DOCTOR REVEALS How She Cured Her Autoimmune DISEASE! | Cynthia LI & Mark Hyman

one of the the themes also that 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 [Music] [Applause] welcome to the doctors pharmacy this is dr. Mark Hyman and as pharmacy with an ffar I may see why a place for conversations that matter and if you've been ill if you know someone who's been ill if you've had struggles with chronic disease like I have and like our guest has then this show is gonna help you figure out a different way of thinking about it and give you hope because a lot of times when we get sick we feel hopeless and that's not good because we actually have ways to think about disease quite differently in our guest today is gonna share as a physician how she's reimagined medicine for herself as well as used a new medicine to help heal her chronic diseases our guest is dr. Cynthia Lee she received her medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas she's practicing internist in many settings she's been at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco General Hospital seen at his medical clinic she served the homeless she's worked in in very remote rural areas in China helping with HIV patients she's worked with partners and health and all kinds of amazing community-based ways of healing people her personal health challenges have really led her to a very different view of medicine that we learned in medical school integrative and functional medicine and she now has a private practice in Berkeley she's on the faculty of the healers art program at the University of California San Francisco school medicine and she's written a remarkable new book called brave new medicine is her first book but it's an important book as you'll see why as we have this conversation so welcome dr. Cynthia Lee thank you so much for having me here so we were just chatting before the show and it was kind of remarkable hearing your story because it seems in a lot of ways we've gone down the same path which is trained in traditional medicine both suffered from a series of different chronic diseases which were mysterious and strange that traditional medicine can't help with and we both were in China and got sick we both had GI issues got sick we both you know had mold in our houses and got sick we both had Lyme disease and got sick so it's kind of fascinating and and I just sort of want to unpack your story because you knew you had it everything you had a great career in medicine you have a fantastic marriage beautiful kids and then like happens too many people one day you're fine and the next day you're not and everything falls apart and you have this mysterious symptoms that traditional medicine couldn't solve your tests came back quote normal but you weren't feeling normal the doctors were confused you were lost you were in bed you couldn't get out of bed with young kids and that's really the beginning of the change in your career that led to discovering a new way to heal yourself so can you take us through that journey everything where'd you come from and how did you get here oh my god yeah well first of all this is not a journey I would wish on anybody so I mean when we were comparing oh my god you know like I wouldn't yeah would not wish this on anyone I mean I know that millions right millions of Americans suffer from these kinds of mystery conditions that are very debilitating so this is not not a spurious experience by any means although although many doctors go well we don't we can't figure it out your tests are normal there must must be all in your head right exactly exactly and you know and I went through that myself I my own health challenges did not fit my own paradigm so for a long time I was stuck in my head like I just need to get past and he'd get past it so - yeah just to kind of go backwards a little bit about 15 years ago I was a few years out of residency so I was at this place in my professional life where I felt a sense of mastery right I just I knew the studies Pat I knew the protocols Pat you know I I was running er's and just feeling like okay I'm not a master of you yes yes and I felt really proud of where I had come to in my life and I had married the love of my life I did something really radical I had always been sort of the good girl the conventional girl which is funny why you know I ended up taking this very um path as far as this this culture is concerned I was yeah I had a very conventional upbringing and my husband and I shortly after we got married I did something radical and we I quit my job and we traveled the world for six months no itinerary you know just a backpack with you know a few necessaries in them and I felt so free and so so alive and after we returned I started a job at the county hospital whereas working with underserved patients and really found my calling so it was during this time that I got pregnant and again you know the pregnancy was easy nine months later we had this miracle of a baby we were thrilled but it was three months after that that I started feeling off and you know start feeling really tired my hair was falling out I was losing weight I mean like super rapidly and again it's just one of those things that I think as as not wanting to complain as our culture tends to do is normalize you know unwellness to where you sort of tolerate it and so I thought it was all postpartum suck it up and push through exactly suck it up and you know and a lot of times things resolve and you know life goes on which I had learned in residency right what doesn't best healer is time everything goes away just right what doesn't kill you makes you stronger right I didn't realize at the time that only works for acute things not chronic so I was in very much in that mentality of invincibility both because I was young and both and then the other reason because I was a doctor there was a strange sense that because I understood chronic diseases I mean I was an internist after all an expert in chronic diseases that I was somehow immune to it you know my patients were over there and I was over here all the disease's you couldn't get him and it took me a while to even recognize the signs and I remember very clearly that I was you know I'd been kind of slogging through my day-to-day life you know with this new baby and an active husband and my job and I was seeing a patient and she was a single mom had like three kids was working two jobs she was exhausted and she came to me for a fatigue and I was I was looking at her and I was just going through the checklist you know all the review systems and I said oh my god you're a textbook case of hyperthyroidism I'm gonna run these tests and it dawned on me that oh my god her palpitations her insomnia her fatigue you know her weight loss her hair loss and I was like oh my god I am a textbook case too so that was a that was a really big eye-opener for me yeah you saw yourself in her yes and and also that I I had a chronic disease most likely because thyroid diseases are usually chronic so that was the beginning and I had what was which by the way low thyroid and thyroid problems in women affects one in five women and half of them are undiagnosed yes and many who are diagnosed aren't properly treated absolutely absolutely and I think it goes to the fact that we dismiss symptoms that are I mean they they're seemingly vague right fatigue I mean I'm tired I'm a little depressed function sex my skin's a little dry my hair's Danny right exactly so to Peyton whatever it's like a normal absolutely oh so for me though my initial presentation was hyper thyroid yeah and then I fell hypo so it's kind of on this thyroid rollercoaster and what I had was Hashimoto's and autoimmune thyroid condition and when it happens put in the postpartum period most of those cases resolved in about a year and so I followed actually that textbook trajectory and about a year after I was diagnosed I wasn't feeling well but I saw my under chronologist who was a top-notch specialist and he said yeah you know I think it's time for you to try tapering off your levothyroxine and I did and my numbers stayed normal and I was by his book and by my book I was cured I just still felt like crap I still felt exactly so that it goes to show you know where I was and my mindset was you know what that the paradigm that were trained in superseded my own experience yeah and what we're trained in is that everything hinges on the diagnosis yeah if you don't have a diagnosis right and the diagnosis is a set of criteria or it's a lab test or it's a pathology report it's something very very concrete so I'm living my life and I was still living a full life so I was also basing health on functionality yeah you were managing yes yes so why did you I was managing quite well so then a couple of years later my husband are then toddler and I take a trip to Beijing and my parents and my sister we're living there at the time so I had taken these trips annually and we went and I had a very dramatic experience before before you go on it's gonna sort of clarify for people for those who haven't been to Beijing it's been cleaned up a little bit but on a sunny day you can't see a building across the street because the air is so thick with pollution and most of it is from coal Rock hole they burn and from some of the inversions that come from the weather patterns from the Gobi Desert and it's so bad that many people in Beijing walk around with masks yes face masks you might have seen those pictures so yes Ellucian we're talking about air so thick that you can basically cut it with a knife on a sunny day and can't see the Sun yes yeah I mean my sister taught elementary school and she was there and they every day they would they would get these you know these color signals of about whether or not they could go out and there were many days where they couldn't even go out at all stay indoors with high heavy-duty air purifiers going on so yes it was she was very rude so it's interfacing nice family trip nice family trip and you know I will say I was we were we took a hike on the wild wall so right that the Yun its unrestored yes the beautiful sort of rustic but crumbling wall of the Great Wall and it was it was a really beautiful hike and I stood at this lookout tower and I said to my husband I said I feel like myself again I was feeling like I'm coming back right my stamina was back the aches and the pains and just that low-grade fatigue was gone so I felt an ounce of of real hope there and then we went to a dumpling house to celebrate and you know you had asked me before this like you know what might have triggered this turning point I don't I was yelling disease I don't know a ton of things some of which were like tons of different kinds of fungus mushrooms like things that are you know can be immunological e triggering as well so I have no idea if that honey had anything to do with it if it was just the foreign food proteins hmm but I was having the feast of my life when I suddenly felt like I was going to pass out you know and I was going through all the you know differential diagnosis in my in my head and heat stroke dehydration I was drinking water but suddenly I mean before I know it I you know my life flashes before me and I think I'm gonna die and then I pass out hmm so I come to in a an emergency room in downtown Beijing and when I came to I just came to a body that really wasn't my own I didn't recognize myself I could barely move my muscles the entire room was spinning around as if I was on a boat that was really really being tossed around burden high seas yes and that was something that was completely outside of my own box as a doctor I was calling the shots in the ER cuz the doctor over see me was a resident yeah I've had that experience being in a hospital in Thailand with severe gastroenteritis telling him what to do it's challenging be sickness challenging me a doctor his six because people are still looking to you - number one stay calm and number two figure out what's going on and I was using my really you know basic Mandarin - trying to communicate I also realized that I had brain fog I didn't know it at the time I just I couldn't remember things I was looking at my own EKG and which was normal but I couldn't quite read it you had a broken brain he had red yeah thousands of those right yeah so I was you know kind of in a state of shock but really just trying to push through the misery of it and in the smattering of tests that they did stabilize my blood pressure which was low I've got IV saline and but all the tests turned out normal as they so often do and he's missed you understand right dr. Lee and one that did not turn out normal was one that I really ordered as a precautionary tests that we do for all young women it was a pregnancy test and that came back positive so that was again a huge shock and my husband and I were really trying to wrap our heads around the fact that I like I felt like I was gonna die but then oh my god wait a minute like I'm pregnant yeah so and I'm miserable so at the time I did not realize that this was going to be a decade-long journey you mentioned that you had a GI problem then right yes that didn't manifest until the very next day the next day I started having nausea vomiting and diarrhea and people said well it's probably the pregnancy and you whatever you got this dehydration you just overdid it but then my husband and my daughter got it too so I realized okay you know what there's a gastroenteritis going on all of this was in hindsight though you know I went from like literally the top of the mountain on the great wall feeling interested thousand years to like the worst you could possibly feel yes yes in a matter of days yes and we were we were scheduled to get on our plane trip home like three days later after the ER visit and I didn't it was some miracle that I've made it but I had my first full-blown panic attack as we boarded the plane because I was so weak and I was I barely made it on I was in a wheelchair and I was thinking 13 hours 13 hours like what if something happens you know I can't do this but but I made it I made it back home mmm and I remember calling my medical director and saying I got a gastroenteritis and I am in the early throes of pregnancy I'm gonna need an extra week to recover but I'll be back yeah or so you thought so I thought and I never did I never returned so that was really the beginning of the rest of my life and it took me being housebound for two years to break out of that that paradigm that I knew so you were still looking at traditional medicine to solve the problem me working I Lancers we went to see everybody yes I went to see specialist after specialist and again another sort of noisy depressed take Prozac right yes well I mean even things like I was afraid to say I was depressed because I was like I don't want to kill myself I'm just miserable you know like I'm miserable I'm yeah but I knew from the other side what doctors did with patients like me so I had a lot of symptoms that I kept to myself what they did meaning meaning yeah antidepressants or potential you know a major psychiatric evaluation or getting stigmatized as a difficult patient yeah we have a very you know in the medical world we have a very pejorative way of talking about these patients we we use a fancy medical word we say it's supratentorial which means it's a in your brain it's in your head and it's very nasty and not true and I think your experience is very important because I think most of us who suffer aren't doctors and so we don't have that insight but when you actually are a physician and you get that you know I had someone say to me the other day oh you know I don't believe all this fatigue stuff when I want energy I just jump up and down and run up the stairs I get energy I'm like no you don't get it like when you get your tank emptied and you don't know how to refill it it's real it's not in your head it's not psychiatric it's it's your biology and I had exactly the same experience I get it and it's sort of what led me to be a functional medicine physician and to so be passionate about telling the world which I think also why you write your book I sort of share with the world look look like I'm a physician I know the science but I hit a dead end when it comes to the paradigm that we were trained in and I needed to find a different way so so tell us about how can I ask you were you as hard-headed as I was I mean did it take you oh well first of all two for me I think partly it took so long was because I was pregnant and all the specialist told me that this is a difficult pregnancy and part of me wanted to believe it or that a lot of it would resolve and amazingly I had this baby who's she's healthy and she's the strongest one actually in the whole family so there was that peace but I was I'm just curious did it take you as long as it took me to I realized there was another path no I well it was interesting I mean I literally went hard I mean I was the same story I lived in China exposed to mercury I came back from China and I was up on a lake in Maine and I had some kind of bug some kind of stomach bug hmm and I never had anything like it I thought it would get better and it didn't so the mercury was sort of like the sort of underlying problem yes and then the straw that broke the camel's back was getting an acute stomach issue which caused a leaky gut and this massive inflammation and my whole system collapsed you know I not only did I gonna have the stomach issues and diarrhea and pain and bloating I also had immune issues my rashes all over my tongue would swell up when I turn to food as I get rashes around my eyes I'd have also some abnormal blood tests my little white count positive a which is like autoimmunity I had a little bit of liver function tests I had severe cognitive problems I couldn't focus I couldn't remember anything I couldn't really barely work I had trouble sleeping I mean just my whole system was down and was called chronic fatigue syndrome which you know for a long time we thought was psychological mm-hm and and now there's real good data that there are a lot of biological markers of what's going on in Classique syndrome it's not just some fabricated thing we call it a syndrome in medicine when we don't actually understand bowel syndrome what does that mean it means your stomach hurts in you diarrhea or constipation bloating it's like that doesn't mean anything so for me it took me a while because this was 25 years ago and there wasn't like a big functional medicine movement but thank God I was working at a place called Canyon Ranch where there was a nutritionist Kathy Swift who introduced me to this guy Jeff bland who's the father functional medicine and I heard him speak and it was like the light went on I'm like oh okay there's a different way of thinking I said well if he's either crazy or he's a genius and I better figure out which one so I started to learn read about an experiment of myself so I was working part time experiment my patients they would get better I wouldn't get better I couldn't figure it out I mean it took me years and years and years if I know what I knew now then I would have gotten better a lot faster but I didn't have all the information and all the tools I didn't know but I did find a huge level of mercury and all sorts of other issues so I think for me you know I was I don't even out stubborn but I knew I knew like you going especially our specialist after specialists that this wasn't in my head like I knew I wasn't depressed like you said although I felt depressed I felt fatigued I felt you know unable to cope or manage but I knew it wasn't in my head yes it was affecting my brain but it wasn't emotional or psychological I think you were yeah step ahead of me so I ended up referring myself to a psychiatrist because well I went there too by that point I wanted a diagnosis right I wanted something I could hang my hat on it in and I hear this a lot from my patients too it's it's giving a name to something somehow makes it more real and I had I had a moment in the bathroom I remember I was coming out of the shower and I was feeling you know my heart rate racing and my blood pressure dropping feeling like I was gonna faint and I was going through all my symptoms and I basically diagnosed myself in the bathroom with chronic fatigue syndrome and dis aughtta no Meah this the total dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system right which is the branch that controls largely unconscious vital body functions like heart rate blood pressure digestion you know this it's like I really think well it's like air traffic control well worse but more serious because as it's gone you you realize what it was sort of keeping together managing all these moving parts so nothing really felt like it was working it within myself and you know like you said though I mean these are syndromes and which kind of mean nothing so I didn't want that I wanted something to say it's treatable I always say the name of your disease isn't the cause of your disease right exactly this autonomia just means your nervous system isn't working right chronic fatigue syndrome just means you're tired all the time yeah so I did I went to a psychiatrist I think you know where a lot of patients like us end up one day and she said you know something that made me almost laugh you know she said this is not you're not depressed you're not anxious I think it's your hormones I think it's your immune system I mean she was really actually going into this systems but at the time like I was like Obama my endocrinologist you know said it's not my thyroid and right you know an immuno why would I go to an immunologist you know and so so I kind of exited and had I known about functional medicine or even integrative medicine at the time it would have been a much smoother path but I because I had to rebuild the paradigm from the bottom up in order to even get there it took me many more years yeah so how did you come out of it so the first thing I did was I went back to basics and so I did you know 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 off of crystals no it didn't Oh God meditation was like it was like pulling teeth so no I went back to basics and I I took out my pathology 101 textbook yeah all right pathologic basis of disease problems in coach second-year medical school right and Kumar Kumar was my pathology teacher oh wow so I took it out yeah I still had it it was highlighted dog-eared I mean in it it actually was good for me like if I know noir plasticity 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 but I started reading about how diseases how chronic disease develops and you know about cellular repair and cellular injury and I was like yeah in it and they actually talked about this was this was published I don't even know which Edition but 20 years ago yeah where they say the one caused 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 was published right so I started reading that at 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 yes I remember I remember going back and reading chapter 1 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 Weir's 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 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 your brain in my thyroid exactly it doesn't qualify as a treatable disease in right that's what I was joking it's a functional medicine doctors are inflamed Eligius yeah I gave a talk on that right right right so and but so that was a really big aha moment for me was wait a minute ok I understand this sudden disturbance would I call it in Beijing but then I had the thyroiditis before that which was sort of right that and the the preceding you know trigger yeah 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 cramp our room are all drop like I felt like I'd run a marathon and I was dizzy and I just assumed what course everyone feels this way because they're exhausting 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 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 mm-hm so if I could do it in a way that was more controlled and gentle then it felt like something I could move forward with hmm so what did you do and all the things that helps you recover so one of the things was yeah with us by the way we cried a few syndrome is not something most people recover from right Mottram algae's not people something people recover from absolutely unless you see a functional medicine doctor right right or have some kind some one of those you know spontaneous remissions which is one in a million yeah yeah so so what I ended up doing also was distancing myself from the diagnosis and the prognosis because it was more despairing you can 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 gonna lose whatever well you know 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 and I can't get sleep I'm gonna not have enough energy mm-hmm 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 every organ oh yes clock yeah even all feel of chrono biology where the different kinds of chemo is better given at different times today than was I know this is in conventional medicine right and it makes I mean it makes my complete rational sense right so I started first of all being more regimented about just okay you know what I'm gonna wake up you know and get up out of bed 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 steps and and I learned that when we deviate I'm in particular 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 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 in my body rhythm yeah we all my dogs I feed my dog at the same times every day why do I do that for myself no you know and he gets walks now um at the same time why don't I do that for myself so it was I started sinking myself also with my kids right like okay I'm gonna 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's kind of time to put myself first you know as my first patient mm-hm that's good and so you did the rhythm and what else change your diet and then yeah and you know a lot of it was just asking new questions the diet piece I thought I was eating quote healthy you know which was largely vegetarian I was cooking meals but also doing a lot of prepackaged meals but you know not a lot of process stuff and it wasn't until I saw an acupuncturist so the acupuncturist that I saw Robert Levine who's in Berkeley California he he was brilliant really he's still practicing and he's a good dear friend of mine mentor of mine I learned a ton from him about understanding about 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 to the thigh bone right yeah exactly 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 and tech the GI system and the liver and the lungs and the brain and the heart and the horn 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 in 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 would get our communities in 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 she means energy yeah whether it's through solar energy you know fossil fuels whether it's yeah I mean its food nature movement 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 you know and you need more of these heavier foods that 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 meets what are you talking about you know and this is before a paleo days and all that so I began researching ancestral it's and you know the work of dentist Western a price prize and Connor's right and it suddenly made sense like oh yeah okay okay I'm gonna eat like my ancestors ate I'm going to prepare food and the way my ancestors prepared so I can maximize nutrient density nutrient density equals more energy yeah and then the gluten issue came up 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 the endocrinologist don't right there's no crosstalk there either and this is in conventional medicine right so and I do remember asking my endocrinologist like what can I do what can I do and he said nothing its genetic oh gosh no it's my decision but not predetermination and so the but the gluten thing didn't actually arise I think I was partly in denial about it I'd 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 ate pretty well she didn't do a lot of sweets and but she had not just one cavity at her visit she had six cavity Wow yeah and I was floored so 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 okay I wasn't feeling guilty until you just said that but 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 Western a prices work around 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 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 Socrates said all diseases begin in the gut it's a 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 and china order to get better I was they were largely quiescent until I removed gluten I removed gluten and I had massive withdrawal AHA 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 I was really frightened by how severe my my reaction was when I stopped gluten so I was thinking it was a bad thing 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 my younger daughter so my my older daughter's teeth like you know really basically resolved I mean they they became really strong some of her cavities even filled like they'd be calcified and I didn't have to get filled my younger daughter who didn't really have any thing that you know was alarming but she could she had like this perioral eczema which is this dermatitis which is very difficult to treat with it's often dairy with steroids and which is how we treat most dermatitis meaning red on the skin they put steroids on it why is the skin irritated 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 one off of gluten well off of gluten but also doing the ancestral diet very yes yes yeah and you know so it was just one of those things I was like you know you can't make this stuff up and this stuff isn't written up and it's very individualized so you look in the literature you know doctor say where's the evidence where is he of us well there's nine hundred thousand 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 Lee he got 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 RNA issue that the cause disease I mean there's no lack of data it's just not data that doctors pay attention to in the literature right and you know and it takes on average 14 years to know 17 oh god good for informational a good day research to translate over to clinical care yeah my data guy the guy who discovered that we should wash our hands before giving you know any surgery or childbirth was basically ridiculed for suggesting that doctors could be causing their patients that get sick by not washing their hands and he was basically exiled and ended up dying in to the disgrace with no money and you know excommunicated from the medical community Semmelweis and it took 50 years for them to go yeah maybe we should wash her my god where's the science on that yeah it was it was an enough time at a doctors that all 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 we don't need science to show us that right well I mean when they didn't know about bacteria common sense was yeah yeah that's true that's true yeah so yeah I mean I kind of just did this stepwise progression to get to the point where I was much more able to get out of the house yeah and then and one of the the things I also explored which I would say maybe is down the unconventional path was I began to I began to shadow integrative doctors on just different 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 anthroposophical medicine dog you know someone doing like sort of anti-aging hormone therapies 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 yeah and it was the pediatrician who said what are you interested in I said well you know I rely love the traditional Chinese medicine parent makes so much sense to me the systems thinking you know and about the gut you know sort of being the foundation of healing and I'm really you know ancestral health you know figures into it and she said it sounds like you you know you're interested in functional medicine I was like what yeah what's that that so and she really strongly recommended that I go see that take this course with Institute for functional medicine so I it was sort of 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 and it came to Santa Monica and I live in in the Bay Area so it was it felt do it well it wasn't yeah cross country and and I went and it was I think I had that aha moment like you did when you you know listen to Jeff bland mm-hmm 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 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 what it did also cause was it caused a little bit of anxiety yeah relearn medicine I had to relearn medicine but then suddenly I went from having no or very few options to having infinite options in how to get better yeah yeah right okay like which diet when you know which supplements you know what do I get you know what do I rule at myself small the mercury and all these things and it felt very overwhelming mm-hmm and so that's when I ended up actually good enough I did and you know I had a very unconventional navigator was we had a visit from some friends of ours who ended up staying with us and 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 would 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 was also clairvoyant so she was she was a sustainable architect and her husband was one of the leading climate physicists so there was very school skill to have exactly so they're very dynamic couple we knew about her clairvoyance through sort of hearsay but we had never experienced it upfront and kind of never really were curious enough to go there exactly that's how I found them so they end up staying in our house and one of the things was that my younger daughter was having night terrors and 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 to try she was doing like chamomile drops and you know some homeopathy but nothing really touched her and so Pia walks into her house and she starts coughing coughing coughing and and she said you know there's something 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 eyes like okay she said well but it's really heavy and so 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 right so people only change when they have when they don't have any P syndrome anymore you know any P syndrome is not another pain yes yes 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 cuz Sonia my daughter's been crying every single night right and she said wait a minute she said no no no it's the other way around Sonia is crying because she feels the heaviness - 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 the Native American Way of grain exactly so she just goes ranch is that what you have 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 convinced me to do it with her what well first of all is a low risk I mean there was right I'm always looking for high potential gain low risk little sage exactly I never heard anyone 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 might just throughout my body because this was the seller of the house who he'd met three times like 280 and she said God 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 a spot-on yeah so we just walked around and you know and I was kind of just being very sympathetic to I sympathized with the seller right there he had to leave his home yeah so you know but but I was what 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 flavor so you know and then there was still part of me was like well you know there's no control you know how do we really know maybe was coincidental but before Pia left what she did was she said oh I actually approached her and I said well if you can lift the heaviness in a house can you draw with me heaviness in my body you know I'm much smaller than this house and she said oh you know it doesn't work quite like that 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 no this doesn't mean you're gonna be a 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 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 the heart well actually they were both really hard they were both really hard yes I like the analytical mind being in my body because my body was so uncomfortable yeah and so she said you know you can only heal something that you are connected to we can heal something you're just detached from mmm so that was healing on multiple levels both that I had to inhabit my body which was probably one of the biggest steps in terms of healing not being afraid of it but going into it and then also learning how to read sensations for as messages and not just symptoms that I don't know we're making me miserable yeah yeah I always say yeah the smartest doctor the room was 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 because I was doing steadily better and then I were you trying somebody 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 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 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 it began to it made that navigation much easier for me and and it's something that I encourage my patients to you know to develop if they're interested it's it's simple it just takes a lot of repetition and quiet listening so you found you know one of the causes was gluten and toxin so you got from China that you yes worked on getting rid of was there anything else you like detoxes so you know I learned how to balance my hormones 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 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 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 yeah so 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 is 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 anything know being the social support system and sometimes you do need help to get rid of some of the drivers things like heavy metals or infections like Lyme which you said you had or mold if you're in which I had almost died from a couple years ago 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 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 yeah 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 clearly is what helped you recover it helped me recover and I wouldn't believe what I'm doing if I didn't actually understand the body that way and every day you know I remember first practicing function medicine I wasn't like for you but I was like I would tell people to do this stuff that was so outside the box what I learned in medical school they 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 coming back six weeks later or whatever and they're like I'm bad I'm like you are really like what that worked okay fine yeah Oh spike I I really it took me years and years to expect that people would get better cuz I suck well I don't know what I'm doing I'm just gonna try this stuff and it seems to make sense and it's not gonna hurt him 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 was 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 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 opened Wow and she was really smart young woman who wanted to go to be 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 vertigo medications micromanage you know the drill and I'm like well and then medications to counter those side effects of those 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 chat fluid retention she'd gain a bunch of weight and you know 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 never really had a patient like this before you know that was that severe that had stimuli 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 you have to know and so I I just no fixed her done she had really bad I gave her stuff to clear out nocebo she had bacterial overgrowth I should have like fungal overgrowth in her I cleared all that out I restored her gut with a gut health shake which contained no polyphenols from cranberry and pomegranate green tea and gave her probiotics and prebiotics and they're just fiber and things that help her gut mm-hmm few basic nutrients got her and on an anti-inflammatory gluten dairy free diet came back six weeks later I didn't recognize her Wow she all the fluid went out of her body she was bright and alert she was funny and heading out ahead of migraine and was symptom-free her gut was completely better and she was off the medication also the fact that you acknowledged her and validated her I mean which is a huge piece of mine you're not crazy you saw her right she was in bed and shoot I mean I could tell she wasn't a malingerer she wasn't a whiner right but she get it's easy to dismiss these patients and go out it's just you know they're just psychological when I were him some medicine right but then their psychological because they feel miserable that's very important 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 right and you and your doctors called you a typical patient yeah I mean I called myself a difficult patient but but it's the different rates the difficult relationships that forced 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 no 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 doctors that were really limited I already knew that but that's kind of the best I could do but you know what else was out there okay I think you know what I mean you and I both had 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 learn in medical school is useful and I use it and I rely on it but there's another metal layer yes understanding how the body is organized because those are just the piece parts like what is the puzzle look like when you put it together that's a functional medicine is and it's such a powerful model it's what we do at the ultra Wellness Center in Lennox and I have three other doctors two pas v nutritionists and we work 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 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 you know to your point though I mean I write at the end of my book about this essay this famous essay called arrogance back and I think was 1980 in the the New England Journal of Medicine editor at that time or he had been retired inkle finger he was dying from cancer and had written this very provocative essay where Amy is talking about arrogance at the time and I would say it's problem arrogance is probably not the you know not the vice of today I think it's more just not seeing right not seeing or denial a little bit 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 and yeah and like how do how do we start with that like as a doctor like just believing all patients and Julianne because you know as physicians we were subliminally trained to have a dismissive attitude to many categories of patients you know if you had airmobile well that was in your head or if you had chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or if you had a you know even more serious illnesses like Crohn's or colitis all that was psychological yeah it manifests it 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 know 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 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 what 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 health care practitioners had an immersion and wellness yeah like what if doctors right we're taught to sleep well what if doctors were fed well in their training what if doctors no what would it look like what would medicine look like if we could sleep or consider weaknesses and residency training I know that I know that but would we would we have that experience then mmm 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 I'm health crisis some trauma some initiative element it was it was sort of help you know select them to be healer hmm 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 normalized that absolutely yeah yeah and and then we sort of pass it on right it's a kind of trauma it is the kind of trauma and we pass it on to our patients inadvertently hmm so how do we break that cycle and you know I would say one thing though just to to bring up related to that in terms of my healing was it was hard from I mean even when I found functional medicine I just it was I just had such little energy and it was easy still for me to have hope I called it hope fatigue yeah wait 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 surrender to it absolutely I mean because it those qualities feel like sunlight to someone who's suffering from a migraine rightly 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 be around him you know he was stressful out 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'm going to agree ritual I didn't I didn't know this things existed but you know back generations ago and cultures those like soul detoxes yeah right like how do we do this right like it's not a body I love that salty time carrying it is subconsciously programmed into the way our DNA folds you know into the way our our neurons are wired and so you know in grief is non discriminant so like I thought I was going for my health you know just the loss of function of my body and all this stuff came out cobwebs right she's from childhood from you know residency relationships in the past and and then the shame the shame of having these this mysterious illness yeah being a doctor who cannot figure it out and [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 this I couldn't do that that's amazing yeah and so you 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 bring this book and and you know it's beautiful is you know it's really your story but it's an inspiring story and it's a it's it's sort of a window into both sort of how in traditional medicine we kind of missed the boat a lot of times and how you can on your own become empowered to find a brave new medicine mmm-hmm 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 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 ones that we covered and so the way that I sort of lived through the experience of my healing journey is you know was really through the journal that I kept and the journal was 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 end of one I'm a doctor I'm my own patient life is experiment step number one ask new questions and so then you know number two I think was the resetting my inner clock right number three so I kind of yeah I just build it stepwise as I'm living through my healing journey so it's a how-to but it's sort of how do you see your rhythm how do you sleep yes how do you give yourself permission to receive and how people help you right right right which was yeah it was really challenging yeah because you know I stopped driving for quite a while and yeah most people are 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 we can do it ourselves I can do 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 carpool 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 so how much is that get a daily dose of nature detoxify your house 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 it into really very practical yeah I think that some of them are kind of strange like what's your intuition tell you were thinking mind where to look next right so no that's it that's a quote from that I took from Jonas Salk right one of the inventor of one of the polio vaccines and that was another thing that was was sort of reassuring to me when I when sometimes would have thought whoa I'm getting - woowoo out there but really looking at scientists you know for fathers of modern medicine who were they they let their intuition sort of guide their discoveries so I was like Oh again why are we calling over whoo it's actually very human we've just forgotten it in our culture and there's so many other great things you know like heal your God and the physics of a thirty day diet reset which is super important because diet drives so much diseases people know yes and breaking old habits and just having pleasure and for root causes I mean surviving leaven loss really really fantastic thank you 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 distinct pleasure here's my favorite prescription that's a good idea mazing how many patients won't do that unless Oh doctor prescribes it today yeah you don't we don't prioritize fun and play enjoy and it's so great well you you just have shared such a wonderful story about how sick you could be how sick we get much illness there is and your own road out of it I think is inspiring for so many people and 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 having me and yeah I would just you know this this taboo about doctors not disclosing their health problems yeah it's there are a lot of doctors suffering out there too it's so true yeah yeah 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 know who you are right that always works that it's right it was 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 so absolutely thank you for sharing your story and everybody should get brave new medicine a doctor's unconventional path to healing or out illness it's been out since September 1st 2019 it's a wonderful story very inspiring and very practical so thank you for joining us absolutely thank you and you'll be listening the doctors pharmacy this is doctor Mark Hyman if you loved the show please leave a comment please share with your friends and family on Facebook or Twitter or social media and if you don't already subscribe please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next time on the doctors pharmacy [Music] hi everyone it's dr. Mark Hyman so two quick things number one thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast it really means a lot to me if you love the podcast I did really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family second I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called marks picks every week I'm gonna send out a list of a few things that I've been using take my own health the next level this could be books podcasts research that I found supplement recommendations recipes or even gadgets I use a few of those and if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list all you have to do is visit dr. Hyman com forward slash picks that's dr. Hyman com forward slash picks I'll only email you once a week I promise and I'll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations so just go to dr. Hyman com4 slash picks that's P I see KS to sign up free today

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 1,422,714

Rating: 4.8771873 out of 5

Keywords: Dr. mark hyman, autoimmune, autoimmune disease, autoimmune gastritis, autoimmune paleo, autoimmune protocol, brave new medicine, dr. cynthia lia, dr. mark hyman, functional medicine, gut health, hashimoto’s, health, health theory, health tips, hyperthyroid, hypothyrois, live longer, nutrition tips, personal development, podcast, self help, self improvement, the doctor’s farmacy, the ultrawellness center, thyroid disorder, wahls protocol

Id: _VZrY2vSbws

Length: 75min 6sec (4506 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/dontknowhowtoprogram]

I read that one of the reasons so many of the health community disliked the idea was because they took it as a direct insult that someone would say their hands where dirty and they also did not like the idea that their hands where literally responsible for the death of hundreds of people.

Strong minds but fragile egos. smh.

[u/JoshuaACNewman]

They actually had him put into an insane asylum where he died.

[u/diogenesofthemidwest]

Not just that, merely they should wash their hands when going from working with cadavers to patients.

[u/Icy_Spring]

The hell's this video OP?

[u/OxfordComma5ever]

There's a really great episode of the Sawbones podcast about this! Totally worth listening to for the whole story.

[u/DrMrJekyll]

Ignaz Semmelweis

[u/FUTURE10S]

Wasn't he also an ass to his coworkers and also implied other things that actually were ridiculous? A broken clock may be right twice a day (give or take depending on the break), but it's still broken.

[u/Jetztinberlin]

💚 u Semmelweiss

[u/BoOtto]

Very nice that you still left Semmelweises name out.