How To REVERSE Autoimmune Disease & MS With Functional Medicine! | Terry Wahls & Mark Hyman

this is not an ms treatment this is a health treatment i can bike i can hike i'm pain-free and i do really very well people can get better from all sorts of things when they change their diet you don't need to be hungry but you're not eating junk so terry you went from like reclining wheelchair to riding your bike 20 miles a day how many people see that level of change you know in terms of uh the whole population i don't know mark are you seeing cases like yours where people are recovering or yeah yeah i i am so one of the individuals in our study um uh dawn she was using a cane for short distances walker for long distances she had severe fatigue she was making arrangements to sell her home moved to assisted living because her son was finishing grad school and she knew she couldn't manage once he moved out and she enrolled in our study wow and she was struggling driving 15 minutes to work okay so by the time the study ended uh her son graduate uh moves out and we followed people for three years by the way so at that point she's taking her dog hiking for miles she's doing uh pilates and weightlifting she doesn't really like jogging so she didn't take up jogging although she she can run and her son's moved six hours away and she's comfortable driving to see him i saw it done uh before the pandemic was out uh giving some lectures in the community so it's 2019. uh and you know she looks great that's incredible and you know so she's still working she would have been disabled and unemployed uh another patient from our our study again that i saw in 2019 with primary progressive ms again primary progressive ms when she enrolled with us she uh needed bilateral support uh two walking sex uh she had profound fatigue her score was six point seven on a seven point scale wow that's pretty bad so profoundly bad so she's walking comfortably now and uh you know so we enrolled her in 2010 so now it's 10 nine years later when i saw her she's she's walking uh doing well uh she is in a band a geriatric band that she plays in yeah yeah so it's very fun at my talk she'll see stands up like a revival and she's telling uh everyone in the audience about her experience in the study and how transformative heat in the study is and then the other here's the other interesting thing that she also noted mark is that she she's telling the audience that if i stop the walls protocol i'm exhausted and i can't walk it's worse again it's worse so she can she can tell within 24 hours uh if she's backing off on on the diet so basically this approach seems to it puts it in remission but it doesn't cure it is that it well you know i don't think anyone with a chronic disease has ever cured we we control it we restore physiology we can improve our health but if i if i came to your house and had gluten dairy and eggs my trigeminal neurology would turn on within 24 hours i would have incapacitating pain typically you're cured if you don't eat that stuff though it's like if your diabetes is perfect but you know if you eat sugar it goes up well yeah i guess maybe somebody else wouldn't so you already have the tendency toward it but so so i'm very careful to not claim cure but i'm careful to say i i'm very well managed as long as i take care of myself following the walls protocol you know i can bike i can hike i'm pain free and i do really very well that's that is true for all of us who have whether it's anxiety depression um diabetes insulin resistance as long as we are managing our diet and lifestyle we can have a rich full life relatively normal physiology no evidence of disease and do great but if i think i can go back to that previous diet and lifestyle and not get sick that's incorrect right i agree it's like it's like i had this patient once who you know was diabetic and i told what to do and he's that blood sugar into normal he says dr ivan now my my blood sugar's normal can i go back to eating my carbohydrates i'm like no you can't in terms of the the autoimmune in general issue for people do you suggest they just try the walsh protocol is there another strategy for them so i want to figure out um where they're at i want them to know what they want their health for so we deal with the mental emotional spiritual and then we have them start with the walls protocol and i stress this is a family intervention so it's a negotiation what is the family willing to do uh and to do all of this together and you know depending on the circumstance i might put them on the walls elimination diet i might run them through food sensitivity testing so we can be very precise or they may need to start at the mediterranean diet because that's all the family is willing to do so there's a clear negotiationist what are you willing to do because whatever the intervention is i want it to be a hundred percent doing the walls diet at 50 is not very helpful you know cut down from six side cokes to three a day right doing the mediterranean diet at 100 is better than doing the walls diet at 50 so i want well i want to have a negotiation what can we do a hundred percent and for you know and in my va practice sometimes what we had to start was meditation because people had to start we had to find a lifestyle intervention that they could do 100 and when they mastered that then we could begin adding the next layer and the next layer in the next layer amazing let's just shift a little bit because we've been talking about a multiple sclerosis and you know your latest book is really about the autoimmune spectrum not just ms which is part of that so why is this effective for that and what are the things that people can do if they have an autoimmune disease you know i want to get back to so why do we develop an autoimmune process why does my innate immune system get overly activated why do i begin to develop auto antibodies against specific structures in my body and so there's only a few basic reasons why that's going to happen if i don't if i have an autoimmune disease and i take disease modifying drugs but i don't address the root causes that led to the autoimmune process people will develop another autoimmune diagnosis right about every five to ten years and so um and i certainly see that you know in my tribe uh people come in they they see me uh and they've had several autoimmune diagnoses and as i work with them they they get better control of all of their uh conditions so so because the the walls protocol well i i designed it obviously for myself and it's focused a lot on the brain it addresses the root causes of why these autoimmune processes are developing so it it helps you know psoriasis inflammatory bowel disease rheumatoid arthritis allergies asthma uh myasthenia gravis ms you know and frankly people reach out to me tell me that they have you know a disease that i have to look up because i've never heard of it i and their physicians had given up hope and they had stumbled on my work implemented my work and are steadily improving yeah and i've also had people with genetic disorders muscular dystrophy for example yeah tell us about that uh who when you found what found my work it actually has been coming to my seminar since the very first one and he talks about yep he still has muscular dystrophy but he's far more functional since implementing the walls protocol and he's not getting worse i think it's important to understand from people that um you know that that people can get better from all sorts of things when they change their diet and um you know i've seen this across the spectrum in my practice so what you're speaking to is such an important fundamental principle people with cystic fibrosis uh people with charcoal marie tooth disease yeah yeah it makes a lot of sense that if you have the standard american diet standard american lifestyle you're going to accelerate the damage from those genetic diseases if we help you address diet and lifestyle gentle hormesis you will have the best quality of life and best function given your genetic circumstances i think that's right i mean terry i i think we think of down syndrome or cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophies these intractable progressive conditions which are autosomal dominant inherited conditions that you can't really modify or change if you have a you know gene that affects folate metabolism or vitamin d metabolism you can modify these are called mild you know single nucleotide polymorphism they're just slight variations in our genes they're not mutations these are mutations and they profoundly change your biology but what i found again like you just observationally my practices i've had many patients like this so i don't know let's see if we can help you let's do this let's look at under the hood what's going on what's often amazing is they have the most metabolic health you can imagine their metabolic and biochemical pathways they're all messed up in haywire that there are certain sort of you know functional things that go wrong that you can modify through understanding the biology of the disease and whether it's mass whether it's or whether i mean sorry whether it's a muscular dystrophy where there's mitochondrial issues or whether there's you know whether there's uh you know down syndrome whether it's huge insulin resistance and inflammatory pathways and methylation problems you can really impact them by changing their diet by certain types of supplementation and it was striking to me to see that you know where people can have really dramatically improved quality of life you're not curing down syndrome or muscular dystrophy but you are modifying the course of the disease and you're actually improving their overall health and quality of life absolutely absolutely yeah i spent a lot of time trying to tell people the goal is to have the best function that we can for you and and the way to do that is nutrition uh sleep uh stress management and consistent gentle hormesis absolutely absolutely but people don't understand autoimmunity as a single you know entity like ms or colitis or crohn's or hashimoto's you know it's common but but you know it doesn't add up to massive numbers when we look at it all together so when you look at all autoimmunities together it's 80 million people which is more than people almost that have cancer heart disease and diabetes combined okay there's a lot of people uh and and the question um for you today terry to start with is you know how has has your thinking changed since we last talked how has your regimen changed uh do you incorporate the same principles are you adding new things what's what's different about your approach now so we're adding new things and i also have learned uh just how critical it is to deal with the mental emotional spiritual so that people are willing to do the work because you know creating new habits creating uh new daily practices uh is takes effort and for people to go on this journey with me i need to spend more time on that mental emotional spiritual side so i spend more time there and then yes we have created this really a wonderful robust pros uh process mark the walls behavior change model that actually has 15 16 steps to help people make these changes step by achievable step and we personalize the diet and lifestyle recommendations to match what they're willing and ready to do that's amazing and and terry um what have you noticed about your own health and you know working with this over the last i don't know how many years it is now i'm over a decade right yeah what is what have you learned what has changed what are things have you been changing your own routine well you know i spend a lot more time thinking about hormesis um so that mild to moderate stress and i do it in a wide variety of ways um i do temperature hormesis so talk about hormesis what is that so hormesis is a time where you have a mild to moderate stress on your physiology covered by followed by sufficient time for your physiology to repair get back to homeostasis and rebuild itself so this is why strength training is so powerful this is why high intensity interval training can be powerful but you have to allow enough time to fully recover it's also why temperature training is so powerful so i take saunas uh probably six to seven days a week and i'll take them up to it and now this this will shock your listeners i could take a sun up to 125 degrees comfortably 140 degrees comfortably even 160. but then of course i follow that with a cold shower and and i do cold showers and for five minutes and in the evenings i'll do an ice bath ah sounds fun yeah yeah so you know it's a relaxing way to go to bed just jump in a nice bath you know what's interesting mark is you do that ice bath yeah yeah it is the fastest way to fall asleep i have the deepest sleep on the days that i do an ice bath really and you don't follow it like a warm thing and before you go to bed you get in bed freezing i get it um but you know my my wife does complain about the cold legs what you're saying is kind of heresy in some ways because we always learn from multiple sclerosis that you never put people in a sauna you avoid the heat it's really bad for them right well that and then it's better to fall asleep with a hot bath so you need to very gradually increase your temperature stress so many people with serious autoimmune disease conditions have difficulty with autonomic dysfunction and they'll have a lot of difficulty with temperature hormesis so they'll have to come at this very very slowly and as they heal and recover uh lower their inflammation uh and lower the inflammation in their brain they'll find that they can increase their temperature hormesis and so we start with a room temperature bath and a slightly cooler bath or slightly warmer bath and gradually expand the temperature with which they can tolerate but absolutely you can't put people immediately into a cold uh shower or an ice bath or immediately into a sauna if they have a neuroimmune condition they will not tolerate it yeah but after over time they can you say for you now it's helpful yeah yeah i think it's interesting when we talk about hormesis it's it's not a concept that most doctors know about most people know about i certainly hadn't heard about it until the last decade or so and essentially what you're talking about is a is a stress to the body sort of like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger which is how intermittent fasting works or for long fasting or exercise when you exercise you're creating a stress to the body those actually help sort of cause a trauma or a stress which then creates a healing response in the body and that's what you're getting as long as you have sufficient time to fully recover you know and for years when i was an athlete you know because i i did um long distance running i i did martial arts i yeah i did not spend enough time in recovery so and many athletes uh do this we train so hard uh we don't spend sufficient time uh in recovery and actually we probably would have made uh faster gains if we would pay a lot more attention to recovery as what does recovery look like so in in my patients we talked a lot about this that i want them to have their stress of their exercise or their temperature stress but then they have to have a sufficient duration of the recovery before they can go back to that stress again so many of my patients you know they're severely uh disabled so for them a uh two-minute exercise may be all they can do and still function for the rest of the day uh and so we we discuss you do the gentle exercise and can you function normally uh later in the day how long does it take for you to recover and then gradually increase their exercise interesting now terry you know you talk a lot about the food as medicine we're going to get into that a little bit more but you sort of touched on a little bit about stress and how that played a role particularly in your case of getting ms can you talk more about that in the stress of medical school and and my my trigeminal neuralgia began during medical school uh and and yet looking back uh you know i grew up on a farm physically very active lots of vitamin d uh probably really a very good diet uh went into medical school i became a vegetarian i went very low fat was no longer outside so my vitamin d levels plummeted i was certainly not taking supplements i was not sleeping at night very much um we certainly had enormous amounts of stress uh in going through those clinical rotations uh it was during my third year medical school that i started getting you know my facial pains the zingers as i call them yeah uh and i would have them you know for the next 20 years and then 20 and they were gradually getting worse uh and you know that was during my clinical practice i was uh very ambitious i i was in physician leadership again a high stress job uh my zingers were getting worse and then i developed uh motor symptoms and had weakness in my uh left legs wow clearly stress was was was always there and was a big driver that was happening just before the onset of my zingers and then i had a transient episode of dim vision in my left eye and again that was associated with stress and i had some severe work stress just before the onset of my love leg weakness and so you feel like how have you dealt with stress in a different way and how that helped with the ms it's interesting during college i've learned how to do transcendental meditation and during medical school i quit that um and you know when i was diagnosed with ms even though i knew that stress was a big factor i did not go back to meditation um it was not uh until you know as in the wheelchair i went back to reading the basic science as working on my diet again discovered functional medicine i and then i was like you know i got to do everything and that's when i went back to meditation i thoughtfully redesigned my paleo diet um i discovered electrical stimulation i and i think it was the combination of doing all of that yeah yeah and and so now my my routine mark is i get up in the morning i do my meditations then i'll do my uh exercise then i do my sauna then i do my cold shower in that routine in the morning how long does that take you it takes me about two hours to do all of that and i you know i learned to put that in my schedule and then in the evening uh most evenings i will again do a round of meditation uh and a uh ice bath oh really wow and you know sometimes you don't do a hot bath first you do the ice bath i just do an ice bath let's brave i like to do a sauna first yeah well and sometimes saunas uh they're really very nice but you know the reason i i keep going back to the ice bath is the quality of my sleep is is better oh really wow i'm going to try that so you just just get in a cold bath and how long do you stay there well i i set my timer and i read for 20 minutes 20 minutes but not like ice ice bath well so so when you first start doing this mark i just do a cool bath and then if you've done that for a few days just run only cold water do a cold bath and then so now you're comfortable with the cold bath then you have a bucket of ice so you're in your bathtub with a cold bath you dump your ice in uh and then i i'll freeze solid you know liter bottles of ice so i have because that keeps the ice longer when it's soft so do do do you use the wim hof breathing method how do you get ready for going yeah i'll i'll do you know a cycle of uh the deep breathing and i just get in it after you do it for a while it's really very comfortable yeah i step in i let my feet get used to it then i settle down into the bath and you know grab my book and i start reading wow okay then i'm gonna try that maybe i'm gonna try i like the ice bath after the sauna um and 20 minutes a long time it's a long time uh well you get you get uh comfortable really quite quickly and you know i i quit but you know the quality of my sleep is so much better when i do the cold bath the ice bath so i end up going back to it all right i want to switch tops a little bit because it's fascinating to hear all your conversation about hermesis and these various practices that help enhance your health and i think there's a lot of those whether it's hot and cold stresses whether it's exercise whether it's fasting whether it's things like ozone or hyperbaric oxygen these are all hormetic therapies and there's there's really cool machines in in europe they use for mitochondrial resuscitation where they'll basically bring your oxygen level that that would be if you were climbing mount everest keep you up at that low oxygen level for a while and then bring you back down to sea level and that oxygen deprivation creates a stress that reboots your mitochondria so there's a lot of ways to actually to do this and it's really pretty it's pretty amazing to see what happens in your body when you get a little stressed it actually does so much better now let's talk about the research because one of the arguments around functional medicine is that there's no evidence it's lack of evidence it's not evidence-based blah blah blah you know you know i mean you know your case alone should be written up as a you know medical miracle that i understand but like it should be it should be every neurologic society every neurologist everyone should be doing how did this happen what's going on the night should be spending billions of dollars funding research like this and you're having to scrounge around from here and there and you know even you know the ms society first you know kind of shunned you and banned you and now they asked me to speak and now they want your help so you've done a lot of the hard work around the research so let's talk about the clinical trials that you've done what you've learned what you've found and what they've shown because because you're you're approaching maybe for those who are just listening to this podcast first time let's just sort of back up and go what is the welsh protocol what is that what is the concept of the diet why are the principles of the diet used in the way they are and what are the key take homes around that and let's get then let's get into the research of of how this works so first we'll talk about the dietary approach so the way you might think about it when i talk to the public is sort of a pre-walls diet is a mediterranean diet which everyone agrees is a great diet more vegetables legumes 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 casein and eggs because they're the three most uh common uh food antigens that can cause it excessive immune response no more waffles 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 uh and you can do that as a vegetarian and that 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 have them soaked and sprouted and 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 is taking kidney pie and all that stuff yeah 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 in the fat soluble vitamins 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 q creatine carnitine so really really marvelous nutrition for us 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 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 um our family's uh favorite dish so uh 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 i 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 live this tiny one bedroom apartment and we'd have liver and onions and rice and i thought that was like a fancy meal chicken livers nothing to realize it was like sort of poor well you know it is actually quite handy because it is relatively inexpensive you can get organic liver 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 so delicious incredibly delicious uh and then you know oysters uh clams uh mussels uh those are all organ meats uh oh really quite quite quite delicious and quick what about the liver toxicity like of liver because people oh my liver is number the waste basket of the body where the toxins go isn't 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 uh if you're if you're concerned about 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 is 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 they'll reduce the risk of macular degeneration of cataracts and dementia you're also going to get great source of vitamin k and in neuroimmune conditions ms in cognitive decline there's a severe um in epidemiologic studies the vitamin k levels are extraordinarily low in those population groups so really lots of reasons to get your greens now we're going to go on to why i want you to have cabbage onion mushrooms so the sulfur is a really great support for your detox great support for uh uh 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 better nerve growth factor production in animal models uh and in human studies associated with much lower rates of cognitive decline in 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 taken those you didn't get the colors yet so 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 idea well no nine no 18 18 servings nine cups 18 surprises 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 then 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 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 having if you're still a constipation more fiber more fermented foods more sauerkraut and kimchi so that's the food part now you're taking 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 the 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 lime it could be mold it could be insulin resistance and it could you know it could be a lot of multiple all of them right and so it's all there could be nutritional deficiencies or hormonal imbalances and all these things and i said you know what's going on is that these patients need to support all these things in order to get better and she says well let's just study one thing i'm like let's see if diet is never getting right it's important to exercise it's important to sleep right it's important you know to deal with stress by 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 get 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 and creating these multi-modal interventions somehow where you look at multiple interventions 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 and 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 uh 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 uh then i so we addressed the supplements we had a 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 and fortunately we had someone find the diet 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 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 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 nobody with cognitive decline got in 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 i'm 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 cell 7's and they were fully compliant with their diet 90 of the days and then on the exercise doing the exercise and the e stim every day 75 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 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 fund 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 uh the swank and the wallace diets were too unpalatable people wouldn't follow the diet they thought it was unrealistic they were going to follow people for two years why are we doing mris because you need drugs to have a favorable impact oh my god that's crazy okay so so we have we have that challenge now the the benefit i have mark is 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 to fund you they they fund our research and so that's how i've 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 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 um on fatigue severity scale score goes from seven to one seven total fatigue in every aspect of your life one no fatigue uh dropped 2.38 points and 0.45 is clinically meaningful so that's a huge drop and the anxiety uh remarkably went down depression remarkably went down uh verbal memory non-verbal memory uh and performance 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 remarkable they didn't get worse which normally they do that's why it's called progressive 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 then they didn't get worse and they often got better and had a reduction in fatigue what were the next follow-up studies you did 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 uh it was randomized a relapsing remitting 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 that uh 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 we're about to launch that just before the pandemic we're going to have newly diagnosed ms clinic isolated syndrome folks baseline assessments baseline mris basically give them the walls protocol 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 have declined drugs uh and we basically put them on the walls diet a stress reduction program and 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 what we're doing is we're extracting the medical records here at the university of iowa of newly diagnosed folks with ms and clinical isolated syndrome and we are counting in everyone from their medical records their number of lesions the number of relapses in the progression of symptoms or remission of symptoms yeah during that time period so we will 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 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 follow-up mris and lesions have disappeared and they're not having relapses and their neurologists are like wow this is really amazing yeah i and so um 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 got a book deal the book was a bestseller uh 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 in all what they're doing have a different view are they still stuck and diet doesn't matter like 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 about calorie restriction uh fasting ketogenic diets uh the paleolithic diet mediterranean diet swank diet mcdougall diet so all these small studies uh our wave study is the largest study today um 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 the dietary intake and uh whether or not that is associated with changes in quality of life and fatigue so that's going to be very very exciting because if an online program can do those things and that makes this you know access available to everyone yeah uh and then uh 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 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 uh 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 balancing and counterbalancing pathways absolutely i think if we're going to create health we have to study 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 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 reduced to 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 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 when i first had my recovery my partner started complaining about what i was doing and i got called in 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 alternate 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 and what i learned the way i shifted my conversation mark was that i i told my patients that 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 uh their health and then we will watch for uh 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 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 long 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 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 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 bell is 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 gut we always adjust to 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 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 uh and which immune cells are going to be active we 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 glia 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 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 the crystal chart one to seven that's the best description of poop i've ever heard it's a 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 the 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 uh and so what i learned was uh behavior change uh group uh 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 a parasite or really bad gut don't think of probiotics something other things now 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 on 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 do you want to know my secrets for living a long and happy and healthy life well all you have to do is check out my weekly newsletter mark's picks where i share my favorite tips for health longevity well-being and lots more check it out and the link below so 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 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 program so 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 two lessons a day to help you on your journey of adapting 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 there are five modules lots of lessons within each module to take you through the emotional aspect of the food aspect the 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 hey youtube if you like this video you're going to love the next one well it's always getting to the root cause you know we always look for the root cause and functional medicine here at the ultra oneness center everything's designed all the tests that we do all the all the work that we do and the way we think about things is to get to the root cause and we know that the the autumn it's an autoimmune process that drives thyroid disease particularly graves and this in this case that we're talking about and 75 to 80 percent of your immune system is in your gut it's gut it's gut um it's called gold gut associated lymph lymph tissue and so why because you have everything that you eat has organisms on it has compounds in it that can potentially threaten your health so your immune system has to be on high alert all the time making sure that there is there's no disruption nothing gets into your system that could cause you to be ill so we look at the gut microbiome and and and the function of the the gut um almost first and foremost when it comes to autoimmune diseases because that's where you're going to find the majority of the triggers so the gut is always a cute thing to think about because 70 of your immune systems in your gut and if you have an autoimmune disease you have to treat your gut i don't think that there's one person with an autoimmune disease i've treated that hasn't had hasn't had some gut issue um that had to be dealt with that that was part of reducing their autoimmune process and getting them into remission okay then wow and and what's really fascinating is that um it just recalls this patient of mine who was about a 40 year old woman who had graves disease and was struggling and did not want to be on medication long term it was willing to do whatever it took and she she turned out she had real gluten issues she had terrible gut issues and we did a really and she had parasites i mean we did a really aggressive gut repair program and we optimized her health and her vitamin d and we improved her diet and what was amazing was that uh her antibodies for graves went to zero her thyroid normalized and she's completely fine now and off medication which is just really striking to me because that's something i never learned was possible in medical school yeah and you know you know i've had a case where um again you get to the root cause and yeah was gut a major issue sure um but in my particular case it was a woman who's 55 years old she came with the diagnosis of graves like i said many do and she just didn't want to you know do the traditional therapies so when she came in she was also menopausal within the last two years and she um that was the main the other main issue with her so um and although she had gut issues she had bloating and distension and constipation some loose stools so with her you know one of the things that works and i you know when you want to treat somebody you're it it's perfectly appropriate to try to understand that the the mechanism the pathway of the way the organ works in this case thyroid tpo thyroperoxidase antibody thyroid peroxidase is an enzyme that's blocked with a pharmaceutical agent that is very harmful botanical agents can oftentimes because we get many of our medicines from botanicals so botanical agents can oftentimes be very effective in this particular case l-carnitine can act as a thyroid peroxidase inhibitor and so using l-carnitine was one of the first things i did with this particular woman and she you know before our next follow-up she was already beginning to have some relief from her symptoms just using l-carnitine and then because she was menopausal estrogen can have an impact on your autoimmune state so balancing hormones is really important you know when you think about hormone replacement you know there's always been a concern particularly with women about the possible impact on the breast and breast cancer what i will say is that there are now studies that are showing that early in menopause using hormone replacement for a short period of time can have a very beneficial impact on brain aging there's reduction in alzheimer development of alzheimer's for women who have estrogen early in their menopausal state it also reduces um the the autoimmune state and because estrogen does play a role in balancing the inflammatory and anti-inflammatory sides of the immune response so i actually put it on there that's why you see most in the case of autoimmune disease in women yeah and in 40 to 50 you know 40 to 60 range so i bounced through hormones and then of course you know we worked on our gut microbiome which is always a critical piece yeah and and you know the other thing you did was you got off gluten and you put on an anti-inflammatory diet yep right yep and you gave her the raw materials for helping your thyroid yeah and i you know that's right yeah and i think it's really important when we say we work on the gut you know we have to remember that when we work on the gut we have a very programmatic approach that can be adopted and adapted to the various conditions people have but it's that 5r approach you know it's basically let's find out what may be a trigger so there are triggers to you know there are some you know bacterial and parasitic triggers to thyroid autoimmunity one of them happens to be blastocystis hominis which is a parasite uh that you know has been implicated in triggering antibodies that will go after the thyroid that's interesting because that patient that i mentioned that's what she had she had this parasite yeah yeah we're going to talk about on another podcast yeah we are so um so when we look at the gut we're going to look and so we're going to need to we know we need to look at the gut carefully so talk about you know what is really driving this this this problem and what what is graves what is hyperthyroidism and what does it do to people how do they feel and how do people know they have it right so hyperthyroidism is when the thyroid gland is producing way too much thyroid hormone that's t3 and t4 and so uh when they're being overproduced then you're going to have symptoms that are going to cause you to lose weight feel sweaty have palpitations be anxious have thinning hair lose your hair have thinning nails graves disease happens to be the most common it's about 60 to 70 percent of people with hyperthyroidism are graves it happens to about one in 200 people men more than women more than men 10 10 to 1 and it usually peaks around in the ages of 40 to 60 years old but it can happen younger so that's like the the overview of um uh graves disease now they're the most likely as you see what are the symptoms the symptoms are some of the ones i just mentioned which are going to be weight loss sweating thinning thinning nails hair loss um skin palpitations when it gets really diarrhea atrial fib yep and when it gets really bad you can have heart failure you can have a hormone imbalance and you can have anemia yeah those are some diseases and insomnia people can't say i had a friend i had a friend called me who was like i can't sleep i don't know what's wrong yeah and uh we get to our history he's like and i lost 20 pounds and i wasn't trying i'm like oh okay yeah you know and it should be yeah so most people as you said have hypothyroidism um it's less common one percent of thyroid disease or two percent is is hyperthyroidism and graves is the most common but when you have it it can be really debilitating and it can be really hard to treat and as you said earlier in conventional medicine the treatments have been changed in 50 years and they're quite harsh and functional medicine really gives us a great opportunity to get to the root causes of what triggers graves and allows us to then treat our patients in ways that make sense for the biology and their life environment yeah so so it's really you know the symptoms can be quite dramatic for people right absolutely went through and like as you mentioned some of the complications are serious it's not just about having a racing heart or insomnia or diarrhea you can get eye damage so your eyes can bug out of your head right yes yes heart failure right yeah yeah that can happen and you know the reason why that happens and and i think we're going to have to just jump right into this part of it is the autoimmune process graves is an autoimmune disorder just like hashimoto's which causes hypothyroidism and so you can't get away from talking about thyroid disease without talking about the autoimmune you know our immune system autoimmunity why we have it why it's getting worse and what some of the major triggers are so the eye disease is actually antibodies that are being made against your thyroid they're called um thyroid um thyroid stimulating hormone receptor antibodies or t-rabs and they're made specifically against the receptors on the thyroid so when those antibodies hit those receptors it triggered it doesn't destroy those receptors actually triggers them to make more thyroid hormone but we have it's a very non-specific interaction and those antibodies can also trigger like anti like antigens in other parts of the body they happen to be in the eye where there are thyroid stimulating receptors and also in the lower extremities so you can get the deposition of all these antibodies in the eye that cause that um the graves up though uh of the uh graves eye disease um and also p pretibial mixed edema and that's because it's like fluid retention food retention in your legs where you get a destruction of the tissue underneath the um the the skin of the the tibia or your your shin and you can see it's thickened and fluid filled and it's not nice looking and it's not nice feeling so those are the things that are the hallmarks of graves and they're all related to that autoimmune antibody response what's interesting also is that uh you know autoimmune diseases often come in clusters and with graves you see people off with other autoimmune diseases right like you do like what so some of the other autoimmune diseases um can be um you can actually get hashimoto's hashimoto's is one of the other autoimmune diseases you can have low and high at the same time you can you can definitely have that um you can have diabetes uh which is not immune to one diabetes type one diabetes um little ligo right this is a common one in your skin yep anemia and and autoimmune things like arthritis rheumatoid arthritis lupus right yep and then and then and then what's interesting is also celiac disease so there's a well there's a link between celiac disease because gluten is a huge trigger for autoimmunity particularly creating antibodies against the thyroid okay so so so that's a kind of a good overview of the prevalence of it what the symptoms are what the complications are um and you sort of it's not it's often not that hard to diagnose when people are that sick you can kind of tell but it's subtle sometimes what tests did doctors do to find out traditionally whether you have it yeah so with the the then we're going to get to one of the tests we do in functional medicine they're quite different so yeah so the traditional test that you how you find it is looking first at your thyroid function so you're going to be looking at somebody the key thing is is the clinical symptoms right it's not always tested people come in and they have symptoms then you have to start to use your your medical you know cognition and everything you know about medicine to figure out okay what do i think is going on well once you realize what the symptoms are then you start to understand you know this is the thyroid so you're going to look at the thyroid and you're looking at what we call the tsh which is a thyroid stimulating hormone and if that's really really low that means that you're the thyroid is is producing way too much thyroid hormone and it's and your your pituitary gland is being suppressed so it doesn't make enough of this thyroid stimulating hormone just let me just back up for a second your pituitary gland drives your thyroid yeah and it sends a signal to the thyroid it's called the thyroid stimulating hormone so your thyroid tsh yeah tsh and so your thyroid is sort of lazy and so it has to be reminded to work so the pituitary's responsibility to send out this signal all the time so you're going to have a certain normal level of tsh reminding the thyroid to work and as long as it's doing its job and nothing's impairing it from doing its job then it's gonna function great and it's gonna make thyroid hormone t4 and t3 t4 and t3 go to the cells now t3 is the active form of thyroid hormone and inside the cell t4 gets converted to t3 then it goes into the nucleus where it causes the dna to start to transcribe and make enzymes and proteins that upregulate metabolism and that's exactly what it's supposed to do now if you don't make enough thyroid hormone then you're going to experience hypothyroidism and a slow down of your metabolism and if you make too much you're going to have a uptick in your metabolism and everything that goes along with that and that's called hyperthyroidism so what happens is and one of the tests so the test so that when we go for the test the tsh is going to be suppressed if the thyroid is making too much the pituitary is going to stop the feedback system tells your tsa shut off and then the other it's a negative other hormones go up yep but there's also antibodies right so now we're going to so once you've realized they have hyperthyroidism then you want to check for antibodies and the the main one you check for is thyroid stimulating hormone receptor antibodies and if those are positive it's 99 sensitivity and specificity for graves disease that's the main test there's also a radioactive iodine test right yeah so after after you do that you can do a radioactive uptake to see if the person has maybe some other reason for having that hyperthyroidism which can be an adenoma or multi multi nodular toxic goiter and so what what are doctors once people are diagnosed with this what are the treatments because it seems like they haven't really changed much since now 40 years since i graduated medical school yeah they haven't changed much and they're pretty harsh and you know one you know so there's there's methimazole which is basically a thyroid proxidase um enzyme inhibitor thyroid peroxidase is the enzyme that the thyroid uses to bind iodine together to make thyroid hormone and so it blocks that and so you just reduce the production methimazole uh can have some you know significant and poly polythyrosol ptu um particularly can have some you know very impactful side effects like you know hepatic toxicity so and you're going to be on them for 18 months up to 18 months to get into remission and so they're not they're not really uh they can be harsh uh and they can have lots of adverse reactions and a lot of the most of the people that i see in the ultra wanna center they come to me with grapes i don't have to make the diagnosis they come and the reason why they come is they don't want to be on methamphetamine and they don't want to have you know iodine the the next therapy is what else is radioactive iodine destruction of the thyroid so basically nukes your thyroid glare basically nukes so you're going to get you're going to get you know i131 which is iodine tagged with you know a radioactive molecule um and when that it's iodine so now this radioactive material gets absorbed into the thyroid that's good wants to use it iodine but then that radioactive material breaks down the xenon and xenon destroys the thyroid or parts of it and reduces the production of thyroid hormone again pretty harsh you're you're radioactive and you know you're you're not you know when you can't breastfeed you can't you can't be around kids you can't for a while you can't touch people yeah you know not your whole life it can be up to two weeks you know of the treatment and then finally there's just take the thyroid out so basically like nuke it take it out or poison it yeah yeah yeah what you have poisoning okay well i mean sometimes that's necessary just to deal with symptoms or people can use beta blockers if their hearts racing and so on which is pretty much okay but the question is how do we deal with this in functional medicine that's different and at the ultra bonus center how do we think about this condition this gets into the testing we do in functional medicine so one of the first tests i do is a stool analysis and that stool analysis is not only going to tell me about the balance of good bacteria which are your commensals and your bad bacteria i always say that those are the those are the bacteria that realize that poop's a great party great place to live and they come and hang out but they may not do anything for you unless you have a really bad diet you're under too much stress you're not taking care of your gut microbiome you're eating processed foods and sugars you're eating lots of gmo foods that have lots of glyphosate on them and your microbiome is disordered now all of a sudden those hanger honors are now going to just they're just going to multiply and they're going to push your good bacteria out and when that happens then the good bacteria can't modulate your immune system can't help you doesn't make the compounds that you need as we know 70 to 90 of your serotonin is actually made by bacteria in your in your gut so you need to rebalance that so we're really careful about doing that we want to know not only that balance but how's your your digestive system working one of the things that allows the the gut microbiome to go into this disorder is you're not making enough gastric acids you're under too much stress when you're under stress then your fight flight response takes over and suddenly you don't want to have an appetite when you're running away from the bear so your appetite goes down you start making less gastric acid and when you're under chronic stress this chronic acid allows bacteria and parasites and viruses to get into your intestinal tract where they can wreak havoc that's another reason to worry about stresses more parasites right more parasites another another so so really it brings it all on so we really we really work on the gut work on the gut you get rid of the food sensitivities and you know i often will see a disease that i've never really treated or that is not that common and i'm like well gee i i don't really know all the time you know i don't know if this is gonna work right but then i go back to first principles in functional medicine and look at what are the root causes of disease what are the causes of whatever is inflammation or metabolic disease and then i can usually zero in on what their story is and listen from their story i'm like yeah yeah you know i i've been eating tuna every day for 30 years or you know like i i basically have this terrible stomach issue that blah blah blah blah blah blah and i go you know so you start to kind of find the clues in the pages story and you follow the threads and you start to do the diagnostic tests that help you and then you start to peel the onion and treat all these problems and so absolutely you know your your treatment isn't just take this ptu drug or get your thyroid nut or take it out it's like oh we have to change our diet oh it's deal with stress oh we have to take the right nutrients to optimize the levels oh you have heavy metals to take care of that oh we have pesticides we have to figure out how to get rid of that so basically go through a process a therapeutic process that's based very strategically on that patient's story and their specific labs and it's no um there's no two people that are the same who have any particular disease like i don't know or graves or anything else yeah i i'm just gonna echo everything you just said mark because we have this conversation this is the work that we do we get to the root cause and then we use treatments that make sense for each person's specific biology and their life environment and there's not a patient that comes to me or it's a rare patient that comes to me that we don't we don't find multiple reasons why their health is either currently compromised or is it set up for being compromised in the future because of all of those particular areas you just talked about environment it's not a matter of people have toxins it's how much yeah right and then and then the genetics determine how well they're going to detox those toxins and so we also know that you have genetics that drive your your immune system but we have places to look we do a lot of antibody testing to help us identify do you have an autoimmune process and where is the trigger and so and we could go through every you know every biologic system that we look at with all the testing that we do and uh and explain in detail how we're using those tests in those biologic areas toxins the hpa access um you know uh um uh energy production mitochondria we do specific tests um that uh will look at mitochondrial function all of those things have to be addressed it's never one thing it's multiple layers and that's the whole problem with traditional medicine it's like reductionist it's crazy you get this drug a seal later that's it nothing else and we're like no no ten people with graves might have ten different issues and we need to treat them in ten different ways and we need to find out what their cause is and how to optimize their system you wanna know my secrets for living a long and happy and healthy life well all you have to do is check out my weekly newsletter mark's picks where i share my favorite tips for health longevity well-being and lots more check it out and the link below you know what 20 years ago or maybe it's longer than maybe 21 22 years ago you were a canyon ranch and you had the opportunity to you know hear jeff bland speak and you you got the fever early on right right 20 years ago i i just started my own conventional family practice and i was a conventional doc for you know it was it took me about 15 years but even in my conventional practice i always had that that holistic approach i was writing nutrition programs i was putting together exercise programs for my patients and my diabetics i had a weight loss program specifically for my diabetics however the pressures of the insurance industry the pressures of my discipline and family medicine were such that it was see as many patients as you can make the diagnosis use a pharmaceutical agent and about six you know probably 13 14 years in i started to say you know what this is not right this there's something wrong because my patients aren't getting better no i'm maintaining disease and then i found functional medicine and that changed everything changes everything changed everything so where you would have come to me with grave disease 10 years ago and i would have sent you to the endocrinologist who would have put you on methamphetamine and beta blocker and then talked about having you go to an ent doc who's going to take out your thyroid i would have been right on board you know what i saw the light and i can tell you in my time as a family as a functional medicine doc now board certified functional medicine the ifm i think i have helped more people leave their disease behind actually be better than i did in 20 years of private practice and conventional medicine wow so so that's a big statement [Music] hey youtube if you like this video you're gonna love the next one click on it to check it out today 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 right that's what i was joking say functional medicine doctors are in

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

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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: iXDRtUjFM-k

Length: 83min 38sec (5018 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021