DOCTORS REVEAL How They Healed Their AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE | Cynthia Li & Terry Wahls

when the dietitian analyzed my diet she goes you know i have never analyzed a diet that was this nutrient-dense in all of my years of research so um the first thing i did was uh i went back to basics and so i did you know i i did not suddenly just start seeing an acupuncturist or start you know trying energy medicine or anything that's really alternative i was like okay no i'm a doctor i start off with no i didn't i didn't uh and oh god meditation was like it was like pulling teeth so um no i went back to basics and i i took out my um pathology 101 textbook yeah right pathologic basis of disease robinson co-training exactly that's the we all take it for sure second year medical school right and kumar kumar was my pathology teacher oh wow so i took it out you know i still had it uh it was highlighted dog-eared i mean and it it actually was good for me like if i know neuroplasticity right it kind of brought me back to this time where i had more of a sense of agency over my life so in that sense it was also healing i didn't recognize it at the time um but i started reading about how diseases how chronic disease develops and you know about cellular repair and cellular injury and i was like wait a minute and they actually talk about this was you know this was published i don't even know which edition but you know 20 years ago yeah where they say the one cause one effect paradigm does not work anymore yeah right we're in this this complex living environment where nutrition matters where environmental toxins i mean this is 20 years ago yeah and they probably wrote that several years before that it was published right so i started reading that and i thought wait a minute and and then that diseases are not defined by a set of criteria yeah they're this continuum this this process and that yeah i remember i remember going back and reading chapter one and it said any pathologic change is always preceded by a biochemical change yes which means that anything you see like on a microscope there's got to be a lot of years of stuff going wrong with your biochemistry and physiology before that happens yes years and we don't we don't know how to look at that and western medicine we just wait till you have something wrong and then we go oh yeah now i don't know what it is right right because in the way that we've been trained inflammation which is what i had right widespread inflammation in my nerves inflammation in my gut inflammation in your brain in my thyroid exactly it doesn't qualify as a treatable disease inflammation right that's what i was joking say functional medicine doctors are inflammologists you know yes i love that i remember that from the first functional medicine conference i went to yeah where i gave a talk on that right right right so um and but so that was a really big aha moment for me was wait a minute okay i understand this sudden disturbance would i call it in beijing but then i had the thyroiditis before that which was sort of right the ant the the preceding trigger yeah um and then before that okay wait a minute you know what when i was in residency post call 36 hour shifts i would my muscles would feel like really crampy like i felt like i'd run a marathon and i was dizzy and i just assumed well of course everyone feels this way because they're exhausted sleeping right right and so i started going backwards and realizing okay this has been going on for a long time and for some people that can be really you know sort of disheartening but for me at where i was it was a little ounce of hope because it meant that i could sort of stepwise piecemeal um address inflammation in a way that i could tolerate what i was really afraid of because i was so brittle was having any kind of setback that would push me down further and um so if i could do it in a way that was more controlled and gentle then um it felt like something i could move forward with so what did you do and um or the things that helped you recover so what one of the things was um yeah was it by the way chronic syndrome is not something most people recover from right fibromyalgia is not people something people recover from absolutely unless you see a functional medicine doctor right right or have some kind of some one of those you know spontaneous remissions which is one in a million probably right um yeah so so what i ended up doing also was distancing myself from the diagnosis and the prognosis because it was more despairing my marriage was held together by a single thread you know i had two young kids i had everything to lose so i was like if i don't get my act together and start trying differently then i'm going to lose whatever you know what what little i have left so i was really motivated and you know the first thing i did was really i started reading about well i knew i had to get sleep if i can't get sleep i'm gonna not have enough energy so really looking understanding the circadian clock and you know i learned things that i was surprised i didn't know already you know i knew about the pet pineal gland and the hypothalamus and we have this master clock and we have jet lag and that's why but i didn't know about um every organ having its own yes clock your own rhythm and then even a whole field of chronobiology where the different kinds of chemo is better given at different times of the day to work better i know this is in conventional medicine right and it makes i mean it makes like complete rational sense right so um i started first of all being more regimented about just okay you know i'm gonna wake up you know and get up out of bed um even if i feel kind of miserable but i'm gonna my body needs to know that it's awake and that it's alive so really basic fundamental um steps and um and i learned that when we deviate i mean particularly when you're brittle like that i mean of course when we're more resilient like now i have much more flexibility but when when i was brittle you know any uh when you stray away so often from a routine it causes stress on the body so i was like oh okay this is maybe an easier way right i can reduce stress on my body yeah rhythm yeah we all look different my dog i feed my dog at the same times every day right why do i do that for myself you know you know and he gets walks now at the same time why don't i do that for myself so it was i started syncing myself also with my kids right like okay i'm going to take care of my kids i can take care of myself at the same time so i think that also as in that caretaker mentality you know as a mother or a partner or a doctor is we we tend to put ourselves last and so it was kind of time to put myself first you know as my first patient that's good and so you did the rhythm and what else changed your diet and then um yeah and you know a lot of it was just asking new questions um the diet piece i thought i was eating quote healthy um you know which was largely vegetarian um i was cooking meals but also doing a lot of prepackaged meals but you know not a lot of processed stuff and it wasn't until i saw an acupuncturist so the acupuncturist that i saw robert levine who's in berkeley uh california he um he was brilliant really brilliant he's still practicing and he's a good dear friend of mine a mentor of mine i learned a ton from him about understanding the body in terms of systems so when my thyroid was out of whack it wasn't just my thyroid it was my whole hormone system yeah which is tied then to the digestive system which is tied to the immune system like it suddenly started making sense into the thigh bone right yeah exactly and the body is connected to the brain which is actually amazing in medicine that our entire training teaches us the opposite that there's all these organ systems right we detect the gi system and the liver and the lungs and the brain and the heart and the horm and you go to specialists for every different part of you and nobody connects the dots right right and traditional chinese medicine is actually a system of thinking of the body as a system and that's what functional medicine is it's a systems thinking yes absolutely and so you know we can extrapolate that to any size system right we look at our communities and our world right and you know one of the things i feel like that drives almost every everything if not everything that we do as individuals and that we do as societies is how do i get more energy yeah right my qigong teacher was talking about that how do we get more energy you know whether it's through you know qi means energy yeah whether it's through solar energy you know fossil fuels whether it's yeah i mean it's food nature movement um so you know i began to shift my thinking in relationship to health and disease in a much more living sort of embodied way so the but the diet thing he was the first one he was like you know you're so deficient right now like i think you need more meat yeah and you need more of these heavier foods like you're doing lots of salads and you're doing which are great but not for you right now so i hadn't even thought about a personalized diet yeah and i was like more meats what are you talking about you know and this is before paleo days and all that um i began researching ancestral diets and you know the work of um dentist uh weston a price price right and it suddenly made sense like oh yeah like okay i'm gonna eat like my ancestors ate i'm going to prepare food the way my ancestors prepared so i can maximize nutrient density nutrient density equals more energy yeah um and then the gluten issue came up uh you know i was really skeptical yeah it's one of the biggest drivers of thyroid disease hashimoto's yes yes and the celiac experts know that but endocrinologists don't right so there's no crosstalk there either and this is in conventional medicine right um so and i do remember asking my endocrinologist like what can i do what can i do and he said nothing you know it's genetic oh gosh no it's um right right it's a genetic predisposition but not predetermination and um so the but the gluten thing didn't actually arise i think i was partly in denial about it um i just you know there were lots of rabbit holes that i knew about and i just didn't want to go down as long as i was steadily getting better it was my older daughter who she was five at the time i was taking her to her first dentist visit and you know i felt like as a family we ate pretty well she didn't do a lot of sweets and um but she had not just one cavity at her visit she had six cavities wow yeah and i was floored so uh you know and the dentist kept saying well don't feel guilty don't feel guilty you know and i was like wait a minute i wasn't feeling guilty until you just said that but um it made me investigate like something else is going on like i know how we eat i know how she brushes and i know cavities happen but like six it just it didn't compute so i started researching and that's when i came across west nate price's work uh around um the condition of teeth tied directly to diet but then going deeper and then in my research i came across gluten and gluten causing enamel defects gluten you know causing inflammation in the gut which therefore could translate into poor oral hygiene and or just conditioning of the gums and the teeth and um so that was just kind of another step in that process when i realized oh i got to go back and again this is not unconventional this is just traditional hippocrates said all diseases begin in the gut right so we're just kind of going back and i realized i have to learn i have to learn how to heal my gut as another step did you still have digestive symptoms after that initial gastroenteritis in china order to get better uh it was they were largely uh quiescent until i removed gluten and i removed gluten and i had massive withdrawal diarrhea irritable bowel and you know and again this was kind of before the time that i realized i understood about detox and how healing happens is that often it gets a lot worse before it gets better and that it could be a good sign so i um i was really frightened by how severe my my reaction was when i stopped gluten so i was thinking it was a bad thing um but then you know what i stuck with it and a week later it calmed down and then my health improved a notch so and not only that but you know we changed the way that our whole family ate and um my younger daughter so my my older daughter's teeth like you know really basically resolve i mean they became really strong some of her cavities even filled really like they re-calcified and uh didn't have to get filled my younger daughter um who didn't really have any uh thing that you know was alarming but she she had like this perioral eczema which is this dermatitis which is very difficult to treat with it's often dairy steroids i mean which is how we treat most dermatitis um they put steroids on it exactly exactly why is the skin irritated right from the inside not the outside so she had that and she had she would get asthma when she got colds and both of those are totally totally resolved off of gluten well off of gluten but also doing the ancestral diet mm-hmm so often dairy yes yes yeah and um you know so it was just one of those things i was like you know you can't make this stuff up and um this stuff isn't written up um and it's very individualized so but if you look in the literature you know doctor said where's the evidence where's the evidence well there's 900 000 papers published every year most doctors haven't read that many of them and the truth is that most of the ones that are on these subjects are completely ignored and when you put all the dots together there's a pattern there in the data that suggests that these things are real that there is something called leaky gut that there is inflammation that comes from the microbiome that you know foods do cause reactions in the body that lead to all these diseases that heavy metals and toxins aren't an issue that cause disease i mean there's no lack of data it's just not data that doctors pay attention to in literature right and you know and it takes on average 14 year i thought seventeen oh seventeen oh god that's not good for information that's not a good day for information and research to translate over to clinical care yeah i think that's a good day the guy the guy who discovered that we should wash our hands before giving you know any surgery or uh childbirth was basically ridiculed for suggesting that doctors could be causing their patients to get sick by not washing their hands and he was basically exiled and ended up dying in sort of disgrace with no money and you know excommunicated from the medical community semi-wise and it took 50 years for them to go yeah maybe we should wash their hands oh my god no no where's the science on that right yeah all right well it was just it was it was an enough amount of doctors that oh you could suggest that a doctor would be causing their patients to die from childbirth fever because they didn't wash their hands that's nonsense yeah so that it is tough to change medical paradigms right right but i mean some of it is common sense yeah we don't need science to show us that right well i mean when they didn't know about bacteria common sense was yeah that's true that's true yeah so yeah i mean i kind of just did this stepwise um progression to get to the point where i was much more able to get out of the house yeah and then um and one of the the things i also explored which i would say maybe is down the unconventional path was um i began to i began to shadow integrative doctors on just different um different paths in integrative medicine or sort of you know i didn't actually know about functional medicine at the time so i was shadowing a um an anthroposophical medicine doc you know someone doing like sort of anti-aging hormone therapies um and then it was when i was shadowing a integrative pediatrician who said well you know what are you this is i mean i was still unwell i was had taken off work for a couple of years and but i was starting to think like oh how does it how would it look if i were to return to work like what are the different ways i could practice and it was the pediatrician who said what are you interested in i said well you know i really i love the traditional chinese medicine parent it makes so much sense to me the system's thinking you know about the gut you know sort of being the foundation of healing and i'm really you know ancestral health you know uh figures into it and she said um it sounds like you you know you're interested in functional medicine i was like what is that what's that what is that so um and she really strongly recommended that i go see the uh take this course with institute for functional medicine yeah so i it was sort of a a bone for me right like i i could i was aiming to get healthy enough to be able to travel to go attend a conference and so um and it came to santa monica and i live in in the bay area so it was it felt doable it wasn't yeah cross country and um and i went and it was i think i had that aha moment like you did when you you know listened to jeff bland i was like oh my god oh my god and like this is this is like this is something that's been developed and developing and there's a framework i don't have to make this up no um so it was a it was a really important turning point for me it gave me hope both in you know as a as a patient but also as a doctor how can i give back um what it did also cause was it caused a little bit of anxiety yeah i had to relearn medicine i had to relearn medicine but then suddenly i went from having no or very few options to having infinite options and how to get better yeah yeah right okay like which diet when you know which supplements you know what do i you know what do i rule myself out for mold and mercury and all these things and it felt very overwhelming and so that's when i ended up i i actually didn't know this i did and you know i had a very an unconventional navigator was we had a visit from some friends of ours who uh ended up staying with us and um we had known them for years but they'd never stayed with us and we've always known them through sort of the sustainability work right so i was i had been doing environmental health my husband is in public policy around renewable energy so we knew them through work circles and anyways we were hosting them for a weekend and they come we knew that the wife pia was um was also clairvoyant so she was she was a sustainable architect and her husband was one of the leading climate physicists so there was this very skill to have exactly so they're very dynamic couple we knew about her clairvoyance through sort of hearsay but we we had never experienced it up front and kind of never really were curious enough to go there oh yeah exactly that's how i felt so they end up staying in our house and um one of the things was that uh my younger daughter was having night terrors and um for four months which did not bode well for my insomnia and we had tried everything i mean and and actually gone out kind of on an alternative limb right she was doing like chamomile drops and um you know some homeopathy uh but nothing really touched her and so pia walks into her house and she starts coughing coughing coughing and uh and she said you know there's something uh there's something going on the energy in this house is really heavy you know do you guys feel it and we're all looking at each other like okay she said well but it's really heavy and so she she said do you mind if i just walk around so she's walking around and she said it's heaviest in the girls room and so you know nothing opens your mind like desperation right sure right so people only change when they have uh when they don't have any peace syndrome anymore you know any peace syndrome is not enough pain yes yes when people have enough pain they're gonna do whatever right right and you hit that dead end right so i just said i said you know what maybe it's heavy because sonia my daughter's been crying every single night right and she said wait a minute she said no no it's the other way around sonia is crying because she feels the heaviness too i'm like okay whatever so she goes off to whole foods of all places gets a sage wand right with a smudge stick which i had never heard of before it's a native american way of course exactly so she just goes around she said well you it's really important that you come with me you're the lady of the house and your intention really matters and i'm like but my intention is i don't actually believe what you're doing she said no no just just say whatever doesn't belong here needs to leave and if the thing that really um convinced me to do it with her well first of all is low risk i mean there was right i'm always looking for high potential gain low risk a little sage exactly never hurt anyone um but get out she said that she had a vision and she described this vision of this man you know tall slender reddish brown hair balding right here wearing a plaid shirt and it sent chills down my my just threw out my body because this was the seller of the house who we'd met three times like 2 18. wow and so she said he died he had not died he had moved out but he had not wanted to move out and she said that's just what keeps coming to me when i look at the energy and i was like okay whoa weird but okay like that's really spot-on yeah so we just walked around and uh you know and i was kind of just being very um sympathetic too i i sympathized with the seller right that he had to leave his home yeah so um you know but but i was i wasn't holding my breath and from that night on sonia slept soundly amazing i mean you know to this day she's an incredible sleeper so you know and then there was still part of me who was like well you know there's no control you know how do we really know maybe it was coincidental but before pia left what she did was she said um i actually approached her and i said well if you can lift the heaviness in a house can you live what's wrong with me can you lift heaviness in my body you know i mean i'm much smaller than this house and she said oh you know it doesn't work quite like that um and she said but i can do one thing i can teach you how to develop intuition which i had never heard of i did not know that intuition was something like music or art like you can develop it yeah you can practice it and she was very pragmatic about it and she said no this doesn't mean you're going to be clairvoyant right but it just means that you can learn to open this other side of your brain that has probably been closed off for a long time because of your training and your upbringing so i um so she taught me how to do that um well she taught me what i needed to do to begin to practice to open up to that and a lot of it was it was so basic a lot of it was just silencing my analytical mind and being in my body and that second part was well actually they were both really hard they were both really hard silent analytical mind being in my body um because my body was so uncomfortable yeah and so she said you know you can only heal something that you are connected to you can heal something you're just detached from so that was healing on multiple levels both that i had to inhabit my body which was probably one of the biggest um steps in terms of healing not being afraid of it but going into it and then also um learning how to read sensations for as messages and not just symptoms that you know we're making them miserable yeah yeah i always say you're the smartest doctor in the room is your own body if you listen to it absolutely absolutely so the intuition piece came in incredibly handy when i was introduced to functional medicine i wasn't really practicing it um because i was doing steadily better and then i were you trying some of it on yourself i was trying some of it on myself but like it was it was you know i mean you know how it is when you're like it's like you know someone wants you to play a piano piece you can't even read the notes yet and it just it's laborious so i wasn't um i wasn't motivated but then i go to the intro to functional medicine conference and saw all these tools but then felt overwhelmed and then i was motivated to practice intuition and i really learned to use intuition to guide me like how do i choose what to do next um is this the right diet for me is gluten really you know is it something that i can return to or is it something that i really need to stay off of strictly so um it began to it made that navigation much easier for me and um and it's something that i encourage my patients to you know to develop if they're interested it's simple it just takes a lot of repetition and quiet listening so you found you know one of the causes was gluten right mm-hmm and toxins you got from china that you've yes worked on getting rid of right was there anything else um so you know i learned how to balance my hormones um i think my hormones were really out of whack after that that incident what does that mean well my my estrogen and progesterone levels were really low so um i you know for a while i actually took bioidentical hormones to just support my system so i could get strong enough just to help balance out the immune system and then as my whole system got stronger i was able to really wean off of those and and just last year even like 14 years later i actually completely tapered off my thyroid medicine as well so i didn't know that was possible yeah amazing what happens when you learn how to take care of your mind amazing yeah so first we'll talk about the dietary approach so the way you might think about it when i talk with the public is sort of a pre-walls diet is a mediterranean diet which everyone agrees is a great diet more vegetables uh legumes uh more fish so nice healthy diet and then the first level of my diet we have people stress and the goal is nine cups of vegetables three cups of greens three cups of sulfur rich vegetables in the cabbage onion mushroom family and three cups of deeply colored things like beets carrots berries and then i want them to remove gluten a casein and eggs because they're the three most uh common uh food antigens that can cause an excessive immune response no more waffles no no more waffles you actually know i make cashew waffles i make all kinds of great things you can you can you can kind of cheat there are things you can do so that's the first level and you can do that as a vegetarian in that it is fairly close to a gluten-free dairy-free version of a mediterranean diet then the next level is becomes more paleolithic so we reduce the gluten-free grains and legumes to no more than two servings a week we add in and stress organ meats uh seaweeds uh uh uh if you're going to have nuts and seeds we suggest that you uh have them soaked and sprouted so why oregon meats why organ meats because you know organ meats are something people avoid right liver kidneys thymus delicious it seems like the poor man's food you know kidney steak and kidney pie and all that stuff yeah and what what um what's the rationale for the the organ meats well uh first off our ancestors would have eaten those uh they're a third of the carcass uh when you harvest an animal so that would have been an essential part of the diet and interestingly enough if there was plenty of meat they left the muscle meat behind and took the organs so the liver great source of vitamin a uh in the fat soluble vitamins uh is so a k a moderate source of e a great source of b vitamins a great source of minerals that are very easily absorbed as opposed to the minerals and plants which are a little more difficult for us to absorb and then great source of coenzyme cube creatine carnitine so really really marvelous nutrition for us and a lot of those are mitochondrial nutrients right they are mitochondrial nutrients and which is important for healthy aging and everything you know the cherry is interesting because uh if you look at i've done this before you google like liver nutrition facts right and then like and then the nutrition facts for the most amazing vegetable you could possibly imagine or grain or be and it and it just it's like it's like michael jordan it's gonna be a high school basketball it's like it's that big of a difference it's shocking it's like not just a little bit it's like three four five ten orders of magnitude more nutrients in liver than in almost any other food correct correct absolutely which is absolutely a super food the one nutrient it does not have is vitamin c that's all right so so um that's a good reason to eat your salads uh and your berries to get the vitamin c now the the caveat i'll have is for my carnivore friends who eat only meat i have to caution them to be careful about how much liver they have because you don't want to um overdose on vitamin a so the liver is really great for you six to eight ounces a week so that's you know up to a half pound of liver a week you know the first nation people in up in alaska they actually would give it to the the the explorers because they want to kill them so they give them polar bear liver and they better literally die from vitamin a poisoning so liver is really great uh it it is our family's uh favorite dish so uh my family makes liver for me on my birthday because they know uh it's it's a special meal for us we just really love that a lot for me for me it was a poor man's meal because we were very poor in new york city when i lived as a kid with my mom and and and we would love this 21 bedroom apartment and we'd have liver and onions and rice and i thought that was like a fancy meal chicken liver you and it is actually quite handy because it is relatively inexpensive you can get organic liver uh very inexpensively because the market doesn't understand how valuable that nutrition is another really great organ meat of course is heart heart is sort of like filet mignon that is just uh so delicious incredibly delicious uh and then you know oysters uh uh clams uh mussels uh those are all organ meats uh oh really quite quite uh quite delicious what about the liver toxicity like of liver because people oh what liver is number the waste basket of the body where the toxins go is it about to eat that so where the toxins go is really the fat of the animal so people like bacon so if you're worried about toxicities be sure that your bacon is organic if you're if you're concerned about um a liver's fatty liver is fatty i would certainly have it be organic i i think that is uh prudent uh my my preference you know have liver get it from an organic animal so um so terry just to summarize the dietary principles it's it's getting rid of gluten dairy and eggs eggs getting rid of grains and beans it's getting rid of obviously i'll process food sugar sugars right more vegetables more lots more vegetables and tell us about your like nine cups of vegetables and the different kinds of vegetable categories that's really important to help you understand it's not just any vegetable that you need you need vegetables that contain certain compounds which are medicines correct so so we want to have lots of greens greens are a great source of carotenoids lutein zeaxanthin museum xanthan these are essential nutrients for your retina and also for your brain because your eyes are really just extensions of brains uh they'll reduce the risk of macular degeneration of cataracts uh and dementia you're also gonna get great source of vitamin k and in neuroimmune conditions ms in cognitive decline there's a severe in epidemiologic studies the vitamin k levels are extraordinarily low in those population groups so really lots of reasons to get your greens um now we're gonna go on to why i want you to have cabbage onion mushrooms uh so the sulfur is a really great support for your detox great support for making glutathione intracellular antioxidants great support for your mitochondria also that's the broccoli family uh in the onion family yes also uh good for your blood vessel endothelial function and then mushrooms there are a wide variety of mushrooms that stimulate your natural killer cells priming your adaptive and innate immunity they also are associated with uh better nerve growth factor production in animal models uh and in human studies associated with much lower rates of cognitive decline uh and depression wow well i feel good about taking my mushroom powders every morning so take your mushrooms i have mushrooms uh in my tea every day so amazing lots of reasons to have your mushrooms okay so that's the food part now now you've talked about you didn't you didn't get the colors yet so there were also you know three cups of colors uh and i want to have a wise okay wait wait before you go before you go on so the government says five to nine servings a serving is half a cup so you're talking about not five to nine you're talking about eighteen cups just so people get the other well no nine no eighteen eighteen servings nine cups eighteen surgeries right you know and i'm not trying to have you um eat more than what your appetite will allow you the point i'm trying to have you do is you eat some your protein and we have strategies for vegetarians uh or meat eaters and you eat lots of vegetables you don't need to be hungry but you're not eating junk when you're hungry you're eating these vegetables and we want to have sufficient protein and lots of vegetables now when you do that you're going to poop people um and of course we have to make modifications for people who have inflammatory bowel disease who can't have as much fiber so when we talk about this mark this is for the public this is for what you start and then you assess your response and if you're having loose stools you're going to have less fiber if you're have if you're still constipation more fiber more fermented foods more sauerkraut than kimchi so that's the food part now you've taken this along with the lifestyle aspects and the stress and the exercise and muscle stimulation and hot and cold therapies and all these other modalities and you you know you've studied them and one of the challenges for traditional medicine is that when we look at research we like to study one thing let's study this drug for this disease in this patient and one molecular pathway at a time yeah it's like it's like it's like i was talking to a doctor a scientist about dementia say look these patients have dementia is a syndrome there's many causes for it it could be the microbiome it could be gluten it could be toxins it could be lyme it could be mold it could be insulin resistance and it could you know it could be a lot of multiple of them right and so it's all the marketing nutritional deficiencies or hormonal imbalances and all these things i said you know what's going on is that these patients need to support all these things in order to get better which is well let's just study one thing i'm like let's see if diet is right it's important to exercise it's important to sleep right it's important you know to deal with stress are you saying we just study exercise but not diet and the rest it just doesn't make any sense it's like let's just let's just see if we can grow a plant by just giving it nitrogen we won't get phosphorus potassium we don't have water we won't give sunlight we won't have a healthy soil but we're just going to give it potassium and see if the plant can grow like it just doesn't make any it doesn't make any sense so you you've been so pioneering in creating these multi-modal interventions somehow where you look at multiple interventions and and then they pass by the review boards for the research and they're actually clinically far more effective than anything we've seen for ms and these chronic autoimmune neurologic issues i have a really unique reason i'm able to do this mark so i was on the institutional review board for the university of iowa for years before i became disabled so they watched me become profoundly disabled and then recover you know walk and bike i'm still on the institutional review board uh and so when i came with my first protocol you know actually the review board uh declined what rejected the the protocol but the ch and the reason ultimately i got to this all got to happen the dean of the college of medicine called the head of the institutional review board and said i really want terry steady to get approved so work with her to meet whatever concerns you have so she can do her little study because i want her to do that that little single arm safety and feasibility study so then the head of the irb called me arranged for me to meet with the pharmacy and therapeutics committee because they were worried about the supplements uh and then i so we addressed the supplements we had a pretty strict exclusionary criteria we had to do a bunch of safety labs so we got that part worked out then they were worried about the diet because it's crazy diet because you know excluding food groups uh and nobody could follow this diet so then i had to do a pre-study and fortunately we had someone following find that that was me so they analyzed my diet and when the dietitian analyzed my diet she said and she she had done dietary analyses research for about 30 years she goes you know i have never analyzed a diet that was this nutrient dense in all of my years of research amazing so we got approval and we're able to to do our our little study and now the people we we enrolled i had a progressive ms secondary progressive prime progressive uh they were using canes and walkers they had severe fatigue uh nobody with cognitive decline got it because we excluded those folks we asked them to abandon and they were having like five servings of gluten dairy and eggs every day one and a half servings of vegetables a day so really a standard american diet no exercise uh they're exhausted yeah at the end of 12 months they're having on average uh eight cups of vegetables a day wow so dramatic uh change and they had uh so sevens and they were fully compliant with their diet ninety percent of the days and then on the exercise doing the exercise and the e-stem every day 75 percent of the days they had done their exercise in eastern wow the average meditation uh minutes uh i think was 7.6 minutes per day and the self-massage was 3.6 minutes per day so these exhausted people did remarkably well with this complicated multimodal intervention it's impressive now the other reason i'm able to do my crazy research mark is i'm not getting funded by the nih you mean they won't find you they won't fund you we we write grants we get scathing reviews we just got another grant back scathing reviews and and we'll negatives negative yeah negative why what are they saying well you know the the reviewers clearly have a pharmaceutical uh point of view uh they didn't think people could uh do the diets uh um the swank and the walls diets were too unpalatable uh people wouldn't follow the diet uh they thought it was unrealistic that we're gonna follow people for two years uh why are we doing mris because um you need drugs to have a favorable impact oh my god but crazy okay so so we have we have that challenge now the the benefit i have marcus because my work has been actually effective at transforming people's lives we've transformed the lives of people who are cold calling the university saying i believe in what dr walls is doing i'd like to support her research it was fun just fun to fund you they fund our research and so that's how i that's how i funded the first study the um safety and feasibility study it was a group out of canada uh founded by ashton embry and his wife joan they gave us the funds for that first small pilot study and the uh and we had a phd student that helped to help me run that study in the university in the va gave me time which of course is hard to get to run the study so what did the study find well you know that was that very first study which we showed that people could radically change their diet they could do the meditation the exercise and the fatigue severity on fatigue severity scale score goes from seven to one seven total fatigue in every aspect of your life one no fatigue uh dropped uh 2.38 points and 0.45 is clinically meaningful so that's a huge drop and uh the anxiety uh remarkably went down depression remarkably went down memory non-verbal memory uh and performance uh went remarkably up uh and half of our folks had improvements in their uh 25-foot walking time for progressive ms when you anticipate a 20 decline per year yeah if we as a group we held them flat so as a group that's that was remarkably they didn't get worse which normally they right yeah that's why that's why they call it progressive right so that's very exciting stuff so that was the first study that people could tolerate it they would do it and that they didn't get worse and they often got better and had a reduction in fatigue what were the next follow-up studies you've done and what did they show so the next study was a small study again funded by our donors and and now we just did the diet it was randomized a relapsing remitting uh study i end in 12 weeks so shorter duration so it's less costly to run people again could radically change their diet fatigue went down quality of life went remarkably up uh and the um speed this at which you could do a 25 foot walk remarkably improved and the hand function also improved uh compared to the control group so you you just got a two million dollar gift to support your study uh uh the sort of clinically isolated syndrome and relapsing remitting ms so yeah so talk about that yeah that you know that was a very exciting study uh we're about to launch that just before the pandemic we're going to have newly diagnosed and ms clinic isolated syndrome folks baseline assessments baseline mris basically give them the walls protocol uh and have monthly support calls uh bring them back in a year repeat all the assessments including the mris and then the pandemic happened uh and so unfortunately unfortunately we had we had not started our study uh so uh we had to redesign everything uh and reimagine the study so the study is now a virtual study uh and it has three arms uh once again newly diagnosed folks who have been offered drugs and have declined drugs uh and we basically put them on uh the walls uh diet a stress reduction program in an exercise program and we do virtual assessments every three months a monthly support calls then the control arm are folks who are again newly diagnosed and are taking disease modifying therapy and they can have whatever diet and lifestyle interventions that they want and then the third arm we said that we need a third arm now because we can't get the mris the way we hoped uh what we're doing is we're extracting the medical records here at the university of iowa uh of newly diagnosed folks with ms and clinically isolated syndrome and we are counting it in everyone from their medical records their number of lesions uh the number of relapses uh and the progression of symptoms or remission of symptoms yeah during that time period so we will uh probably have it'll probably be another uh eight months eight months of data collection and then we will analyze our data so you know with ms um there's often white matter changes in the brain in other words there's scarring in the brain that you can see on an mri do you see changes in that as well what we're going to find out i do know uh that in our intervention arm we do have some folks who are having more relapses who have elected to go on drugs we are also having some folks who have had their uh follow-up mris and lesions have disappeared and they're not having relapses and their neurologists are like wow this is really amazing yeah uh and so we'll we'll see what happens uh at the end um certainly the vast majority of of folks in our intervention arm are reporting symptoms are going down uh their motor uh problems are reduced their uh sensory problems are reduced uh vision is improving impressive impressive so so how is this research being received now what's different about it because it seems like you hit a lot of resistance at the beginning ms society wouldn't even talk to you they don't like your quack and now they're wanting to talk to you work with you what are you seeing why all this was happening i think uh the ted talk went viral uh i i got a book deal the book was a bestseller the ms society monitors social media and they saw that when my book came out all of the attention which led them to prioritize and create a wellness conference and actually tracked me down and got me to the wellness conference i was one of those one of uh the uh scientists there that's amazing uh and then they made a priority to fund dietary and lifestyle research and funded art and really the the wave study so that that one was funded by the ms society so great terry um and and the work you're doing is so important and putting the foundation of research behind it and showing the efficacy and i think have you seen your your neurological colleagues who specialize in ms start to change at all what they're doing have a different view are they still stuck and diet doesn't matter like where where are we at well um we're so i'm making a lot more progress that there's more research that the microbiome is altered there are more people doing dietary intervention studies you know now we have uh some small studies uh about calorie restriction uh fasting ketogenic diets uh the paleolithic diet mediterranean diet swank diet mcdougall diet so all these small studies our wave study is the largest study today we are we have a protocol in front of the irb uh for a couple more studies uh that i'm really excited about um one is a study of the the online program that i run yeah so we're going to evaluate uh the dietary intake and uh whether or not that is associated with changes in quality of life uh and fatigue so that that's going to be very very exciting uh because if an online program can do those things and that makes this you know available to everyone yeah uh and then we have uh plans for another study uh a big study wall's diet ketogenic diet dietary guidelines that will include mris at baseline and at two years and uh that will be a study funded by a uh again a very generous uh donor it's amazing though you think this should be something funded by the nih right this should be funding by united states and and and now you know we're having private donors doing which is fine but it's unfortunate that you know you can get millions and billions of dollars to study drugs but you can't get five cents to steady lifestyle or nutrition and um that that's because there's this this dedication to thinking we can understand biology molecular pathway by molecular pathway but biology is a network of uh uh balancing and counterbalancing pathways absolutely and i think if we're going to create health we have to study uh complex systems and you have to support the entire system that's right i mean that's what functional medicine is it's treating the system not the individual symptoms or diseases and then when you do that it's the only way to create health i mean you're not actually treating ms you're just creating a healthy person by getting them off crappy food getting a real diet getting exercise reduce stress sleep better take a few supplements optimize your pathways metabolic pathways i mean it's you're not you're not really treating ms specifically right you're you're correct and that's what people don't realize this is not an ms treatment this is a health treatment and for anybody with an autoimmune disease this can be a very powerful model you know when i first had my recovery my partner started complaining about what i was doing and i got called in they had to speak with the chief of staff and the chief of medicine at the university uh and then i got sent to the uh complimentary alternative medicine clinic and my chief of medicine sat me down said terry you got to talk about it differently because you're making people upset and what i learned the way i shifted my conversation mark was that i i told my patients that um we're going to monitor your drugs and your disease but we're going to focus on supporting uh your how your cells run the chemistry of life and we'll just watch see if i have to adjust your medicines if you run the chemistry of life a little bit better and so we're going to do it through diet and lifestyle and that's why i documented the chart that i'm supporting their health and then we will watch for side effects on their medicines yeah so i had to learn how to talk about in a way that was more comfortable for people and to make sure that people did not think i was treating disease that i was working on uh creating better health that's why you say science you know functional medicine is a science and creating health and disease goes away as a side effect that is exactly right and and what we're simply doing is monitoring the drugs to be sure people are not over medicated oh exactly right you know i i had a huge problem when i wrote my book blood sugar solution because people started following the book and it was the number one bestseller and people were following the program and we're getting all these calls my blood pressure's too low my blood sugar's too low i'm like yeah you don't need your medication so i had to put in a big warning it says if you're on medication this program can be dangerous because it will prevent you from needing those medications and if you're taking them your blood sugar and your blood pressure going to go too low so you need to taper off them with your doctor yeah so yeah we did that as well we put all these warnings in my in my uh reprints in the book to say you gotta if you're on meds you have to work closely with your doc because you may need to use steadily exactly so let's switch topics a little bit i want to talk about the microbiome you mentioned it briefly but i remember years ago we were 20 years ago i had an ms patient and she said to me dr hyman well i have irritable bowel and whenever my urinal valve gets bad my ms gets back my bowels better my ms is better and i was like oh noted noted like i when patients say that stuff to me i pay attention and that was before even the word microbiome was in the culture at all and in functional medicine we always address the god we always adjusted god as a way of dealing with inflammation and ms is an inflammatory disease so what what is the story of the microbiome nms and why is there such a link and how does how does it all connect and what do we do about it yeah how does the wall's protocol affect the microbiome well we have a greater appreciation that uh your microbiome is talking to your t cells your t regulatory cells uh it affects your immune tone of how how many pro inflammation molecules you're going to make and which immune cells are going to be active we also know if you have a leaky you probably also have a leaky brain and these immune cells and these inflammatory molecules are getting into your brain and activating the immune cells in your brain called microglia and your microglia are continually sensing the environment and either making it very inflammatory which is causing a relapse or very reparative which is rebuilding the myelin that's been damaged and that is going to depend on what you're eating and what you're doing uh and so it's part of why i you know i i talk to my patients are you pooping rocks logs snakes pudding or tea it's putting your tea you need less fiber if it's rocks or dry logs you need more fiber and more sauerkraut and kimchi if you've got snakes and they're getting into your pants then you probably still need to have less fiber snakes are ideal but only if they don't get into your pants okay so it's not it's not way easier than you know the crystal chart one to seven that's the best description of poop i've ever heard little graphic and visual but i think we all get the point yeah you know everyone laughs and they all get it they all understand it and they understand you know snakes in the pants are a problem so a lot of times in functional medicine we treat the gut directly like we we really focus on gut reparative therapy is a 5r program in functional medicine do you need to do that with the walls protocol or do you just do the general approach and it works or do you need to dive in there and say oh this person has extra gut inflammation or they have lycromancy or they have this and that parasite you know what what is interesting marcus i when i went through my personal transformation my only clinic practice was at the va yeah at the va you can't you really can't do any functional medicine labs zero and the supplements i could get were b vitamins uh and fish oil uh yeah and that that was like that was it and what i discovered is by basically doing the walls protocol man i was reversing disease left and right and so what i learned was behavior change group clinics group visits and the power of starting with the walls protocol listening closely to how people responded and making adjustments based on their response but someone had parasite or really bad gut don't think of probiotics something and other things they may they may and there's no doubt if i could have done functional medicine testing it would have i could have recovered people more quickly and there are people who i i couldn't recover as well as i would have liked that had i been able to do functional medicine testing i could have probably done better yeah incredible so the the microbiome is a huge role in our immune system and then across the spectrum of diseases in a spectrum of inflammation we've talked about that a lot in the podcast i do think that the the work you're doing is so radical because it does it does affect everything it affects your nutrient levels it affects your microbiome it reduces inflammation it helps to optimize the function of all the systems in your body that you were talking about but terry you know your work is so important you've touched so many millions of people and you're bringing hope where there was none especially in the field of ms it's one of those horrible conditions that you know i've treated so many patients and it's remarkable when you follow these principles and i followed similar principles over the years treating these patients with great success uh and hopefully this will get more into the mainstream but what you've done is you've created access points you've got your books you've got your cookbook and also now you have these online programs so tell us a little bit about the online programs people are listening and they want to join where would they go how do they find it what is the program several times a year we have a free five-day challenge and that is five days of lessons that people get from me uh two lessons a day to help you on your journey of adapting uh diet and lifestyle and then we have the autoimmune intervention mastery course again which is online so we have people from all over the globe uh there are uh five modules lots of lessons within each module to take you through the emotional aspect of the food aspect uh the uh exercise movement aspect and the supplements and supplemental what are the additional things that you can do and in the online course you also get access to seven calls group calls where i come in i provide more information answer questions and provide a lot more clarity functional medicine is an incredible roadmap it's really about thinking differently about disease and it's what you said it's about understanding the body as a system where everything is connected where there are root causes of things that we can get to where there's things your body needs like rhythm or the right food to help it restore balance and when you do that for yourself it works and often you know it's not something you even have to do in a doctor's office a lot of things that actually work to create balance are things that everybody can do whether it's eating well moving right sleeping absolutely meditating connecting you know being the social support system and then sometimes you do need help to get rid of some of the drivers things like heavy metals or infections like lime which you said you had or mold if you're which i had almost died from a couple years ago um allergens those those are the things that actually you know you might need a little help with but if you're suffering out there if you're listening and you're wondering you know what's the road how do i how do i get better you know i've been told that this is just something i have to live with that i have to manage that i take medications for i encourage you to just have hope because if if you are suffering there is a road for most people that recover and functional medicine is the gps system to figure out how to navigate that road and and it really is a powerful model it's not the answer to everything but it is a far better mousetrap than we were trained with in conventional medicine and it's what i've done for the last 25 years it clearly is what helped you recover it helped me recover and i wouldn't be able to do what i'm doing if i didn't actually understand the body in that way and every day you know i i remember first practicing functional medicine i wasn't like for you but i was like i would tell people to do this stuff that was sort of outside the box what i learned in medical school they'd have severe migraines you know 25 times a month or they'd be having severe irritable bowel or they'd have you know an autoimmune disease and and i would tell them to do you know change your diet do this do that and they call me back six weeks later or whatever and they were like i'm better and i'm like you are really i say the same i'm like what that worked okay fine you know i was like i i really took me years and years to expect that people would get better because i was like well i don't know what i'm doing i'm just going to try this stuff and it seems to make sense and it's not going to hurt them right and people just recovered and it just was amazing to me yeah i mean i had a woman the other day who came in with vestibular migraines which is a terrible kind of migraine where your head is spinning you're in vertigo it's like you were saying you experienced she had severe migraines 25 times a month she had severe other quote other symptoms so she was seeing the neurologist for that but they weren't worrying about her gut and she was having severe bloating fluid retention you know digestive issues she had anxiety i mean she couldn't even come in my office without the door being open wow and she was really smart young woman who wanted to go to be a nurse practitioner and she was a nurse and it wasn't in her head and she was on all these antidepressants and psychiatric medications and any anxiety medications and uh vertigo medications micromanagement you know the drill and i'm like well and then medications to counter those side effects of those medications right and so you know i just followed the basic map of how do you help people restore health and function and for her i was like well you know she's got a lot of inflammation going on i could see her she was swollen she had fluid retention she'd gained a bunch of weight and you know i i wasn't treating her migraine i was helping restore her gut function yes and i was helping her you know eat a diet that was anti-inflammatory and i was helping her with certain nutrients she was low in and you know i i never really had a patient like this before you know that was that severe that had vestibular migraines and in functional medicine it doesn't matter if you've never seen the disease before because if you follow if you follow the principles of removing the stuff that's causing a problem and adding in the stuff that creates health the body knows what to do it's super smart right the body figures it out yeah don't have to no and so i i just you know fixed her gut she had really bad i gave her stuff to clear up you know sibo she had bacterial overgrowth i should like fungal overgrowth in her gut so i cleared all that out i restored her gut with a gut health shake which contained you know polyphenols and cranberry and pomegranate green tea and gave her probiotics and prebiotics and you know just fiber and things to help her gut a few basic nutrients got her on an anti-inflammatory gluten dairy-free diet she came back six weeks later i didn't recognize her i mean wow she all the flu went out of her body she was bright and alert she was funny and had not had a migraine and was you know symptom-free her gut was completely better and she was off the medication that's amazing but i don't i don't want to discount also the fact that you acknowledged her and validated her yeah i mean which is a huge piece of i'm like you're not crazy you saw her right all right i mean she was in bed and she i mean i could tell she wasn't a malinger or she wasn't a whiner right but she get it's easy to dismiss these patients and go well it's just you know they're just psychological whatever just give them some meds and kick them off right but then they're psychological because they feel miserable right well that's very important all right right right i'm like wait a minute like okay your brain is right the difficult patients are the ones who are really suffering right that's why they keep coming back that's why they're irritable that's why and you and your doctors called you a difficult patient yeah i mean i call myself a difficult patient and you want to be difficult but uh but it's the difficult way it's the difficult relationships that force us to grow i mean we have to start asking the question like wait a minute and i would say it's like any other relationship right even if one person is the one who's sort of being dismissed and is kind of miserable i mean both people in the relationship know it's not something's not working that's right so even before i got sick i knew that the tools that i had in my doctor's bag were really limited i already knew that but that's kind of the best i could do yeah but you didn't know what else was out there right i think you know i mean you and i both have the experience of being knocked to our knees in order to figure out a different way i don't wish that on all our medical colleagues no but i do wish they would understand that that the paradigm that we learned is only part of the story and that yeah everything i learned in medical school is useful and i use it and i rely on it but there's another meta layer of understanding how the body is organized because those are just the piece parts like what does the puzzle look like when you put it together that's what functional medicine is and it's such a powerful model it's what we do at the ultra wellness center in linux you know i have three other doctors two pas five nutritionists and we work with people from all over the world we've like you know probably over 70 years of clinical experience together and it's just amazing the kinds of things that that people can recover from and now you're doing that in your own practice you've written this great book brave new medicine which is a really fabulous story about how you as a physician understood that there's a different way to heal your illnesses and your autoimmune disease and all this weird nonsense that we don't know how to deal with in medicine right and sort of just what does it look like the lived experience um you know to your point though i mean um i um right at the end of my book about this essay this famous essay called arrogance back in i think was 1980 in the the um new england journal of med medicine editor at that time or he had been retired englefinger he was dying from cancer and had written this uh very provocative essay where amy was talking about arrogance at the time and i would say it's probably arrogance is probably not the you know not the vice of today i think it's more um just not seeing right not seeing or denial a little bit of hubris a little bit of denial and he had posed the question what would what would medicine look like if one of the prerequisites for all doctors entering medical school was that they had a serious illness yeah like what would it look like right and so yeah would there be more empathy would there be more belief i mean like this this one of the central questions in my life has always been around belief yeah right like what is true and what is not true how do we make ourselves believe things if we don't yeah um and yeah and like how do how do we start with that like as a doctor like just believing all patients and that's really important because you know as physicians we were subliminally trained to have a dismissive attitude to many categories of patients you know if you had irritable bowel well that was in your head or if you had chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or if you had you know even more serious illnesses like crohn's or colitis all that was psychological yeah it manifested physically but you know these were trouble patients right right i mean which is so ironic and unfortunate i mean for everyone i mean like i know for myself and many of my colleagues and friends that i went into medicine to alleviate suffering and you know how much of it are we perpetuating and you know one of the the themes also that um that comes up over and over again with chronic illness and i know for myself too is you know reaching that point of hopelessness or helplessness and there becomes a learned helplessness on top of that when you get punted from doctor to doctor to doctor so are we perpetuating illness as well through this system and you know i so yeah would i want doctors to go through this i mean hell no but you know so i sort of turned that question on its head like what would medicine look like if doctors nurses healthcare practitioners had an immersion in wellness yeah like what if doctors right were taught to sleep well what if doctors were fed well in their training what if doctors you know so terrible what would it look like what would medicine look like if we it could explain what you're considered weaknesses and residency training i know that i know that and uh but would we would we have that experience then to be able to translate to our patients right i mean we're ultimately teachers well that's what functional medicine is it's the science of creating health yes and when you do that disease goes away as a side effect yes and you and you're right i think you know if you look at most healing traditions a lot of shamans or healers went through some crisis some health crisis some trauma some initiatory illness that was sort of help you know sort of select them to be healers we don't do that anymore we just have the hazing of medical school but that makes us all kind of unwell in a way and we sort of then normalize that absolutely yeah yeah and and then we sort of pass it on right it's a kind of trauma it is it's a kind of trauma and we pass it on to our patients inadvertently so how do we break that cycle and you know i would say one thing though just to um to bring up related to that in terms of my healing was it was hard for me i mean even when i found functional medicine um i just it was easy i just had such little energy that it was easy still for me to have uh hope i called it hope fatigue right to try another thing to try again and what i ended up discovering that was easier was to release so instead of sort of going you know trying to think positively trying to be optimistic which were things that um surrender to it absolutely i mean because it those qualities feel like sunlight to someone who's suffering from a migraine right like i know i need that sunlight but it is killing me right now yeah you know my husband was this sort of embodiment of resilience and confidence and optimism i couldn't stand to be around him you know it was stressful from where i was and so what i ended up stumbling across was oh my god like i'm carrying around a lot of grief okay yes i've got you know my lost identities and time lost and all the suffering but like you know all this stuff came out right i went to a grief ritual i didn't i didn't know those things existed but you know back generations ago in cultures those like soul detoxes yeah right like how do we do that that's right yeah like it's not a body i love that soul detox how much are we caring it is subconsciously programmed into the way our dna folds you know into the way our our neurons are wired and so you know and grief is in is non-discriminant so like i thought i was going for my health you know just the loss of the function of my body yeah and all this stuff came out cobwebs right um from childhood from you know residency relationships in the past and and then the shame the shame of having these this mysterious illness the shame of being a doctor who cannot figure it out yeah and um [Music] that was really really healing so then as as you say like as a side effect what ends up filling up that space is health yeah right it is oh i suddenly become more optimistic i have more hope because there's space for it yeah it's not something that i have to will myself in order to get because i couldn't do that that's amazing yeah and so you've taken all you've learned you've been through you know so many different cycles of struggle and you've recovered and come back on top and you've written this book and and you know what's beautiful is you know it's really your your story but it's an inspiring story and it's a it's it's a sort of a window into both sort of how in traditional medicine we kind of miss the boat a lot of times and how you can on your own become empowered to sort of find a brave new medicine but you also share at the end of the book you know 15 steps that are about healing about how to care for your body and how to heal so in a way you sort of to make it really simple for people in how to actually create health for themselves can you take us through those yeah so i mean a lot of the steps were um uh ones that we covered and so the way that i um sort of lived through the experience of my healing journey is um you know was really through the journal that i kept and the journal was um something that i'd kept since i was a little girl and so when i began when i sort of made that shift like i've got to try differently go back to pathology 101 review inflammation okay what's my first step like this is going to be my experiment i'm an n of one i'm my own doctor i'm my own patient life is experiment step number one ask new questions um and so then you know number two i think was the resetting my inner clock right number three so i kind of um yeah i just build it step wise as i'm living through uh my healing journey so it's a how-to but it's sort of it's an organic it's really beautiful it's simple like how do you set your rhythm how do you sleep yes how do you give yourself permission to receive and have people help you right right right which was yeah it was really challenging yeah um because you know i stopped driving for quite a while and yeah most people were just like oh my god that's just horrible you know like how do you get a you know you can't even get around and you know what i started thinking about like who can i carpool with who can get a rifle it ended up being a strange community building yeah experience and we can do it ourselves i can do it myself right and then i realized also i don't have to live my life so fast right i can slow things down i can wait for a car um so there's a lot of things i think that happen with healing like for instance a diet i might prescribe a diet that's that's healing for myself or my family or my patients and maybe it's less about the diet per se than just getting them to connect to their food right right getting them to connect to their bodies and they're paying attention and they're treating themselves with love like you know so how much is that right um beautiful yeah yeah get a daily dose of nature detoxify your house and yourself and it's really well laid out and very simple it's almost like you've taken all the concepts of functional medicine and traditional chinese medicine and everything you know about healing and integrative medicine put into really very practical things and some of them are kind of strange like let your intuition tell your thinking mind where to look next right so now that's a that's a quote from that i took from um jonas salk right one of the inventor of one of the polio vaccines and that was another thing that was um was sort of reassuring to me when i when sometimes i thought well i'm getting too woo-woo out there but really looking at scientists you know forefathers of modern medicine who were they they let their intuition sort of guide their discoveries so i was like oh again it's not woo why are we calling it it's actually very human yeah we've just forgotten it in our culture and there's so many other great things here like heal your gut and the basics of a 30-day diet reset which is super important because diet drives so much disease as people know yes and breaking old habits and just having pleasure and looking for root causes i mean surviving love and loss really really fantastic claiming thank you finding your story i mean these are just real nuggets of wisdom around healing that you've really come to the hard way and uh practicing pleasure is my favorite prescription yeah that's a good idea it's amazing how many patients won't do that unless a doctor prescribes it to them yeah we don't prioritize fun and play and joy and right it's so great well you you just have shared such a wonderful story about how sick you could be how sick we get and how much illness there is and your own road out of it um i think it's inspiring for so many people and i i think i really feel like that's really why you do what you do it's why i do what i do it's why we spend time teaching and sharing because there are so many people who suffer unnecessarily who suffered needlessly and there is a way forward so thank you for sharing that thank you so much for um having me and yeah i would just you know this this taboo about doctors not disclosing their health problems um yeah it's um there are a lot of doctors suffering out there too it's so true yeah i think my advice to doctors listening is to tell your story share with your patients absolutely don't have this you know doctor-patient relationship which is sort of very distant and estranged be be a human let them know who you are and right that always works that it's right builds a relationship it helps them know that you've suffered through it and right i mean even if you haven't suffered you can share something [Music] if you love that last video you should definitely check out the next one on food as medicine because you don't need a doctor's prescription for health what you need to do is to make that part of your life in a natural way well if we can get food reimbursed by health care it's a game changer and actually working on that clinic with the food pharmacy which is the idea of actually paying

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 17,502

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: EdffA2rG5Hg

Length: 82min 10sec (4930 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021