Is Brain Fog Caused By Your Microbiome?

certain foods may trigger brain fog and it is something that I think is intimately connected to the gut [Music] welcome to the doctors pharmacy I'm dr. Mark Hyman as pharmacy with an FFA RM Acy place for conversations that matter and today we have a special episode of the doctors pharmacy house call with one of my colleagues from the ultra Wellness Center dr. Todd Lapine you probably know him by now he's an extraordinary position he's been a doctor of functional medicine longer than I have which is a long long time he graduated our birth medical school he teaches all around the world he's one of the smartest guys I know and he's just an awesome physician and we get to talk about some really interesting cases today today we're gonna talk about brain fog now that's not something I learned about in medical school there was no class on brain fog there was no icd-10 diagnostic code for brain fog but it is a real thing that people experience and most doctors dismiss so in traditional medicine we don't really have a way of thinking about it actually except it is really really common and when people have it they know what it is I've had it I don't pure you've had it and it's not a fun thing you feel like you're walking through silly putty you can't focus you can't think your brain is all foggy and it's very difficult to get through the day and there's so many different causes of it so talk to me in general about yeah you know let's just sort of skip the part where what traditional medicine does with brain fog because maybe they'll give you an antidepressant maybe they'll I don't know what I ignore him but what would what would be the major reasons that we're seeing this pandemic of brain dysfunction and brain fog today so you know brain fog is really a symptom sore like coughs Oh coughs can be caused by a cold bronchitis pneumonia post nasal drip asthma a whole bunch of things so you gotta figure out okay what's driving it and there is no icd-10 code for brain fog you know you might call it you know altered Mental Status but oftentimes it's transitory and that's the really interesting thing and I've seen patients where they'll you know get brain fog when they're in a certain building they'll get brain fog after they've had a certain meal you know though certain foods may trigger brain fog and it is something that I think is intimately connected to the gut I think the and I'll talk about that at this particular case is gut fermentation is oftentimes a cause for brain fog I'm use like bugs fermenting the food you're eating creating all this nappies micronics yeah and I I don't know I don't know mark if you've had patients who have had this is a really interesting because I have patients come in they say I feel like my gut is just like bloating and I'm fermenting and that's exactly what's happening so yeah there's there is a condition I just recently had a patient who had auto-brewery syndrome yeah and I've seen your own like beer factory exactly so when you want to make beer what do you do you take sugar and you add yeast to it and you can actually produce alcohol and I've had a couple of cases where it was missed and it's actually not just the recent findings it's not just yeast in the gut that do this but also Klebsiella bacteria so bad both bacteria and yeast can actually produce these compounds which are toxins out all is a toxin that's why when you get drunk you're intoxicated and you'll actually produce alcohol and other toxins which affect your brain actually I never really had that insight before you said that we're intoxicated you're toxic toxic toxic six years to figure that out exactly but I think that your what you're saying is very true I mean I've had two times in my life when I've had severe brain fog one was when I had mercury poisoning 30 25 years ago and my gut was a mess then because the mercury poison my god I had terrible bloating distension diarrhea and the second time was more recently when I had mold toxicity and I had c-diff and I also had colitis and gastritis and my whole gut was a mess and I had severe brain fog and it was pretty debilitating you could barely focus answer an email talk to someone concentrate at all and people think oh that's just sort of in your head it's not in your head maybe your stomach what's manifesting in the head that's the whole thing is it's and we you know we have these artificial boundaries between the brain and the body and the mind and they're all interconnected and and and brain fog is a real it's a real phenomenon and then you have to sort of figure out what is what's doing it the other thing that's is interesting that I see with some people with brain fog is just gluten and dairy yeah and I tell patients that you know the most one of the most addictive foods is pizza and the reason for that is that Pizza has gluten in it it's true you can eat a whole pie it's one of us one of the foods that I'll occasionally indulge in but it's I don't have it that often because there's not the best food for you but you have my cauliflower pizza with Yoshi right you can make a healthy piece yeah but but I the two foods which are interesting is that gluten and dairy both get broken down the proteins in those get broken down into KC morph ins and gluteal morphine's and case um orphans are the ones from dairy and gluten orphans are from gluten and those have working like effects so you literally you get a little high you get a little you get a little high get a little foggy in the brain and it also can cause cravings and and it can sort of make you sleepy you know you eat it and then you get a little little sleepy from it also and that's you know when when when children drink breast milk they go to sleep effort or they you know they conk out I mean that's because of the morphine like action in milk yeah so that's true I think you know it can be our diet it can be food sensitivities like gluten and dairy which are really common and often will people going on elimination diet will have an immediate relief of brain fog which is something that you don't know you have until you don't have it anymore sometimes people just think this sort of slow decline of their cognitive function they're not realizing that it's actually something that can be reversed and it can be reversed rate quickly so yeah the second thing is you know the the factors that that are in the gut like bacterial overgrowth East overgrowth we call dysbiosis that can also lead to a lot of cognitive issues because your guts connected to your brain and that causes this this effect when the bugs are out of balance and it drives inflammation and then you get inflammation the brain essentially is what causes brain Fox absolutely well the other other important thing I think I talked but this last time is that the blood flow from the gut has to go through the liver mm-hmm and the reason for that is this to filter all of the toxins that are there so there is a meet there's a lot of immune cells that copper cells in the liver and a lot of filtering processes and detoxification takes place in the liver prior to the blood from the then going into the systemic circulation so sometimes you'll have in addition to a leaky gut you'll have problems with detoxification in the liver itself and that's you know an example of that is the condition hepatic encephalopathy which is brain fog that's that's essentially we talk about that what is that for people who don't know what that so the word I learned and I think I mentioned this before and it was one of the things that really stuck with me is when I worked at the VA hospital there was a lot of alcoholics and when you're an alcoholic you basically turn your liver into into a pickled pickled liver you trash your liver you trash your liver and then you're not able to detoxify and I would typically see this over and over where patients had cirrhosis of the liver and the liver was not able to detoxify and then when they would eat foods especially high protein type meals they would get hepatic encephalopathy and literally go into a coma so they would literally get delirium confusion absolutely brain fog rain fog that's a brain on steroids and the reason is it was coming from their gut and what I found so striking when I started learning about functional medicine was that here was a condition in medicine that we knew how to treat by fixing the gut we gave people antibiotics yeah to sterilize their gut to kill the bacteria that caused all these byproducts that made people have you know basically delirium or encephalopathy and yo brain fog yeah so it was like wow the gut is connected to the brain totally totally connected to the brain absolutely and you in some cases you know there have been cases of people actually having psychosis from gut dysfunction yeah you mentioned auto-brewery syndrome I remember reading a case of a woman who was arrested for driving under the influence in aterna she wasn't drinking but she had a high blood alcohol level that was coming from her gut yeah yeah it's a very real phenomenon you have to think about it and the way that you actually test for that is you you can it's actually quite simple as you just have somebody do what I call a pancake challenge you've basically some pancakes full of carbs but throw some maple syrup on it eat it and get a blood draw at point zero yeah you know eat them eat the meal and then half an hour hour later check your alcohol level I says it's not like a fun medical testing okay so so we talked about the guy we talked about gluten dairy food sensitivities there are other reasons too infections infections can can do that another one that is fake infections absolutely tick infections yeah oh that those are yeah those I would say that that that's in addition to brain fog you get a lot of cognitive dysfunction to you memory is more severe it's why I'm much more severe the the one thing that I see a lot is allergies I call it the allergic brain hmm and you can have food allergies that can potentially do that or even environmental allergies or mold and the high levels of histamine cuz histamine this actually acts as a neurotransmitter and I've seen this in a number of patients I've had some patients with another condition which we're seeing more and more of is mast cell activation syndrome it's sort of a buzz you know but these diagnosis no but it's a very real phenomenon and is related to the mast cells which are the types of immune cells in the body and the interstitial lists or the spaces between the cells where they reside and they release lots of histamine and if anybody's ever had hay fever you see that the picture of a fever you're like you know like this like half asleep and like they're walking through a fog it's like hay fever is an example of brain fog yeah and antihistamines can actually have a benefit with that naturally things like worst and nettles can can be also be very helpful and you've probably have used it this is something that I use I've been using more is the drug crumblin sodium yeah which is I've had some amazing success with that in more difficult cases I wouldn't necessarily go to the that for my first choice but Todd's talking about is this is a struggle juice for asthma and allergies that is usually inhaled yeah usually inhaler there's a version you can take orally that before you eat inhibits your white blood cells from releasing histamine and creating an allergic response and I often found it extremely effective some patients yeah so Todd I talked about this patient that you had that had bad brain fun this is a guy who come to see you worked a lot it was a lot of stress and that could be you know easily dismissed as though you're just stressed and tired but yeah you went deeper what did you find well he actually came into me and he had already seen a variety of different doctors and that this the background is is that the gentleman as a child had lots of allergies and asthma so he had you know ear infections bronchitis also developed some sinusitis type symptoms she had multiple rounds of antibiotics and I always emphasize to patients that when you have an immune dysfunction look for the gut because the sixth is 70% of your immune system is in the gut and just like you know with what's going on with the coltd virus and/or the Cova da 19 syndrome that we're seeing by coronavirus is it's not the virus or the bacteria itself that causes the problems for immune systems response to it yeah and in general we want to have a I call it a balanced immune system so we want our immune system to be idling yeah so basically just sort of sitting there and I'll say we're enjoying planet Earth we're going out for a walk we're not reacting to this under-reacting or overreact exactly under acting overreacting and when you overreact that we call that an autoimmune disease when you under react we call that aids right now so aids are cancer AIDS or cancer or reactions allergies or I mean and then and I think you know we talked about like you know a weak immune system or strong immune system it's really I think an intelligent and a balanced immune system that's how I like to think of me on and that's you know related to immuno tolerance which is what the gut does so when we have a healthy gut we have an immune system that is tolerant to lots of things and you can eat certain things you can go out in the environment you're not going to react to dog dander and all these other things there are some genetic some people have genetic predispositions towards being more a topic or allergic but having a healthy gut especially early on the priming of the gut is so critical you know having a vaginal birth being breastfed not introducing certain foods like gluten early in living on a farm living on a farm exactly being exposed a lot of and crawling around in the dirt and literally putting dirt and you know I call it you know your body's immune system samples planet earth planet Earth is a very dirty place there's lots of bugs and all kinds of things in your body learns to be immuno tolerant and and one of the things that is really I also focus on is part of this immune systems are called the T reg cells the T reg cells are like the conductor in the Boston Symphony Orchestra so you've got you know the wind section over here and the horns over here and they keep everything in balance yeah and the T regs are really really critical and what we're finding regulatories they regulate they regulate the whole you know the whole balance of the immune system and the T regs that we find out on the two things that are really simple that people can use to up regulate your T regs to keep things in balance are fibers fibers in the diet fibers are the key things that help with regulation of that and then also which I use it quite a bit it might end up in the patients that I see is vitamin A vitamin A helps to down regulate the immune system helps to keep the t reg cells in in place hey everybody's dr. Hyman thanks for tuning in to the doctors pharmacy I hope you're loving this podcast it's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from and I want to tell you about something else I'm doing which is called marks picks it's my weekly newsletter and in it I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health it's all the cool stuff that I use and then my team uses to optimize and enhance our health and I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter only sent at you once a week on Fridays nothing else I promise and all of you do is go to dr. Hyman com forward slash pics to sign up that's dr. Hyman calm for sliced pics P IC K s and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I used to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer now back to this week's episode so this this guy came in with brain fog and he had lost chest we also had other scat mold exposure yeah he was working in a building and they found out that he was in a water damage building unknown to him and he had a mold exposure which you've been experienced yourself and like yeah yeah yeah and and and you know and we live in in you know a lot of people are in older buildings they you know the and you don't know you might buy the building and there's water damage you don't even know what's there I mean 50 percent of buildings have water damage in America that's a lot really yeah Wow yeah that's a lot yeah so he was actually came to me and he was he had the diagnosis of mold attacks in fact he actually learned about this through one of your podcasts I think it was you were talking with David aspirin oh yeah I was right exactly was the moldy moldy a podcast so that's how he sort of went down that road and he got treated you know with a variety of different therapies he got some IV glutathione he got some ozone therapies and other interventions and he got about 50% better and then within several months he sort of went back to where he was he was also again not sleeping much because he was you know he was doing a lot of litigation it was a lot of stress he wasn't sleeping well the big thing that I see with patients with conditions like immune dysregulation is stress and lack of sleep is a stressor probably the number one stressor so if people aren't getting a deep restorative sleep yeah that is a stress to the immune system and I was trying to sort of emphasize that you know you can do that for like one or two days but you can't do that on an ongoing basis so really really important I always emphasize getting good deep restorative sleep with patients so I emphasized that with him so when he came in he also had a lot of digestive symptoms he was actually on a whole bunch of inhalers he was on like Brio spir Eva ventolin on Zoli air injections flown ace for his sinuses he also had some where's are very expensive like $20,000 a year Oh tense immune suppressing medication yeah it wasn't better it still wasn't better know exactly and then that and that actually worked by stabilizing my cells which you can actually naturally do request and actually can help high dose quest and can be very helpful for amassed else else's age for Ovid exactly exactly yeah yeah so so when he came in here and I did a thorough workup on him and I did retest him from mold and he did have some mold but I compared it to his previous labs and it wasn't that bad so I empirically treated him with some binders to sort of help but he had already moved out of the quote the mouldy building that he was getting out of the moldy environment and they use these binders to help get the mold toxins out of your system right because it might the mycotoxins they do tend to recirculate in the body the intro patek recirculation so they'll get reabsorbed by the body what is a kind of binders views in him I actually use very natural things I used clay medi clay and I also used to activate charcoal that was pretty much it these are things that don't get absorb that suck and suck all the bad stuff out oh yeah exactly and you worked in Marin Mirjam right we still somebody who would overdose on drugs we would get them charcoal yes right make him drink black charcoal and every night vomit up on you we've been there done that yes right yeah so this guy had also other stuff right he had gluten issues oh yes yeah so so so again and unfortunately when he went to the the previous doctors who did help him out they didn't go deep enough they didn't sort of you know get all the pieces of a puzzle so they did not check him for gluten sensitivity which he would markedly was gluten sensitive and also did the cyrix testing on him for gluten and cyrix for leaky gut and both of those were markedly positive tests that we use at the ultra Wellness Center that are a little bit different than traditional food testing that looks at antibodies that aren't true allergy but there are reactions that our immune system is having against foods and we can tell what you shouldn't should need based on this what's causing an immune response exactly exactly and then also did did stool testing on him I did the what I think is sort of the state-of-the-art the the GI map test which does quantitative PCR for the DNA of bacteria yeast viruses parasites and he had probably one of the worst cases of dysbiosis ever seen as imbalance yeah imbalances yeah a lot of lot of imbalances you know my I tell patients that everybody has you know hundreds of different kinds of bugs in their gut and they're a little bit like weeds in the garden no garden does not have weeds you just don't want too many weeds and the interesting thing about the the digestive tract and bacteria is that there is a phenomenon which is known as quorum sensing and quorum sensing means that when certain bacterias reach a critical level they start acting as bad actors an example of that is like Clostridium difficile so when patients get antibiotics and they wipe out the good guys the bacteria the C difficile somehow another sense that there's not enough cops around and they take over the place and they start producing toxins same thing happens in this in this particular case he had one of the highest levels of Pseudomonas bacteria that I've ever seen and we typically see that in patients with cystic fibrosis so he had bacterial dysbiosis that organism plus other organism you had a lot of gut symptoms right yes yeah yes yes exactly yeah exactly very yeah a lot of mucus and that's that in my opinion that mucus that sticky mucus is a biofilm that's that's where the bacteria lived they live in that that biofilm layer and antibiotics and such are very difficult to penetrate that not having a smooth log that just comes out clean there may be some problems in there exactly yeah and he also had yeast overgrowth which was I you know not unexpected of all the antibiotics he had oh yeah absolutely the acid blocker he was taking he was on a proton pump inhibitor that's one of my you know I hate I hate them I they are they are good and bad they they can say be helpful but even I remember and I was in medical school talk to us in the podcast we were told they just came out and they were like these are very powerful drugs you don't wanna give to any patient more than six weeks at shutdown's acid production it's risky long-term and now everybody's on it for a dollar they're over they come over the counter and for life and it causes also to disruption to God it causes you to not absorb your nutrients it causes overgrowth of yeast it changes the pH leaky gut leaky gut I mean it caused the herbal bowels osteoporosis osteoporosis and pneumonia people deficiency yeah every other going it's not it's a great way to keep the business going this oh yeah I wrote a textbook chapter on reflux and was like we're looking at all the data it was like holy cow this is not good exactly yeah and and unfortunately they're handed out like Pez candy yeah and Paige patients stay on them long what's wrong with Pez candy I used to eat that all the time I have my little PEZ dispenser yeah those of you who are younger you might not know what this is but it's a little candy defensive device with a little cute cartoon character on the top and Donald ugh yours pull it open and it is a little candy would pop out it was so funny I was like quit when I was like eight No so so this guy had all this stuff and he had got his shoes he had gluten issues he had mold issues and what I find really important to emphasize is that in functional medicine it's it's about looking at the whole system and not just treating one thing and often its many things at the same time yeah because when the system breaks down lots of things break down yes well these guys glue dishes well getting off the gluten wouldn't fix them or just fixing the mold when to fix them or just fixing is going to fix them you've got to deal with all these various things and you had you know another thing that you found on him as well right oh yeah I'm sinus issues sinus issues that was a that was actually but he actually had sinus surgery for that and it was it was a really big thing and in fact I actually just recently downloaded a paper from PubMed on the nasal microbiome yeah so you know we have bacteria on our skin we have it in our mouths we have in our digestive tract in the vagina in the sinuses they're home they're everywhere they're everywhere and so disruption of the nasal microbiome can also cause brain fog typically you see that a lot no guarantee was taking up his nose and athing was it absolutely and it's also it's a it's a dark moist environment so a lot of patients who have chronic sinusitis it's actually been shown that there's so much to be bacterial as it is to be yeast fungal fungal origin so you got to really think about that I typically will you know start in his case he had X he had he needed surgery so he actually had it sinus surgery that helped a little bit but it didn't clear up the problem which is really uh of dysfunctional nasal microbiome so I actually treated him with neti pot nasal saline irrigation you can also do there are certain machines I like the sino pulse machine sounds like a Waterpik for your nose exactly but put it sailing and then it rinses it out rinses alright for people who do have chronic sinus issues and then iost in his case I actually used silver cylinder which is a another colloidal silver but it's a silver Saul and silver is actually a great antimicrobial and I used that in him the great as success was really very very effective so silver is also something it kills but kills Bukka and put up your nose and will help deal with whatever latent infections are exactly and and then this particular paper that I was talking about which is discussing the nasal microbiome they were actually making a proponent to actually use probiotics like things like lactobacillus up into the nasal passages yeah recall innate the the notes yeah transferred up your nose exactly and you know in India bredesen who's been a leader in looking at the various causes for Alzheimer's talks about the the nasal sinus passages as a problem when you have chronic inflammation in the sinuses being a risk factor for Alzheimer's because there that that is directly information or chronic inflammation exactly goes right up into the brain so you also did this nasal treatment you also treat his gut so what did you do first got um I trade I mean everybody we did obviously we put him on a an elimination diet absolutely I got him off of gluten detection foods yeah man it got a got him a sort of a low yeast low mold type diet got him on put him on a I actually did not treat him with antibiotics I treat him with antimicrobial botanicals I also used oral silver which I'll sometimes use in conjunction and and I also continued with binders the activated charcoal and then another product GI detox and it was pretty romantic remarkable his success within a month he said is he liked it like the light bulb went on in his brain so you mentioned a product called GI detox which is something it actually has charcoal and clay in it right yeah it actually helps to bind up all the nasty things that get produced by these bad bugs young they're fermenting the foods that you shouldn't be hitting yep right so it's really a it's fasting so you also sort of looked at this holistically from a functional medicine perspective which is really quite different yeah than most people so the fact that this patient had gluten and mold and imbalance gut flora and sinus issues was the reason for his brain fog mm-hmm right but if you take ten people with brain fog we might have 10 different reasons absolutely just I get 10 different for cough right mind was mercury you know that didn't show up in this guy so really it's right it's right it's important I think this is the thing that's so different about functional medicine is that we don't just stop thinking at the symptoms we go what's the cause of the symptoms absolutely you say you know you have rheumatoid arthritis or you have a headache or migraine migraine isn't a diagnosis it's a symptom it's a certain type of headache yeah right it's like and and and so we we really have to look at the different causes for each individual so it's very personalized and absolutely totally personalized and it's often treating it not just one thing it's treating multiple things in the right sequence to get people better he said excellent so he was building on getting rid of the mold and getting out of the environment and ozone and glutathione which certainly helped but then he there were other things right he got to get off the acid blocker he had to get all these nasal sprays that were suppressing his microbiome in his nose that he had to get sleep he had to get sleep right he had to manage stress I demanded stress he had to irrigate his sinuses and use natural anti microbials to kill the bad bugs in there he had to reset his whole gut system and get rid of those Pseudomonas and build all this together in a protocol which it sounds complicated and sometimes it is I guess you know but that's what we do in functional medicine and it's a very unique approach that is the future of healthcare it's not something that most physicians are learning in school yeah something that is actually working far better and most traditional therapies for these kinds of things and if you have an acute problem you go to the hospital you know I had atrial fib you know you gotta go to a hospital and I get my little extra chol system fixed it's fine but I think if you if you I have these weird symptoms that nobody can fix or they I'm trying to medicate it just doesn't work that well yeah and they you you really bring a very good point cuz I mean make you know regular mainstream medicine has its place you know you break a bone you have you know a heart attack you have a stroke there there's definitely places for acute care medicine but when it comes to chronic care medicine I would almost venture to say that the mainstream approach which is either the scalpel or using expensive potentially toxic medications is actually doing more harm than good in most most circumstance that really is it's it's unfortunate but it really is and then what happens is then one drug is layered onto the next drug especially like in these young people with a DD and depression and stuff like that they come in with polypharmacy you know and I talked about the iatrogenic imperfecta which is that you know the patients are getting problems be related to the doctors treatments you know that's that's the the big issue these days I think about functional medicine its agnostic when it comes to therapy right sometimes use medications when it's appropriate but it's usually about finding the cause and treating the cost so someone has a parasite you might as a parasite medication right if someone has you know lyme disease you might use an antibiotic but if that's not the right treatment you don't do it because it's the only thing you have yeah I think it's very we have a very limited toolkit traditional medicine and function one doesn't expand that toolkit and expands the map of how we figure out what's wrong with people exactly and you have to map it all out and you know and the the matrix what we use as a intellectual way of framing how we see the problem helps is like a like a pilot's checklist so we like okay well let's see how is the immune system working how is the gut working how are the hormones working so we look at all those different systems in the body we do both traditional testing and specialized testing to help us so we're not guessing I always tell patients you know you're when you see me you're coming in to see me because you've got an issue that nobody else has been figuring out and you know you went to the Mayo Clinic and the Scripps Clinic and Harvard and you name it and they you know they're throwing up and here you don't take an idea to present and see you later that's that's I see that's so many times and we have to explore and lift up the rocks and shine light on places that haven't been looked at before that's right that's the kind of test you're talking about the Foods has to be testing the mold testing the gut testing these are things that are definitely outside the box but they are the future I mean this is how the body works whether we like it or not there was a recent textbook that was published at Harvard called Network Medicine talking about the paradigm shift that's happening now around the body being this biological network and system and that's really what functional medicine is it's the application of this to what's happening today and it's so powerful and I think you know people out there are suffering from all sorts of cognitive issues you know we did the broken brain series and know whether it's a DD or a dementia or depression or brain fog or whatever it is there's usually a reason yeah that doesn't happen for no reason and that's what we're good we're good at being detected and finding the reason exactly yeah it's very good it's interesting cuz you know I was trained I was a a chemistry major when I went to Holy Cross college and then when I went to medical school after I did my residency I did my training in internal medicine so I'm you know a board certified internist that's my my my specialty and invariably I'll meet someone say well you know what is your specialty and it's it's so funny and and you know and if I suppose in humans yeah ya know it's yeah so and they would say what kind of doctor are you and I say well I'm a good one and it's sort of funny and then if I if I actually say the term functional medicine there they get like this blank stare what is what is function right so I I've coined the term might call myself I say I'm a cyclone neural immuno endo got ologist that's good yeah yes good which is basically understanding that it's all related the psycho is the brain nerado in there yeah exactly yeah exactly yeah and I forgot my toe in there yeah but it's all it's all interconnected says this unified organism and there's the it's an ecosystem it's an ecosystem yeah everything impacts everything else and in the the beautiful thing about the body is that if you give it the right environment and a tincture of time you know in most cases the body is pretty good at self-healing yeah if you give it fresh air you because sunlight if you give it exercise take out the bad things take out the bad things you take out the bad things put in the good things and a tincture of time the body is actually pretty good at healing you know the art there are there are some cases where you know we don't fully understand the human genome I mean we do testing for genetics and we can get insight into Jax I'll actually talk about that in the next podcast but I'm very optimistic that when we start to combine artificial intelligence and big datasets that we're going to start seeing some of these cases that are really complicated and saying oh this is what's going on with them on a genetic level or mitochondrial level and be able to dial it in a little bit better that's what we do we do pattern recognition so you've seen thousands and thousands of cases and you see these patterns and you can recognize and then you sort of know where to go with the testing and figure out what's going on you probably you know I'd play a game with my cell phone if you do this after being in this so long as I I try to write down everything I possibly think is going on with this patient and what the test results are going to show yeah and then I get the test results and 90% of it I actually figured out before I even got the test cuz yeah once you've done so much of it you see those patterns and everyone knows that there's curve balls ya know I that I always I always get all the curve balls myself like I get curveballs and sliders and nut balls I was the curve ball might like my own health issues were just curve balls and I yeah that's what got me learning about this well Todd this has been such a great conversation I think those of you listening who struggle with these issues it's tough but there is hope and I feel that people need to learn about functional medicine and you're welcome to come to the ultra Wellness Center we're now doing all virtual consultations if people want to come virtually we don't have to have you come here anymore we can do the testing and go to ultra Wellness Center calm to learn more about our practice we have an incredible team of physicians and nutritionists physician's assistants and nurses who are supported by an incredible administrative team and and we take care of people from all over the world helping solve these complex problems so if you would like to learn more just go to alter wellness Entercom thanks for listening this podcast I hope you enjoyed it if you liked it share with your friends and family on social media we love to hear from you please leave a comment subscribe wherever you're getting your podcasts and we'll see you next time on the doctors pharmacy [Music]

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 51,487

Keywords: microbiome, brain fog, gut health, healthy bacteria, todd lepine, mark hyman, the doctor's farmacy, health podcast, nutrition

Id: Sgc5b5dr9mg

Length: 35min 31sec (2131 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020