If Dr. Jordan Peterson was My Patient, Here’s What I Would Do

okay i think we're live i can see mike's i can see some text i will see if you can hear me which is always the ultimate test because as you can see i'm not home we are not in south dakota yet we have not made it home and i am doing a few other things that i usually don't do which is sit down for a for a uh show because i actually i i think i got carsick i don't know we were i don't know if you can tell this but i'm here in texas oh thank you for the great sound i appreciate that rye the trip from south dakota to texas is still ongoing i thought for sure we'd be home by now but we aren't and um the the adventures uh we can see two-thirds of it yeah the sun is very bright and i just don't i don't have lighting so i have to be outside because i'm in a hotel and um i think it's crooked too so i'm just gonna have to deal with it i'm sorry um but yeah so i am sitting down because on our drive around texas we have uh we are looking to move our family and texas is one of the places we are considering going and a few places where they said check out our town gave us some invites and we've been doing that um we've been to dallas we've been to mckinney we've been to uh austin uh san antonio new braunfels [Music] been to the woodlands and just trying conroe and montgomery and we were driving to this place today because um lake travis was another place that was on our list to just check out and oh my gosh i had to tell my husband to pull the car over pull the car over quick and try not to throw up uh i think i scared the man that was running the convenience store because he said are you okay has this ever happened before i'm like not since i've been pregnant but anyway so i'm going to start the show like i usually do i am doing a few things differently um and i am going to check my numbers but as i said i am not feeling well so i'm wondering how that will go [Music] so i am just going to drink water for this show and not any of the any of the experiments i sometimes do so we're going to start by just checking numbers and i really have a great show for you i've been actually um just practically meditating over this for like three days on how would i present this so for those of you that are new don't let me know if you can see this uh but this is our uh i'll put it out here in the light actually this is this purple strip uh the purple strip is the one that measures ketones and um i actually have a brand new meter today because i gifted my meter to somebody a few days ago and again counting down i've got a 0.6 for my ketones i don't know if you can see that and the glucose is 108. i actually expected that to not be so good i just really don't feel well so uh we'll see how the show goes i am gonna sip on some water and i am really excited about the show there is uh several things that i um was gonna give some updates on uh one of them is the progress of the book as many of you know i have been in the process of writing down what it is i do in my clinic for taking the ketogenic diet to an advanced level and using it methodically and then finding a way to teach it that doesn't overwhelm the patient that meets them at the stage they're at but also just how do i think through it what am i doing with their metabolism why am i pushing certain people sooner than others so if you've read the other book that i wrote any way you can i think telling telling stories as you teach gets the engagement of the patients so it's a story of a man who um used the ketogenic diet and we talk about his health but we really focus on a lot of his the weight loss but also his brain which plays into today um and we're going to wrap that uh certainly full circle as we talk about dr jordan peterson and his just sad unfortunate um story that he's going through that i i couldn't stop thinking about and so i decided i would just say if he was my patient this is what i would do um but let's back up a little bit and give you some updates on the book i know there's a few people that wanted to be pre-readers and i thought i would have you a copy of the book by now but the first pre-reader is i am happily married so i asked my husband to read it first and he said you can't you can't send this out till you fix a few things so after i got done being angry because i really wanted to be done uh he's right i hate it when he's right but he was right so i've had to write a couple rewrite a couple chapters and then it's like i'm missing a chapter like i don't even know what happened to it i can't find it anywhere i swear i wrote it but it's not there so thank god for husbands all right so uh in true spirit if you are one of the pre-readers hang tight it's uh it's coming and i do think it's going to be very helpful in the meantime those of you that have taken the online course that is actually the curriculum that i use for the book just kind of testing out how well it fit with patients and how well if i wasn't sitting one-on-one with them how well would it be received so uh i think that's where i'm going to start i will try to remember to check my numbers at the end of the show i just think that's helpful for you to see that i do look at my own metabolism i think it's a powerful way to just have a self-check you know doctor heal thyself and in many ways dr peterson's story is going to um have a little bit of um it has a lot of parallels to my life uh so i think i don't know if that's why i just feel so compelled to not just share a story but send my deepest condolences that the medical community hasn't done a better job of helping him so we're going to start and i had set this up a couple of ways and then when i ran just a brief uh summary by a couple of people they didn't know who dr peterson was and so i thought oh okay let me uh let me back up a little further for this uh um for this show uh for this uh announce this lesson and we're gonna try and do an introduction to dr peterson so let's look over here and see if i can get that camera there we go uh pray my poor little computer doesn't overheat uh all right so yes this is dr jordan peterson and i have some notes over here just to make sure i get all of his uh degrees right but you know actually i first heard he's he's actually been famous for probably 15 years but i had i didn't hear about him until um the recent uh actually i think it was a couple probably 18 months ago or so when he was on the joe rogan show and uh joe rogan interviewed him and had talked about the some controversy but what was most interesting as i listened to him was his um the psychology about um you know not only his personal development but also how he teaches theology or teaches about the bible at a university and i thought oh wow i don't know if i've ever actually seen that in my uh recent years that they could do that and so that was my first curiosity uh then once you start um the transition that's happened since i wrote the book any way you can has been the amen just immense i can't even put it into words how many people have been helped and you know dr peterson spends a lot of time talking about your purpose and meaning in life and it sounds cliche until you know you really slow down and say if you could write the perfect world about how you impacted it how would how would that look and i don't know if it's i don't know why i can relate to him so well like i'm sure the whole world feels this way but specifically the things that really connected to me were his sense of community his sense of need for this um i mean especially the way he writes his lectures that he he doesn't want it to be christian or jewish or mormon or he wants it to be why is this biblical tale um so important in in his own life how does he reflect on some of his sins some of the things he does that he's like well i do like the way my brain works and he does like the way you know he's very intelligent and you know he says to to work on your own pride is it's actually real like that isn't easy that's hard and you have to be really honest with yourself when you're doing that so anyway i'm just trying to give him the praise and say thank you if god forbid he would ever watch this um but to say you know this um the way he teaches and the way he has a sense of altruism for when he's writing his lecture and processing the the impact that he has because he does a really good job so one of the places where i cringed when i was hearing again about him for the first few times was he has a daughter with an autoimmune problem and i can remember hearing that he said she had her joints replaced in her teenage years and again i'm internal medicine this is what we do for a living as we take that we do the long game and to know that the joint replacement started in teenage years i just i can remember the sinking feeling saying oh my goodness did someone someone should have told him about the ketogenic diet of course a few a few weeks later i hear another little blip from somewhere and i hear that he and his daughter have been on the ketogenic diet or maybe it was in that same show where like oh great um and you know as a dad you can hear his regret that he you know he's like we did the best we could i you know i was reading all the scientific literature uh i was giving her my you know deepest attention um really uh spending my own time researching but also leaning on very professional um advice so when you look at um what's happened in her story is she she was on the joe rogan show as well actually i didn't i haven't listened to that until just like in preparation for this show so for the last you know two three days ago i think is when i first listened to his daughter but his daughter's name is michaela and she is uh in her early 20s she has a daughter of her own married daughter of her own but most notably is that she was able to improve her um her autoimmune process by being on a carnivore diet and as i hear her talk tell her story uh on the joe rogan show that i think it aired over a year ago or so she boy she needed to take the keto course because she could have got there a lot faster and she's got some things where she's like i don't know why this works i'm like i know why this works i know why what you're doing works but you should measure it you have an autoimmune disorder this is something you want to reverse the age inside your joints for anyway she's doing an amazing job she's a beautiful woman and you know really god bless her for pushing and trying as hard as she did to um to not give up on how how do you heal myself and like like what's happened with her dad they spent a lot of time going to professionals and really asking for the kind of help that i i really think medicine is missing and i know i have colleagues who are doing the best they can as am i in a system that isn't set up right and to hear dr peterson's story um oh it was heart-wrenching to say oh my goodness i know exactly what happened here i know exactly why he oh i know exactly what they did oh no oh no oh no so we're going to tell his story a little bit in case those of you that haven't um haven't heard it but i would really encourage you to check out the show notes i've linked the interview that i'm about to show you some clips from and i've um i think i have it set up in a way that you should be able to follow it pretty well but most importantly i just uh i really think that when it comes to the ketogenic diet there are there are some gaps of uh what medicine i mean what my colleagues what um people who study metabolic health can see uh and know but what is in real practice and we're gonna we're gonna see if i can do this okay because it's it's a story okay so here is dr peterson uh again uh his uh practice in canada is still very much um where his home is but i actually think i think he's in budapest right now so we're gonna do a couple of things here we are going to pray to god this works here we go uh one two three all right take a listen to this maybe um well in the most canadian fashion i can muster um what the hell happened eh well you know an accident is when three or four or five unlikely things happen at the same time your mom and i tammy and i went to australia and new zealand for most of february and that was actually not too bad a trip it felt all right and she was feeling all right too but we knew her surgery for what was hypothetically a relatively treatable cancer was coming up in march so that was hanging over our heads we weren't overwhelmingly worried about it and then she went and had her surgery and then we were informed six weeks after that after she had recovered but was still suffering some pain that the easily treatable and non-dangerous slow-growing malignancy that we were told she had was in fact something fast-growing with about a with a some something near 100 fatality rate within a year regardless of treatment yeah and she had a ductal carcinoma of her breast and just that is a it's incredibly dangerous um cancer and her they're right the death rates are high there's about four more clips here we're going to stop it between the clips i have a few things we're going to talk about but that one they're all about uh between 40 seconds and a minute long so oops we're going to do this one here so why before we get into that yeah what why why did you start so so let's actually just cover something for a second here so he started on benzodiazepines um and the benzodiazepines are um yeah i i take care of the ketogenic diet is something that's been um what's got me at youtube i mean people watch this youtube channel because of the ketogenic diet but i um dove into the ketogenic diet because of its ability to repair the brain so when he says he takes benzodiazepines the first thing i think of is oh my goodness this amazingly and i heard him mention this on like the joe rogan show that he would on benzodiazepines i'm like oh my gosh no no not long no and um yeah you just think should anyway so let's go on to the next clip really quick uh and go to here so why be before we get into that why why did you start taking benzodiazepines well over the christmas vacation in 2016 you and i and julian and my son and tammy went out to vancouver island you and i and andre your husband ate something that didn't agree with any of us and i was freezing cold for about a month i couldn't get warm no matter how much i wore i couldn't stand up without fainting um i couldn't sleep i don't think i slept at all for for something where i'm like he didn't sleep in the order of three weeks when we went back to toronto our family physician prescribed benzodiazepines which are often used as a sleeping aid and an anti-anxiety medication and something called zopa clone immoving and i hardly took them a vein at all maybe four or five times you know i thought they were that it was a relatively harmless drug right that's what most of them and i was taking it in a prescribed fashion not too high a dose and i developed symptoms that i now recognized were associated with its use um weakness on the my left side and like a feeling of detachment from people yes so a couple of things he said there were this is predictable we could have i mean you could see that if you've got um uh he had a severe allergic reaction and this is when i um i got a little more clue that his he must have a leaky gut and i know that's not a diagnostic code and i actually don't like that term but uh just like oh he had sulfites and sulfites shouldn't bother you but when they do it's a warning that says stuff is getting in that shouldn't uh so that was that was a one of the other clues that i'm like oh that's not good his daughter has an autoimmune problem he must have some sort of autoimmune issue and i don't actually know that but um something isn't right and and we're going to get to the club before we get into that why why did you start stop that i'm sorry so let's go to clip number three one point when things weren't getting better and tammy was still in the hospital i was trying to take care of her we had lots of help i stopped taking them entirely and honestly tried ketamine which is a treatment for depression well that neither of those were a very good idea as as it turned out i had to stop taking benzodiazepines entirely i started stopping started tapering off when tammy was in the hospital but i couldn't push that too fast because it wasn't bearable and what what do you mean it wasn't well my anxiety levels went higher than i'd ever than anything i'd ever experienced and i also developed this condition called akathesia it was like being jabbed with something with a prod like a cattle prod something electric or something sharp non-stop for hours for all the hours i was awake was absolutely i couldn't sit or lay down yeah so you look at the um some of the processes of acasthesia it's called st vitus dance and they can't stop moving and it is a sign there is a swelling in his brain the drug when you have not just the swelling when you have the swelling plus the akashesias it is a heavy level of uh of impact that's happening and it's not very common with uh benzodiazepines it's actually common with several other antipsychotic medications but it is when it's happening it is a sign of an a rift a scar a damage that has happened to his brain at somewhere um you know he's i think he's 60 years old so maybe he's in his 50s somewhere along the lines he's had a brain injury and the medication is swelling the brain injury now it does lower the anxiety it does calm them down it does put them to sleep but not in a way that's healthy for the brain um so uh hang in there we're gonna get through this so this is actually his uh dr jordan peterson's 12 rules for life um this was the the um this is his website i also put that in the show notes um and this is the book that i made my kids read for the summer but i want you to take notice um i i put this up there to say look at what the forward is written by it is written by a man named norman deutsches norman deutsch and he's also canadian but he is one of my teachers i've learned more from dr deutsch than probably any other clinical physician and i mean it's it's amazing how little the i mean i give this this course um which is i've given the department of defense and for lots of folks around the upper midwest and one of the key books that i bring to say if you need a book to read that you can heal your brain let me click on his website here quick it is norman deutsches so norman i keep putting an edge an s on the end of it let me click on his i put his website in the in the show notes as well but um he's the guy i mean he has to know dr peterson that's why i'm bringing this up so norman deutsch and he has um he has some of the best protocols he's who if i could go back and do an internship again this is who i would pick i would do everything in my power to just you know sweep the floors at his clinic to learn uh how he's implemented these protocols i i've used several of them the literature behind what his recommendations are have been um because it's much like what happens with benzodiazepines you read about how terrible they are how rotten they are and then you go to clinical practice and everybody is using them i mean when i give this lecture i will talk about how um you know this this table right here shows you that the half-life for the benzodiazepines is um is incredibly long for most of them that the paper that this comes from uh is written in 1991 i mean i was a year out of high school then this is not new news we know that these drugs are derived from alcohol they act much like how alcohol works in a brain and if we want them to um when i go to explain how how benzodiazepines work i say yeah you know how a hangover works it lowers your anxiety it calms you down and you don't really sleep well when you have too much alcohol yeah that poor sleep is what's happening with these medications and the longer they're on it the higher the risk for severe brain damage reversal of brain health uh iq points drop when they were on these long term this is this is not new i'm going to show you some some spec scans here but i just like uh people to you know take a a quick look at the half-life half-life means when i give a pill to somebody um how long does it take before the half of it is out of their system and you can see some of these half-lifes for valium and librium are are several days so i tell patients if if we want to um audio is super off uh sorry i don't know why the audio is off um i wonder i've got a green light on it now it was yellow you're right so hopefully the audio caught up again um again i don't know what else to say all right so let's keep going um oh i see what happened there so i might have to play those those clips again uh apparently my mic was circling through them so i'm sorry about that as i look at though the the difference between um the these benzodiazepines i mean people say i'm on xanax i only have to take it a couple times a day i'm on a really small dose and the answer is don't do that do not do that so let's go on to we're gonna do the next clip and i will fix my mic for this one sorry about that yeah and so and things just fell apart more and more tammy recovered rather miraculously in the middle of august and but i continued my sort of downhill spiral and ended up in a clinic in on the eastern seaboard that claimed they could do a rapid yeah benzodiazepine detox which was a complete bloody lie yeah and when i got there what they told me instead was that they'd substitute essentially they'd substitute one benzodiazepine for another which wasn't the least bit helpful because clonazepam was already a long-acting benzodiazepine and they're easier to wean off than the shorter acting benzodiazepines all right so if i look at um some of the um some of the steps that i teach my patients whenever i do write it i mean first of all to get a benzodiazepine out of my prescription pad it's like you need a crowbar i absolutely have a rule i don't write them much like opiates i just don't write them i work with brains i work with addiction and it is such a slippery slope and here's this profoundly intelligent man going through a very stressful event he has an allergic reaction and the allergy flares his body and if i could have had a microscope in his brain the area where there's been a damage was swollen and the swelling is without a doubt um it's old scar tissue so he he's like i don't have any brain injuries i didn't get a concussion i'm like no no that's not what brain injuries are mostly from most of the brain injuries that i take care of are from things like excessive alcohol use of marijuana benzodiazepines and when we look at repairing a brain we don't say oh let's keep you on the drugs that still damage the brain while we try to repair it if you want to actually graduate from a brain injury you have to have a protocol in place that says hey why don't the um steps that are needed for repair uh begin with removing the ones that cause the damage and boy that's it's it's dangerous um but much like what was happening with michaela when she was in her teenage years she had this awful autoimmune problem and again autoimmune problems i've talked about this several times autoimmune means that your body is attacking itself and in her case it was attacking her joints [Music] people say it must be genetic it must be genetic and i'm like okay if you have genetics for that then for heaven's sakes turn down the aggressiveness of your immune system which means don't have infl any inflammation in it the removal of inflammation is a state of measured ketosis and that's why you're going to see we'll go here in a second where what i would what i would recommend okay so let's go down to the next clip uh i think we have one left and then we're going to show you some brains you and andre your husband took me out of that hospital and we went to russia of all places near moscow to try a treatment offered by a clinic there that used uh they used propofol and dextor right right proper fault to as a heavy heavy sedating agent which basically made me unconscious for nine days yeah so you were completely out for nine days well i also had pneumonia which i developed apparently in the hospital in toronto well yeah it was quite quite entertaining the whole the whole string of events oops my mic back up so looking at um the i mean the saddest part here is here's this brilliant man and he is absolutely um in charge of you know leading i mean i would say probably the whole northern you know all of north america as one of the psychologists that understands um not just these biblical stories but that development in the the human choices and i know he's gotten some controversial things about how how do we how are we discussing uh what does it mean to be transgender and what what that is about but here's this brilliant man and he has a problem with a medication that his doctors should know better they should know not to do this it's not dr peterson's job to know those medications it was our job it is the physician's job to know danger danger danger do not do this but one of the reasons norman deutsch is so um uh which again he wrote the forward for dr peterson's book that's why i'm like this is such a small circle uh why norman deutsch is a huge like icon you know in a time where i just need somebody else to see we can't be doing these things if we're going to repair brains we can't say these things to patients like you're never going to get better and i don't mean lie to a patient i mean if you tell them they can't get better guess what happens they stop trying and some of the stories in norman deutsch book norman deutsch's book were i mean they gave me the power to be able to say all right here's the logical thing to do and we're going to bridge it with what the medical team says to do but the medical team every every warning to the united states from the united states government from the fda says do not write these benzodiazepines for more than two weeks do not do not do it you are going to find that their brains age much like an alcoholics and i wasn't like a kind of thing it was like very clear evidence that this was happening so why when i got out into private practice was like everybody does this everybody writes them i'm like not good not good you're going to hurt somebody and then you stand alone and you think why am i the only one that doesn't write benzodiazepines chronically and the answer is because it's it's really easy to write them chronically you get them out of your room faster and when you get tired and you stop caring and i don't mean that doctors do that i just mean it it's hard i mean have i never written a benzodiazepine no of course i've written them but slippery slope um i mean it's his story is disastrous he he gets on them for an allergic reaction it swells his brain he can't withdrawal because it's making his anxiety worse just like when an alcoholic withdrawals they can have seizures but they can also just have this kind of electrical feeling which is part of what he was talking about that cattle prod that was and i've had i've had hundreds of patients have this problem where you say all right we need to help him heal his brain someone needs to show him help him heal his brain so let me go to a couple of other uh a spec scan is one of the ways that we can look at the function of a brain and that's what it looks like when it's healthy healthy spec scans aren't done as much in the clinical practice but they're so powerful to teach people from so i know i've actually been you know through dr ahman's training he's really his clinic is known for doing spec scans and i do think he is leading the way again counter culture to what uh today's world says as far as how do you what does the science say about mental health issues versus what does um what's being done what what's reimbursed like spec scans don't get paid for so most doctors don't write them this is what it looks like when a brain is damaged and i'll tell you this is just mild damage there all those divots are places where it's not conducting the messages correctly it's either slowing down or stopping altogether and when you look at chronic brain trauma the defects are larger deeper they've been there longer and reversing them starts with do not inflame the brain which is what brings me to a couple of other things where i said all right if he was my patient what would i do so let's start by showing you actually i'm going to show you what it looks like to have let's take this away chronic benzodiazepine use and this was totally in within the range of prescription this was a normal brain four years ago and she was on clonazepam as a way to just settle down her anxiety and the what that medicine did to her brain was this you you say well is that is that the only one that does those things no here is uh here is a spec scan of someone who used alcohol so again this is a 37 year old male he is healthy he is lean he does not have diabetes he just drinks alcohol way too much and i mean i don't know if you can see the depth and the size of those uh defects are much bigger than the ones that were in the benzodiazepine one uh that process isn't isn't as easy to appreciate when you've only seen a couple of these but boy it doesn't take long before you see alcoholic after alcoholic where there's large defective message centers in their brain and that comes from the swelling that happens every time alcohol penetrates into their brain and you know one of the workshop the workshop that i give goes into this and really does spend a good amount of time going over it i want to actually show you one more one more picture dural mail this is a picture looking at from the underside of the brain but i don't know if you can see how large those defects are so when i look at patients who say you know what doc i use that marijuana and it calms me down i'm like if you don't have a problem with your brain do what you need to do but i i i would never do that to my brain i go to my kids school to say you want to see what happens what what the science says and i know it's not popular to talk about this but as you look at what the science says about what marijuana does it is a fat soluble molecule thc is it hangs out in the fattiest parts of your body that is your sex organs your testes or ovaries and your brain and if you want to damage your brain further just put some thc into that brain and i know this isn't going to be popular but i am telling you it is not healthy for a brain that is especially one that's injured and one that is working to improve that as i look at some of the some of the things that i would say what would i ask um both um not just michaela uh not just not dr peterson but michaela to say all right you're looking at a brain injury and that brain injury is in a super important not that everybody's not important but here's this man who is in i mean i think the last thing he just talked about i'll go over to this picture here actually um the the interview that um i posted there and said if you can watch it beforehand it really does explain this a lot better than i'm gonna be able to do but i mean they have gone through several places where they've they have the money they had the resources they needed somebody to remove this drug and then help his broken brain not electrify not have those seizure-like um activities and i mean he is now finally on a protocol somewhere in budapest repairing his brain and you say oh my goodness i want him to have the privilege to repair his brain completely and that means that if he's going to uh i mean his daughter who has been just incredibly gracious for just stopping her life staying present with her dad flying all over the world trying to find an answer for him and then um you know being his advocate being his protector um at the young age of 22 trying to process what does the literature say what what does science say and i mean she's raised by a her dad is very methodical with what he looks at in the scientific literature that he didn't know the risks of benzodiazepine is because that's not his field of of of work but you ask him to you know regurgitate the studies he is uh he lectures from or he talks about and they're all very well studied in how does the human brain change and react and in the world of psychology what does affect the long-term outcomes and again i had my boys read his book for their summer reading this summer because it is a powerful lesson to say it's not just your mom saying these things and so when i look at michaela's job right now which is to help her dad be as mindful as possible be as safe as possible to get his him completely back to where he needs to be um we need her to take the ketogenic diet to a much higher level so again the reason i ended up with a love for the ketogenic diet isn't because i was trying to have a weight loss clinic i repair brains i do i deal with chronic illnesses uh internal medicine we started teenage year and we take them to the grave and it doesn't take very long to say you have a high blood pressure cholesterol diabetes and there's something inside that brain that stops working well once depression starts that depression gets harder and harder and harder but much like when i came across norman deutsch i was i was it was this relief to hear oh my gosh somebody else is seeing what i'm seeing that you cannot keep writing these prescriptions you cannot ask me to see them in 20 minutes and think i'm going to fix all of this these are chronic problems they take a not just a bunch of time for which most insurances aren't going to reimburse you more than the 20 maybe you'll get 40 minutes of time reimbursed but it's a fight and to repair a brain like that i needed to find a way to make it more efficient for their education and i needed their brains to get better fast enough that they could get on their own because i would start seeing some of them in a nursing home i mean one of the worst cases of marijuana i ever saw was he i think he'd been high since he was 20 and he was in his 50s and he ends up in a nursing home where he can't smoke marijuana and i had i was his physician and it was like as we repaired his brain with medications but also a a regular sleep routine he it started working again and of course then he walked out the front door got high again but that's his problem we did our part the reason i point this out is it it isn't like one or two days in the clinic that you see these patterns where brains don't heal when you do certain things brains don't heal when you're overweight brains don't heal when you have diabetes brains don't heal when you have high blood pressure they don't heal when you have chronic alcohol they don't heal when you put marijuana on board there's a lot of literature about that marijuana for sure lowering those iq points and you know one of the as i said at the beginning of this podcast one of my endearing stories that dr peterson talks about is he comes from this small town where um much like much like i did and i think anybody from a small town you watch the choices people make as they start out with not very many resources it's a small town their schools aren't going to get them all the ap classes and launch them into a you know ivy league school you're just you're thankful if you get to go to college and and i remember looking back at several classmates saying it was just a few choices that they made but then that choice led to the next choice and that choice led to the next choice and dr peterson writes about this in his book and i mean it totally brought me to tears saying it's exactly what happens and as i launch my kids in their mid teenage years to say all right it only takes a few bad choices and i can't scare it out of you there is a part of this that you need to experience but as i look at his fragile setting where he has got a brain that's not working right and knowing what i know if i was michaela or dr peterson it was my patient and i was saying michaela you got to help me here's what your dad needs let me put this over here first of all i would tell him that you have a you have a brain injury and brain injuries i actually was looking at um let's see if i can scroll this down a little bit we are going to go here yeah so this this is the the curriculum that i use to step people through i don't think dr uh peterson and his daughter are in that beginner they've been keto for a long time but i would push them to say um i would want you measuring to know that he is repairing his brain much like if you were one of my patients with autoimmune disorders and you were saying how do i never go back on that those medications again how do she really has repaired her her life and she did it with a carnivore diet but it's the chemistry that's happening deep inside her situation that has has been the repair that she really does i mean she gets all the credit she's done a great job if i look at uh this one here so here's dr peterson here's michaela and to say what would i recommend to them number one um you can't fix a brain that's not sleeping so it sounds like in the interview that they just did the one that's being podcasted that uh is in the show notes and is part of her her podcast and on his youtube channel is that for the last couple of weeks he's finally sleeping and again you cannot you cannot fix a brain unless it has that deep layers of sleep you'll see if you go to bossmd.com and go to my favorites page there's something called the muse headband where we they actually now have a device where you can measure did they get stage four sleep and we would do this in the sleep lab we would measure if the brain gets to stage four sleep we know the repair level is much better and i did this in utah utah is known for not having alcohol but they were the number one i don't know if this is still the case but at the time they were number one in the country for use of these benzodiazepines and you could see it right on the uh eeg you could see that their brain would not shut down it was just like an alcoholic they could they would not shut down without when the benzodiazepines were on their eyes were asleep they had a few brain waves for the early stages of sleep but that stage of sleep that's needed for repair could not could not happen does not happen uh when benzodiazepines are on board or when alcohol is on board when i give my lecture for the department for the the big lecture the 12 and a half hours of lecture it is i say if you want your boost to last for five days we call it librium if you want it to last for three days we call it valium if you wanted to last for two days we call it clonopin and we can measure in that i mean one day is xanax and adivan and klonopin i mean the the length of those half lights half-lifes that i showed you in that chart show you that that's only when half of the medication was gone its ability to uh the brain's ability to fall asleep it has to be off and it sounds like he is on um i mean i don't know what his medications are but i'm gonna guess the you know the protocol that i use uh when i get them off of the medication um it does it puts them to sleep for a couple days now we do it outpatient um you know if you go to my blog and you type in a case for sleep you'll see just a story about how i use have used this over and over again to get people off of these benzodiazepines in an outpatient setting but it is not a little thing i make their spouse come in i make somebody like michaela come in and say you have to chaperone them take away the keys they are not going to think normal for the next couple of days i'm going to take them off of this medication while not letting them have a seizure and here's how this looks and yeah obviously we have to taper some things in order to get it right but boy it's it's a powerful transition and then i tell them she said you don't remember a thing i'm like that's right when they're withdrawing they cannot record memory so michaela can't forget some of those things that were happening in those days i tell the my families this that the chaperone will will never forget what's going to happen in these next few days but the patient will have no recorded memory they cannot put memory down the brain's swollen it's not working right it's like a concussion they don't work right same thing happens with chronic marijuana use what happens to their iq why are those big holes in their brain those fat based molecules of thc land in their brain and they stay there for up to three months three months of swelling that's getting high once that that molecule is in their brain for up to three months they're not high for three months but the inflammatory damage to their brain is is there for three months so number one they'd have to be sleeping remember i had my notes here just to make sure i don't forget what i would do number two i would put him in a state of ketosis that is measurable that um much like what michaela had in her in her benefit for increasing and improving her ketogenic or her autoimmune problem she didn't she couldn't see she was blinded she's like i don't know why i feel better i don't know how i'm feeling better tear off the blindfold and look and that means i know she checks she's like i've been in the state of ketosis for this long and i'm like okay great state of ketosis is one part of this what um when it comes to repairing the brain or the autoimmune problem um we want you doing let's see if i have this in here we want you doing i might not put that in this one i think it's in this one let's go don't give up here comes uh oh yeah so we want this okay so this is the dr boz ratio where you say measure it measure it weight loss is when you get it under 80. that is every single person will have weight loss if they keep their doctor balls ratio under 80. for those of you that have been around you know hitting the doctor pause ratio and staying at the doctor pause ratio totally different things and what we're looking at for the next two layers where you get a doctor balls ratio of 40 or less or get a doctor ratio of 20 or less and these are levels of autophagy an autophagy is that ability for the brain to start sweeping up the scars sweeping up the damage for those of you that have been watching my instagram you'll know that i am trying to hit a doctor boss ratio of 20 weekly and i have not done so good the last two weeks because my mom my mom who's 76 years old and much like michaela's commitment to her dad is this is a similar thing that's happening to me and my mom is she has is cancer she's chemo free her cancer numbers look okay but there is something going on in her bone marrow where the real estate to make red blood cells and platelets have started to creep up and the logical assumption is that that is scar tissue she's had this cancer for over 15 years it lives in her bone marrow and the only way we know to recycle those scars is to hit an autophagy ratio that is a gki which for those of you that have been around the ketogenic diet that's glucose to ketone index or a dr boz ratio of 20 or less so grammar rose is doing her best she's actually done really well she's way better at this than me um but has uh is hitting a ratio of 20 or less every week and she fasts until she gets there now i'm not in dr peterson's life i don't know how hard that would be for him to fast but at least to get his numbers at 40 or less and that really is possible i saw one of the comments there saying i've been on keto for a couple years you guys all say dr bosworth looks younger i'm like i look younger because of autophagy being keto isn't just a way of eating it is a chemistry set and when you start to measure the metrics you can predict who's got um you know who's who's got numbers uh that are recycling these scar tissues and when i look at um the danger of having a ketogenic diet that is just playing with it like great if they're just trying to lose weight no problem but if they're really trying to improve those ratios improve that cancer improve his brain function you've got to be measuring it you've got to get that ratio down to 40 or less and when i'm taking care of my my brain patients i am absolutely we do not this is not play time you have got to measure this um that when i look at the the keto continuum which is the again this is the protocol that i would use for um for my patients but also for like how do i get people how do i work on this um i don't think michaela and her dad are in the beginner's phase they've been keto for a few years but if you look at um let's see here wonder if keto contain here we go there we go i think they're probably i don't know if they're 16 8 um but it would be something that i would be saying nope you probably shouldn't be using urine ketone strips anymore we should be getting you into some of the higher metrics and of course some of that comes from the places where we stress the metabolism that sounds like a not a nice thing to do but it really is important for somebody who has an autoimmune problem or has a brain injury that um you know i don't i don't flaunt this uh lightly that the ketogenic diet is amazing it has changed everything about the way i do my practice that i have a personal goal of stopping as many prescriptions in the next 20 years as i started in the first 20 and i started a lot of them i'm an internist [Music] trying to help people and part of the reason i keep showing up on sundays even when i'm i don't have predictable internet and my computer overheats uh is because there's this calling to educate and it is very parallel to what i saw in dr peterson's lectures of teaching the psychology of the stories behind pinocchio which i had never thought of i mean it gives me goosebumps to hear to just hear uh his analogies of what what are those bible stories really saying on a psychological level how how do they apply to today i mean they really do and i've been going to church a long time i've never heard a preacher talk about it in a way that's so connecting uh and inspiring and that that moment where and dr jordan peterson says you know he he had pride you know he's like i was proud of how smart i was i was proud of how great my brain worked and it was easy for me to argue with people and you know be the smartest one in the room and and i've been there i've said those same things saying it's it's fun to argue it's fun to be that person and then you look at the aftermath of the damage that happened to the relationships and it's it's not who i wanted to be i i wanted to to use the brain that god gifted me and help people and you could hear that in his lectures and when i heard that he was struggling with a benzodiazepine addiction and they had gone to all these physicians that could not get them off of it that could not stop his brain from sinking really low during a time when his wife's life was being threatened you know like is she gonna live and praise god she's alive and she's come through that cancer it's a statistical anomaly they're not supposed to live every textbook says they're supposed to die and it's the same thing they said about my mom who is four and a half five years from um that story that is written in the book i the first book that i wrote and it has changed lives so as i look at um i don't know if dr peterson will ever see this but maybe people with benzodiazepine injuries will and it's not attractive to talk about how cbd and thc are not your friend go to the national institute of health i mean i do this very thoroughly in the the course that i teach i do not do this very much on youtube because it's just too charging for people it makes people fight and i don't want to fight i want you to see ketogenic diet is really what your dad needs but he needs it in a way that is very measured uh in order to repair his brain you have got to stimulate autophagy he is not 30 he's in his 50s or 60s whatever age he is i'm sorry i don't know his age um and that means much like what happened to my mom at 71 he's going to need someone to do this with him and that sense of community is probably you michaela um you've had such success with your with your autoimmune disorder it's very i'm so thankful that you've found without without ever measuring it but you've figured it out and you've got a really good path to don't let don't let folks talk you into going back to that old way of eating ever and i know that you won't but there's you get a lot of pushback and i think you're a strong strong woman for being able to say i don't care i feel so much better that speaks so much louder than what all of you were saying for these years of time um the other things that i would have your dad do is i heard on joe rogan's story that your vitamin d was low it was probably years ago but you live in canada i live in south dakota and it is very difficult to get patients vitamin d up but i've done several podcasts on this last week i did one and i actually left out something that's super important and that is my dad who had failing kidneys we just buried him two months ago now but his vitamin d was in the in the drink it was terrible like in the 20 in the teens and 20s and that is such a predictor of brain repair it is such a predictor of depression that i mean i was giving him 50 000 units i was doing things to supplement his uh vitamin d and it was not working and when he went into a state of ketosis i know that his gut absorption got better but what was powerful was we kept him off of him this is what i forgot to say last week when we were reviewing is that we kept him off of those uh supplements for a four month time and it was it wasn't doing anything anyway it was not changing the numbers and we had him go to a tanning bed with uvb with lights and like i said last week they cannot advertise for this they cannot talk about it there are laws against it they can't say that it increases vitamin d but he needs to get uvb raised to the point where he raises his um vitamin d level to i mean i wouldn't stop until you're above 50. we did this for this like i think it was 10 or maybe it was 12 weeks between blood checks and again we had to start my butt white dad at like four minutes in the tanning bed um it took us like three or four weeks to get up to 10 minutes a week in the tanning bed and he would go into this little shop in town and he would get naked and get in that tanning bed and he would chirp at me the whole time he did it but at the end of 12 weeks his vitamin d was 60. it had jumped up so high his doctor said you're probably toxic it's not toxic but i mean that vitamin d is such a huge predictor of how fast his brain can repair when i have patients who have a brain injury it isn't about educating the patient their brain is broken they're not going to remember what i tell them anyway i make them all figure out where my next lecture is for this this brain course and just go find a way to go i do have it about to launch online i haven't done that yet but i'm getting close to launching that course but i would take your dad's level of ketosis up to the next level and i would be you know the book that i'm going to write about that is still being written so i the only thing i could offer you is to take that online course if you go to bosmd.com and you click on shop um the course is available and i just can't uh say enough that i have taken care of patients with broken brains for so long that to hear that this happened to your dad i think is just the biggest tragedy and i would do anything to help others not have this problem but also to support his recovery in any way so i know i went way over but i'll have to cut out some of the video

Channel: Dr. Boz [Annette Bosworth, MD]

Views: 13,174

Rating: 4.7573657 out of 5

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Id: aKKAKSSKcBo

Length: 60min 55sec (3655 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020