutics, various and different categories of diet and lifestyle modifications. And you also have to think about every single potential component of the environment from their EMF to their air quality, to their water quality. And it's an enormous amount of information to have to deal with. And this is part of why in the practice, I abandoned the old model of fee-for-service because what happens with fee-for-service is you come in and as one of my mentors would say, he said, Leland, if you get the patient the result they want, you're a hero. And if you don't, you're a zero. That still cracks me up to this day, but it's true. And in the fee-for-service model, basically you're being judged on very short-term results. And if you keep delivering short-term results, patients will stick with you and they will refer their friends and family. And as soon as you fail, then they move on to somebody else. And guess what? When you live that model, here's what happens. Your patients may love you, by and large. They may be very happy with their results, but eventually, because you do not have the time to counsel them about their diet and their lifestyle, the roots of the tree of life, they end up creating more and more of their success therapeutically on this shaky foundation. And then the tree falls over, and then you're like, well, why can't I sleep now? I'm on Dr. Stillman's sleep remedy that doesn't exist yet, but we might make one. I'm on Dr. Stillman's this and this and that and the other thing from this doctor, and none of it's working. What happened? What's, what's broken in my system? Usually if you go back to fundamentals, you're gonna find that there's something broken in the diet, lifestyle, and environment. And that's why I'm so passionate about this. In our practice, the way that we do it is you come in, you have a program of care, there are scheduled appointments, there are forms and surveys you fill out. We look at the entire picture—your diet, your lifestyle, your environment—in great detail. And for some people, it's a bit overwhelming, I will be honest with you. But the fact of the matter is, when you get down to this level of detail, you unlock insight that allows you to get the kind of results that people come to us for. And invariably, when we look where other people have not, we find things that we can move and change and adjust. And that's the secret. That's when you get really durable results. And once you've fixed those roots of the tree, now you can go into the therapeutics and all of a sudden you get better results faster for longer with lower doses. Of the same stuff. And long-term, patients do better. They don't end up with this constant tire patch, you know, what's wrong with me today, this is broken, that's broken, which is just— it's a source of a lot of the burnout in the modern healthcare system. And it's part of why, as you can tell, I'm very passionate about a membership-based practice where essentially people are paying a membership due every month. They have very rapid access to me and the team during a very wide range relatively speaking, of hours compared to other practices. In terms of— by which I mean, you can get an appointment with me if you're a member of the practice within about 2 weeks, and it's sometimes as quick as like 2 or 3 days depending upon, you know, scheduling acuity, stuff like that. And that means we can move quickly to address new or re-emerging issues over time. And it also means that we have time because guess what? We get to share with members of the practice lots and lots of content. Like yesterday, we had our first group coaching call, which was on our new platform in our new community that's going to be coming soon. So if you join that, you want to learn from us, you'll be able to join that in the coming weeks. We're just setting it up and troubleshooting it and tweaking it. And we get the opportunity to educate patients, and they'll come back and they'll say, I heard this on the podcast, or I did this because of the group coaching call that we did, and it really helped. And that's how, honestly, the medical practice of the future, which is what we're building here, is going to be set up. There's going to be education and empowerment and teaching and accountability, and then there's going to be one-on-one consults where we really hammer out what are we going to do with diagnostics and therapeutics. All right, that's enough for one day. Thank you all for joining me. It's great that you're all here. I'm so grateful for your attention, which I really do value. I'd encourage all of you to check out the 14-Day Reset, which contains the top habits that I share with every single patient for them to do every day when we start them in one of our programs. It's not necessarily the right thing for everyone in the entire world, but all comers, it's where we start our patients for many, many reasons. I'm going to be coming out with a workshop about why that's going to accompany the launch of our group coaching program. It's going to be called the 14-Day Reset Work Implementation Workshop, and I'm excited to share that with you all. And we'll be announcing how that'll be available and when it'll be available as we launch the group in the community. Thank you all for joining us. Take the 14-Day Reset, check it out. Be well.