The Power Of Food To Heal Everything From Autoimmune Disease To Traumatic Brain Injury

I'm not interested in finding out if you have early disease I'm interested in helping you create a disease free or cancer free life [Music] welcome to the doctors pharmacy I'm dr. Mark Hyman and that's pharmacy with an FFA RM Acy a place for conversations that matter and if you suffered from any chronic illness or know someone in your family or friend who has a chronic problem that nobody can figure out and fix this is a conversation that matters for you and it's because we're here at the ultra wellness center my practice where we've been doing functional medicine for 15 years with our leading doctors and what more doctor today is dr. George Papanikolaou who is an extraordinary physician he's joined our practice recently but he's been a doctor for a while now probably what 25 30 years in 22 years 22 years all right yeah he's a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine he's board certified in family medicine he is also certified as a functional medicine practitioner through the Institute for functional medicine he went to the Indian Health Service after graduation he worked on the Navajo reservation for four years the Chinle comprehensive medical facility and I actually also worked on the Hopi reservation so we were kind of neighbors back there he founded the cornerstone family practice in Raleigh Massachusetts in 2000 he his philosophy was centered on personal relationships treating the whole person not just the disease which is really at the center of what we call functional medicine he called this philosophy whole life wellness now over the time that he had in the healthcare system he found it harder and harder for patients to receive the kind of personal care within the existing model which is why he came and joined us at the ultra Wellness Center a number of years ago and we're so excited to have him here he's been working with our patients doing a phenomenal job and welcome George Marc is a pleasure thank you for that introduction it's it's always exciting to talk about what we do here at the ultra Wellness Center and how this model of functional medicine can impact people's lives in so many ways it's true I mean I think that's the thing I experienced here over and over it's just the miracles that happen every day you know people who come from all over the world with chronic diseases which nobody else can figure out and you know we collectively here probably have 60 plus years of clinical experience in functional medicine and given that functional medicine has only been around for 25 years that's a lot easy there's a lot and and we have extraordinary experienced team of nutritionists and navigators and doctors and there's practitioners pas and we are doing things that are not being done in most senators alina in the world so correct talk about how you came into this journey you're you're not an MD or a do so tell us what is the do and why did you go to do school and how is that different than traditional medicine sure so you know as we talked about earlier I am a I like a very curious person and so I've always looked at my life very curiously why am i doing in being where I'm at in in medicine right now and I think it starts out because I'm just innately a empathetic person I've always been connected to people I've always felt deeply for people particularly dispossessed people whether it be disease or whether it be socio-economic I've always had to draw for people and I've always been very curious and I did I I believe in the intelligent design and I believe everything is interconnect and everything has a plan and a purpose that gives beyond our understanding and is a huge mystery which always leads me to ask the question why and that is one of the key elements that I think I bring to care and we bring to care here at ultra wellness centers were always asking why really that answer yeah I mean functional medicine is about the why not write what you know not what disease you have and what drug do I need but right why is this happening what cause would you really do the osteopathic medical school was the principles that and retailers still would outlined in 1872 I think right around there and here are the four principles they're very interesting one is that the body is completely integrated and has the ability to regulate and heal itself that's number one that's true right absolutely Lahti it basically wants to be healthy right right right that's a very profound idea which is this is 1872 yeah okay then he goes on to say is that all the systems of the body are interconnected another amazing idea not what we learn in traditional medical school that there are all these different parts and we have to treat each part in a specialist for absolutely and so so I there's no functional medicine in my mind at that point but I hear these principles and they're really resonating with me so so then the third principle is is that the structure and function of the body are connected from membrane to hormone - - they're all connected you cannot you cannot disengage the mechanical structure the biochemical structure from the function of the body those are the three top principles his fourth principle was the one that really made me pause as is principle was this if you do not account for the first three pensive principles when you are designing your treatment plan for a patient it's irrational hahaha that's fantastic man that is really in a way that's like medicine right which is the body's and interconnected system right that everything works together right I met you can't really heal people from chronic illness unless you're actually thinking about how everything is connected exactly which is the opposite of how our training medical school and you were saying when you're in medical school you basically got a lobotomy and so it's so nasty panic medical school and you experienced it when you went to medical school you have your first two years of brain science but the basic science part was cool because you get to learn about how everything is connected you to the biochemistry the pathology the microbiology the physics of everything and and you're excited and then you go into your clinicals and that's where the lobotomy happens it's like all of this interconnectedness that we learned even in osteopathic medical school there is still that disconnect it went down to make the diagnosis treat the disease and quite honestly you know as my career went on in medicine and I started being driven further and further from that ideal I had when I first went to medical school I became more disenchanted with the medical system yeah well I think that's true I think we really are in a way disconnected from the basic biology and functional medicine comes back right to the most elemental things we learn in the first years of medical school how we make energy from food and oxygen how our immune system works how our biochemistry works I mean biochemistry was that class you took in the first year medical school you gutted your way through it you hope you pass and then you forgot about all right right but in a sense functional medicine brings all that back so you have to learn about see way in which your body works so we're interested in the mechanisms and the causes not just the name of the disease and the symptoms and that's really the problem exam edison's we're focused on geography where is it in your body is it your stomach is your head but your headache might be caused by something going on in your microbiome oh yeah we have a lot to talk to star yeah so exactly and then so when you're practicing conventional medicine with my mindset and I was trying to build this whole life wellness program I was writing nutrition programs for my patients I was writing physical fitness programs I was helping people criticize their training helping them plan for events and that was really great stuff but it's time went on mark here's here's something really interesting that warped one is is that I was being pushed more and more by insurance companies and health plans to meet these metrics they're trying to measure quality of care and I had to meet these prevention metrics but the prevention metrics were really measurements of disease once it was out of the box right did you get you all you want me to get mammograms did you get all your young ladies to have their chlamydia test did you have do they all get their pap smears we're looking for disease out of the box yeah we're not helping people create a cancer free zone in their body right you know a woman would ask me so what do you think about mammograms versus thermography dr. Papanicolaou I would say I'm more interested in thinking about the Pap test Papanicolaou so yeah your uncle right but I will tell you the Pap test yeah if you give me if you give me a brief of this I personal story when I had my I had to have surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery it's right next to Cornell yeah so a lot of people saw my name I had nurses coming from other floors to come up to see if I was related to George Nicholas papinek now George James Papanicolaou so my dad told me and don't hold me to this audience but my dad told me that we're like second cousins once removed or something like that there may not be you can't royalties from every problem I just say it doesn't really matter how we're relating I get nowhere that's but the first person or two that asked me I said I think we're second cousins once removed and they left deflated no I came up all here to hear that he said a third person that came in as my granddad well see that's very funny yeah but get back to her you know yeah what you just said was very profound which is that prevention as we think about it in traditional medicine is absolutely not prevention exact early detection exactly what colonoscopy so you can find a polyp or an early cancer do a Pap test you can find early cancer do a mammogram find early cancer how about not getting cancer in the first place and that's what goes back to I was saying you know about the mammography I would say to them I'm not interested in finding out if you have early disease I'm interested in helping you create a disease-free or cancer-free life or zone yeah and when we talked about hormones little bit later we'll talk about estrogen and xenoestrogens and how that creates that environment for women that were they're more likely to get cancer but that's going back to the point we need to prevent not just detect yeah and I think that's what people get sort of confused about because doctors don't learn how to truly prevent they learn how to detect and what functional medicine is it's really a science of creating health so when you create a health you don't allow a disease to show up right if you create a healthy system which is going back to ossify the training it's what functional medicine is you absolutely don't have to worry so much about disease when you create help because the disease is often just go away as a side effect of creating health you create an inhospitable environment and we see this over and over again with no diabetes and chronic illnesses where you actually figure out how to build and create the body's functional systems yep and treat the whole system the diseases just kind of get better without treating I don't treat disease anymore and that's what we do with the ultra on the center here we don't treat diseases we create health and as a side effect their symptoms go away and their diseases go away yeah and it's in and it's hard work you know when I when I practice traditional medicine it got to a point where it II you weren't required to think necessarily too deeply because you have specialist everything got siloed right that's right we we learned that basic science of interconnectedness we learned all the the beauty of the organic organism of the the body and how it can heal itself and then we forget it and then we then not only do we lobotomy is it in terms of our science and thinking we do it as a system we break it all up into organ systems and then we're in trouble because now one silos not talking to the next I would refer somebody for a rheumatologic problem very bright doctor would see my patient and if it wasn't it rheumatologic problem the patient came back and told me nothing you do for me tell me go back to you I didn't get even an idea of where else I should look or a collaboration of here's what I did find and here's what you might want to look next but it's not in my purview yeah it was isolated silos so you know developing you know starting to think about functional medicine it's really hard well before you think about functional medicine it's really hard for a patient when they're sick to get better if nobody's integrating the whole message you know you know all the data and so as a family doctor I took a lot of pride and I put a lot of emphasis in being that quarterback for my patient and trying to get as much of that information to integrate a good health plan for the patient hopefully to get them better then to get you know help them not only be better but to optimize the performance yeah and in functional medicine we do that and here's a really cool part is we have the time to do it yeah you don't have it trying to do it do it in in conventional medicine so you have silos you have no time and now you're treating really chronic disease and you just can't do it yeah so I think the point bring up is really important because when we're training traditional medicine you know the rheumatologists do their thing and they just focus on the autoimmune stuff you know the gastronomic just focus on the airplane the neurologists focus on their lane and on and on and people go from Doctor to doctor and are super frustrated because they have all these symptoms you know when people come in with you know 10 or 15 different diagnoses I'm like is this just a coincidence or you know I and separately you know the addicts are treated by the migraine doctor they're Rheumatology doctors treating their joint pain their gastronomic stream their IBS and so on and so on and they're getting different drugs for every different symptom and instead of going well gee is this just a coincidence or is there something linking all these things together and how do we think differently about them and that's what functional medicine is it's a way of thinking device you mentioned you know the rheumatologist and you mentioned the gut you know the microbiome is one of those areas that is blowing apart our traditional concepts right so the microbiome is this ecosystem of bugs in our gut it's trillions of bacteria it outnumbers ourselves by ten to one and numbers our DNA by a hundred and one and it has been linked to everything from autoimmune disease to cancer to heart disease to diabetes to obesity to autism to Alzheimer's I mean you the list goes on and on so when you go to the rheumatologist they don't go how's your poop but we do all right absolutely so let's talk about the gut in connection to some of these diseases we we treat something a lot that's called SIBO now when I went to medical school this wasn't even a thing but essentially it means small intestinal bacterial overgrowth the trainees bad bugs growing in the small intestine where there should be sterile that have an impact on our health so what what are the symptoms how would people know they have it and what kinds of problems are they connected to and let's kind of get D here to what our approach to diagnose you're treating it's gonna be sure so you know I just want to be a little cautious here because we're jumping right into talking about a disease yeah right yeah it's a it's a phenomenal phenomena but actually causes also another problem we do have to give things labels but it is a phenomena that's connected to many different parts of our body and getting somebody better involves the whole lifestyle spectrum and involves us using something in the functional medicine realm that we call the matrix and the matrix is looking at not diagnosis but conditions yeah let's talk about the matrix yeah tell us more about that yeah what is the matrix yeah how does it differ from traditional diagnosis and so why does it for me to tell you about the matrix you have to swallow the red-blue but you want to swallow they take the red that's the right bill okay so anyhow now I can say about the matrix so so the matrix is basically a construct that we have in our minds where when you start telling me I have headaches I have fatigue I have belching I have bloating I have I have a diagnosis of Hashimoto's thyroiditis migraines migraines weakness they don't become the endpoint they become part of the narrative of your of your disease and we we put together into a story we call a matrix and so we look at assimilation which is the gut we look at energy that takes us from you know an idea of fatigue we rattle it down on our brain to one of the things in the body that control energy right and so we think about mitochondria when we think about energy we think about toxins how did toxins influence the rest of your well-being we think about our transport system our blood vessels our lymph drainage and the connection between lymph drainage in the brain and your gut leaky gut leaky brain things that we'll talk about and we think about the hormonal system on neurotransmitters - adrenals to thyroid and we place this all in our mind in this in this matrix this paradigm of thinking and then we make the connections you know say okay what's SIBO okay well it's gonna be symptoms bloating distension I feel like I've used the term food baby you're something that was in my gut yeah a food baby some men you feel your belly bloat up betsy called SIBO right that is SIBO you don't feel like you fully evacuate when you have a bowel movement you're fatigued you get depressed and it's any and you can actually feel your depression it's related to how your gut feels I have that food baby I'm anxious I feel depressed it impacts me I can link to all sorts of other diseases right fatigue and then when we think about fibromyalgia you know we need to think about the gut and what's been impacted there and we think about Parkinson's 50% of people with Parkinson's actually have SIBO yeah now asthma right and we don't we don't know we know there's an observational connection there we don't know anything about causality but it's something you have to consider when you're thinking about other disease so the fatigue the brain fog the potential inflammation and joint pain the all the gut issues that SIBO yeah and a lot of SIBO we don't know all the causes there used to be some standard ideas what the causes were but now we know that it's it's hard to determine so the use of proton pump inhibitors another acid acid acid problem sac previs said all that stuff oh that stuff and then we have stress plays a major role and so that's some of the cause that's a SIBO can look like and now how do we how do we address it how do we know first yeah you mentioned these acid blockers because you know they're giving out like candy you can buy them in the drugstore they're over-the-counter now and people think they're safe and fine I remember when I went to medical school they just came out and we were told by the drug reps these are very strong drugs they completely shut down ass in the stomach you never want to give them more than 6 weeks and now people are on him for six decades you know and and what they do is pretty frightening literally they will help your heartburn but the side effects which are not really side effects they're effects we just don't like them so we call them side effects are bloating and diarrhea and distension all the SIBO symptoms and by the way they cause osteoporosis and pneumonia and prevent b12 absorption and zinc absorption and mineral of magnesium absorption so they're not exactly I just have to say this work a night you know is that this is my this is the concern we all have for medicine when we've been unplugged and this is the issue is that we have pharmaceutical companies that provide medications to our patients support sick lifestyle that perpetuates disease yeah I love that love those advertisements on TV where they like don't worry eat you're like sausage and peppers and don't worry just take this premise hitter think the purple pill it's ridiculous it is and so they have but on the functional medicine side here's where the hard work is changing the lifestyle hmm to make it a healthy lifestyle so people can you know be healthy prevent disease if they do get sick then we help them change lifestyle because Zac and impact disease more than anything else and then for people who are well or better we can use lifestyle to optimize their their their their aging and again using a term I've heard you use age young you know and that's that's part of what we do here dual true walnuts are the whole spectrum prevent treat and then help people optimizing age young yeah my my goal is to die young as late as possible so back to the SIBO thing yeah right it's a you know so once we we make that now how do we make the diagnosis so I always tell people tests are good but there's no perfect test and you know your cognition your doctor's ability to think through problems is the most important thing that they do we do a functional medicine right we are thinking differently oh yeah my mentor Sid Baker was one of the leading I think medical minds in the last century was really pioneered a lot of a visionary concepts of functional medicine he says we're in the name and blame attainment game you know we name him blame we name the disease and we blame the name for the problem and then we came with a drug so we say oh you're sad and hopeless and helpless you have depression that's what's wrong with you know it's just a name of what's wrong with you it's not the cause right let me go I know what you need you right need an a depressant and that's like this doesn't make sense instead of all we doing functional medicine it's called thinking and linking right we actually think in link cuz everybody you know thinks you treat the same disease with the same treatment and in functional medicine you're gonna ten people with migraines or she's everyone differently everybody's different than people with lupus and everybody's really differently because you're looking at what the root cause for them is and right I think that's really profound yeah and I want to get back to this SIBO thing but I just want to come back to the matrix because that's such a key concept and you know you described all these biological networks you know assimilation which is the gut defense and repair the immune system energy how we make energy detoxification our transport system our circulation our communication systems hormones and our transmitters or structural system and all those are influenced by our lifestyle right by thoughts our flights our relationships our diet our exercise or sleep all those things intrinsic relationship yeah and then and then they're also influenced by external factors like toxins allergens bedbugs stress poor diet right and those impact our genes to change the expression so we have basically our inputs that are problem and there are lifestyle and that caused a disturbance in these systems and no matter what disease you have we use this modelling and every single chronic disease and even acute many acute disease are caused by disturbances in our biological Cecily and that is what functional medicine so unique at diagnosing and treating in a totally new way absolutely and so it's it's that constant work around the matrix and one of the things that I said earlier is functional medicine is hard medicine it's hard for the doctor is hard for the patient yeah because you're think you have to think right and you're constantly thinking and as you treat the environment of the patient changes so you treat you you begin to the treatment plan and the patient comes back with a particular response and that response will be based on what is their lifestyle what part of the lifestyle have they been able to change because it's a real struggle for people to change lifestyle that's hard work and then you know what are their genetics you know and and how are their genetics cuz we you know use a lot of genetic testing here that help us identify that and so once they come back and they've responded to our first step of treatment then we go around the matrix again yeah and we rebalance and we look okay okay it's like tailoring you're just every kind of every it's like it's like a fine watch and you're just constantly working the gears asking questions having them tell their story again retell their story I can't tell you how many times I have sat an hour-and-a-half initial visit only to have the patient come back over it over zoom or a physical visit to the office and I asked them the same questions and all of a sudden they're in a different place and I get a different answer that opens up a whole new realm of thinking about their disease their health and even their goals for their life so every time I go around the matrix I get that person better and better and better so we don't treat a hundred and fifty five thousand diseases we just work with optimizing our biological systems in the matrix that is the key to functional medicine so that in a sin a way it's very simple but it's also very unique because each patient is different and for the patient some of the changes are hard because we're asking people to change your diet or take different supplements but the truth is that it's actually you know and so much suffering and helps them so much that people are so excited about it oh they can they do it and so yeah it's it's actually mmm and many times very easy for patients change because they see the results so quickly yeah so let's talk about the C book it's great to see bones talk about this cases yeah I think we should share some cases yeah give an example of what we're talking yeah this is abstract I would say that very rarely do I see Siebel by itself and and why is that because mark you've you've already talked about it's the microbiome hey when the microbiome is assorted as it is in C Bo and you have these bacteria growing or they shouldn't grow and so you you're now changing how food is processed you are changing where it's processed and you're changing the body's ability to absorb it and what we know about the microbiome is those bacteria actually train our immune system they're very closely related to our immune system and they will-they our immune system identifies antigenic material from the bacteria and it the bacteria is able to tell the immune system here's what you need to be worried about here's what you don't need to be worried about yeah right and so when we alter that gut immunity we can create inflammation and we create inflammation we begin to break down that that the membrane that's responsible for opening and closing and letting good compounds and and and good nutrients in and keeping the bad guys out yeah when that breaks down we have leaky gut and all of a sudden our immune system starts to see proteins and that have not been completely processed down to the peptide level that they're accustomed to and they start making antibodies against commonly eaten foods yeah so now this person with SIBO is sensitive to a plethora of foods that they eat every day which might not they might not be allergic to those foods but they're sensitive to them so now they're not eating so they're coming with all these symptoms it gets exacerbated by almost everything in their diet and it because now the disease and I don't know what to do not eat because there bothersome right right and so now they can come in that sick now that your immune system is triggered they have muscle aches they have they have joint pains they have brain fog because now they're having to you they have fatigue their mitochondria being affected their brains are inflamed they're being affected so now this person comes in and they may say to me I have brain fog I have this side of that I get the whole story and I hear the gut always start in the gut right so now what do we do and they tell me there's symptoms we order a test it's called a small test before the guys want to recalculate you said was so profound yeah which is that I like being for felt thank you no I mean it's a total friendship so most doctors don't think much about the gut unless you have direct digestive symptoms anyone you do they treat it kind of in a very linear way but what you're saying is when there's bugs that should be in our large intestine migrate up to the small intestine for various reasons it causes an imbalance in there and that leads to a breakdown in the barrier which causes this leaky gut and then all these foreign proteins and métro moments leak into the system your immune system goes out that's not me and it starts creating a response and then you get systemic inflammation which is why you get brain fog and muscle aches and fatigue and joint pain all these things skin rashes acne whatever and and and people think these are all not reenacted but they're all they are connected that's why see with such a great topic to start with yeah because it connects the entire matrix so tell us how we test for it now let's get into a case okay so testing will be with a breath test it's a it's called the Cebu breath test and you we starve you for a day basically we want to starve out those bacteria they're living in the small intestine so they become metabolically and active and then you wake up in the morning and you take some lactulose which is not absorb sugar but before you do that you breathe into a little balloon and then we put that aside as your baseline test then you drink the sugar drink and now the bacteria are like we got some food we're excited we were starving out but we were doomed and then they get very metabolically active and then within 30 minutes of 60 minutes when they're metabolically if they start producing the exhaust of their metabolism hydrogen and sometimes methane and even sometimes sulfur gases so it's not just the cows that are burping methane nope humans nope yep uncle uncle arts and SIBO you're contributing to climate change is that it yeah that was gonna be when we get to the magic one question I'll talk about my wife anyhow so and also other tests like urine tests you can look at metabolites right yep you can look at yes oh yeah we can look at where it metabolites that will show us markers for dysbiosis in the gut using an organics test so on organics test is when we look at all the organic acids that are products of your metabolism and so we're able to tell we know which should be you know in the metabolism appropriately and we can look at organic acids and we do that as a part of our GI work which is a tested traditional doctors don't do they'll do the traditional breath test okay they're not going to do weight an organic acid organic acid test or something even more advanced called an ion profile that looks at all of your amino acids and that's important what I do is see the workup because if I look at your amino acids and you're depleted then I know you're really in trouble with your SIBO because you're not getting more nutrition you're not absorbing yeah and then I can see markers of inflammation on the ion test I can also see the the organic acids are really critical because there are things that the bacteria produce that will end up in our urine that indicate to us that wow those things are in the urine because you have bacteria over growing or don't belong in your gut yeah and now we find out I think you're right I'm gonna jump in with a sadist remind me of a little girl I saw years ago yeah who was nine years old and she's pretty little sweet looking girl right who was a monster like a terror she would constantly get kicked out of class she literally couldn't make it home on the bus without the bus driver having a stop ten times to settle her down she was violent and she would rip you know pictures look like part of her family at home she would terrorize her sister and I'm like what's going on with this girl right and we did a whole workup and we found her organic acid test and we found she had massive levels of overgrowth of bacteria yep and she had overgrowth of yeast which is not called SIBO but see flowers small intestinal fungal overgrowth and what I did was I gave her an antibiotic and an evening fungal and literally the girl completely transformed so you think you're treating a psychiatric disorder absolutely with antibiotics and any fungals how does that make sense well make sense when you understand the connections between the gut and the brain I mean this was over 10 years ago I remember writing about it in the ultra mind solution go like wow you know the gut is so connected I'm another one with OCD the same things she had high levels ammonia and she had severe OCD she wouldn't pick up anything off the floor I gave her in any bike and literally she became like meat freak it was the weirdest thing oh you know I so I would so in in those cases in cases I've seen Seba is very commonly related to neuropsychiatric disorders so when I have people with memory loss brain fog ADHD just as you said I've had I've had multiple patients against them right autism the first thing we do is treat their SIBO change their diet and within the first six weeks we're starting to see significant change in their behaviors with ADHD and in their verbal abilities with autism kids facilities so that I was going to talk about a fire biology case but I will talk about a ADHD I had a actually in the anxiety depression case talk about both oh yeah talk about why there's so many cases I could choose from there is a recent case from a patient from a different part of the world actually came in and they were having lots of difficulties with your child very bright siblings but this particular child is having a lots of issues with impulsive behavior tension in the classroom moodiness to the point where there was the child would speak of not wanting to live anymore and so I went through all their symptoms and I the the biggest thing that this child had a difficulty with was the bloating in the distension that was constant mom noticed it from almost day one of life so we did not only the SIBO breath tests but we did something called a IGI map test which we'll look at it will it will using DNA and piece PCR technology look at all of the bacteria in your gut the major colonies and major species look for Candida and also look for markers of inflammation those two tests on this patient indicated severe disruption of the balance of the mic microbiome the patient with patients put on a brief elemental diet which is a diet that takes out you know most most food solve a foreign protein all the form proteins and then was put on a autoimmune Paleo diet and very difficult to put a kid on diet basically stars a lot of a bad bacteria absolute of feeding them all start my sugar and carbs which they love you giving them rice and we and we combine it with a low fodmap diet to make sure that the child got all the nutrition a map is like what that's like so those are those are long-chain sugars that get fermented very quickly by bacteria and when you eat them and you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth you get a very big food base or nine months pray you know and the baby is this basically you're fermenting food where you shouldn't be foods meant to be fermented in the large intestine and that's like florida right but you know what's happening with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth bacteria up in maine and the foods coming in the main mains not ready for gas and so now all of a sudden you've got this gas where it doesn't belong geographically you feel very uncomfortable and it starts to impact everything we talked about your nutrition your inflammation and that translates that gut brain connection in the brain gets affected that's why we see so much benefit when we treat diseases like SIBO and dysbiosis and our patients with neuropsychiatric disorders from ADHD to OCD thing xiety and depression and you've noticed it i know we've talked about even like parkinson's and and other disease processes that will stabilize once we start addressing that issue so what happened is this kid then so within that when we had the six week follow-up and we had started you know it was actually not as six weeks followed by the six week follow-up we went over all the testing and we started the these the second part of nutrition plan once we started then frisson plan and i use some natural herbs to get rid of some of that overgrowth sort of antibacterial the bacterial herbs that come in different compounds that we use at the eight-week eight weeks later that child's behavior the mood swings are completely gone yeah completely gone the impulsivity was drastically reduced and the teachers are saying he was now paying attention in class and that was just with food no stable no stimulants just herbs like oregano and oregano or marine and thyme and things like that absolutely yeah powerful stuff yeah and so that's that's acebos story yeah brain connection still powerful brought back some bad memories because we talked about the food baby I when I got sick from mercury poisoning almost 30 years ago one of the things mercury does is it interrupts all your enzymes and your function so my gut became very dysfunctional and I remember literally having food babies all the time I literally almost couldn't eat anything without my stomach blowing up and feeling like someone just pumped my intestines up like a bicycle tire yeah and at that point of time we didn't really think about SIBO we didn't really name it and we weren't really aggressively treating that I was trying things that I thought would work but it was really tough until I got rid of the mercury and I couldn't get rid of the SIBO yeah so often there's something underlying yeah there's often a root cause I've seen people with gut issues that maybe were caused by Babesia for example does it take infection oh absolutely so like aziza lies the gut right so if I have a sieve a patient it's not getting better I think two things one is I think about Lyme disease because if one of the one of the symptoms of Lyme disease and is a trigger to test somebody for Lyme is and they get Bell's palsy Lyme disease can affect the nervous system yeah and so Bell's palsy is when you have your facial nerve is paralyzed and it can be caused by Lyme the same thing can happen in the gut you can get a paralysis and a dysfunction of the migrating motor complexes and now that the peristalsis of the intestine is declining the intestine won't move now these bacteria can stay there and grab you late so again it's all these things that's know when you go to a traditional guest neurology myself II we do the breath test you have SIBO take these antibiotics forget about the yeast stuff and like I'll see you in Hope across shrinks and there's so many that fails because they're not getting the root cause so right the root cause may not be SIBO might be something that's causing the SIBO right like lime or like mercury or something there's no there's something else to going back to lifestyle when I can't get a person better with SIBO I start going around the matrix again are you sleeping are you exercising are you how's your marriage how you're its relationship do you have a toxic relationship because the people that I've done everything for I've given them the bone broth and colostrum and and and you know elemental diets they're not getting better mmm it's the fifth or we use the five ours right we use remove repair restore and I can't remember fourths it's remove replace reenact you late repair rebalance rebound and read the rebalance peace the fifth are I call it fifth are it's the fifth are it's getting people to rebalance their lives and that is basically are you dealing with your stress the people that aren't dealing with their stress aren't getting their sleep aren't exercising and how what a stress have to do with the intestines that's another podcast lon yeah give us a nugget here okay so stress so stress is probably the the start of all disease it impacts everything from your hormones on you know in your own body but stress actually creates some neuro chemical changes in your brain and there's a communication between your brain and your gut microbiome and your gut your it's called the second brain it's the second brain right well some people think the gut was the first brain may be right you know and that that the our brain only developed once mitochondria we're starting to make energy for us and then we're able to convert use that energy to make a second brain that allows us to reason and so forth however once you have that gut brain connection stress can actually you know we have this vagus nerve it's a it's a superhighway from the gut to the brain and more is acts the relaxation nerve it's the relaxation nerve and your brain can communicate anxiety and stress to your gut microbiome and actually change the makeup of your gut microbiota and your nervous is right any nerve it literally paralyzed stress hormones literally paralyzed your gut your sympathetic nervous system and your fight-or-flight you don't want to be digesting your food when you're running from a tiger right while your gut to shut down send off the poop or do anything else but your good shuts down and that's what happens we live in a state of chronic stress and our guts not work it's not working and then you end up with you know now you create that environment for SIBO to develop yeah I I just you know I was talking about see by just remember this patient I had a few weeks ago was was what a striking case she came in with what we call vestibular migraines which is essentially a migraine from Hell where your room is spinning around you're in bed you're nauseous you can't get up and she had it like 25 days a month and she was a really smart young woman who you know wanted to go to graduate school and was basically in bed and so I started not just asking about her headaches and she was she'd seen like 45 doctors and you know seen neurologists and everybody and she was on this medication nothing was working so I'm like what else is going on well I blowed it all the time and my belly's distended I you know and I could see she was puffy and swollen she gained a bunch of weight she was severely depressed she was anxious and I'm like this is not a messed up person this is a person whose biology is messed up and I said well let's just try to put you on a you know clean diet eliminated all the allergic foods I gave her a non absorbed antibiotic and I need fungal basic nutrients very simple and I waited for a test to come back and she came back in on the first time she came in she had to leave the door open she was so anxious her system was so in fight-or-flight she could even be in the room she stood up she's pacing around I'd never had a patient like that she came back six weeks later she looked like a different person I mean not only was all the inflammation gone out of her body all the fluid not only is she lose twenty pounds but her gut was normal and she had a migraine right she was completely better she maybe had one or two very mild headaches and when I got her test back yes she had seabone I sort of could anticipate based on her history what was going on but that you know that's a case where you know she had been seen doctor after doctor doctor and these are the kinds of patients we see here where I often joke because we've been here for about 15 years before that I worked at Canyon Ranch was the medical director and I was joked I was a resort doctor the doctor of last resort and that's kind of things we say here or I joke I'm a holistic doctor go take care of people with a whole day patients a whole is the problem right so and then the treatment for this is all the things you mentioned it's dying we start with diets you know it's really diet lifestyle and I and I probably buy painted by the time patients get to me as I said before Simo is just part of the of the whole complex because once you've affected diet then you're affecting you know how your hormones are working your autoimmunity and so forth so we always start with diet because we can impact all the systems with a good diet so diet we can include a fodmap diet it can include elemental diet include and I mean paleo with and our nutritionist here at the ultra Wellness Center we work very closely with and when a patient is here after I see them I will consult with our nutritionist and we will customize the diet plan for each particular patient that has SIBO it's not always gonna be the same diet so that's really important you said so we here at the ultraviolet centered work as a team absolutely and and tell us a little bit about that yeah so we have a team from the first phone call to your first visit and beyond each team is made up of a navigator and nurse and nutritionist and a doc and we meet every week multiple times a week and we discuss cases and we discuss cases that are coming to you coming to our Center cases that we're working on and we're constantly collaborating and we're always trying to answer that question we're always asking why and and how and so our team from the first first visit the navigator will identify you know what your needs are and then you'll get a phone call from our nurse practitioner who will do a collaborative pre visit a whole hour you'll spend before you even get here going over your case and we'll get all your documentation we'll get a summary from the nurse practitioner I review all of that before the patient even gets here and I will review that case with my nurse with my nutritionist even before I go in the room see the patient for the first time so before I even come in the room of the patient I've actually gone over all the data they sent in it's been reviewed by a nurse practitioner who's actually interviewed the patient I get that summary I talk about the case of my nutritionist I actually begin to create the patient's matrix before they come in for their visit yeah so when I'm sitting there I am now getting them to fill in all of the blanks answer any questions any any any pieces of the puzzle that I haven't been able to figure out yet and I an illustration I will use with my patients they'll say look you know we get patients from all over the world and they're usually very complex and usually been to many other doctors and they bring me this big sack and they they empty it and it's puzzle pieces yeah it's the pieces they've collected from all their other medical workups and we connect the dots and we put those puzzle pieces down and we try to piece them together and by the end of that first visit I can see where the gaps are I can't tell if it's a lion or a tiger or bear and elephant but I can start to get a picture and at that point we make the decision here's some more testing we need to do there's more information I need to get and here's some things we're gonna try based on what you've tried before and why it might be a good starting point for you it's always nutrition and it's always lifestyle change first yeah food first I mean wait you know when I started this practice 15 years ago at the Ultra Wallace Center I think we probably were the first practice where it was mandatory to see a nutritionist if you wanted to get an appointment right because if food is medicine then how do we practice without nutrition you know just like imagine taking a prescription pad away from your doctor absolutely I don't even know where probably prescription pad has anymore at the time because III barely used drugs because I don't need to I'll use them if I need to right but I don't usually need to is that's absolutely correct and we're in the same I'm in the same situation I went from using them a lot to barely using them and you also mentioned testing now people think oh I'll test for the same I my doctor worked me up he did all the tests everything was normal and everything's fine what do you have to say to that conventional testing is is wanting it's very one-dimensional it again looks at the the price it doesn't look at the the root cause of disease so one thing that we do a lot of is we do genetic testing mm-hmm knowing and the cut we don't do it 23andme you get five thousand genes we don't know what four hundred ninety-four thousand nine hundred of them do right and we don't know that how to make clinical connections but we use a company that looks at eight very important biologic systems and the most important potential variance yeah thank you comment that you can do something about it you make it clear actionable they're actionable genes what we call single nucleotide polymorphisms it's just basically when one gene is is is altered in a way that the gene will still be a blueprint to make an enzyme or a protein it's just the protein or enzyme that's made is might not be as effective for a different function a different functionality it might might do it's supposed to do really fast it might was doing it's supposed to be really slow and that will impact how you will function so doing that genetic testing allows us to see what your blueprints are and you have baseline variants that if we alter your lifestyle and alter your nutrition can support those those variances so they optimize and now your body is functioning better your immune systems functioning better your your ability to stop oxidation improves your ability to turn good inflammation on and turn it off when it's done that can be improved because they can be affected by those blueprints so genetic testing is a critical part of what I didn't throw my work ups and then another test that we do is we check for toxins yeah so what you're saying is we're starting to look down through the matrix we're looking at biological systems and dysfunction or imbalances there aren't quote diseases through testing that isn't available really in most places or for sure through conventional medicine right and that's where we find the answer right you know III once was doing a study I mean Elektra on vitamins and I had to figure out how many chemical reactions they were has all chemical reactions depend on vitamins and minerals and there's 37 billion billion chemical reactions every second in the human body yeah that's 21 zeros yeah okay how many blood tests you get from your doctor 30 yep you got your chem screen your CBC or cholesterol and and we think oh well that's fine so you're healthy but the truth is those alleles yes yeah we could if we wanted to talk about testing we can just go down that cholesterol route and we can just talk about the double go that is for our patients you know with the testing that's done it's very one-dimensional one layer that doesn't really look at cardiovascular risk at all so testing that we do it starts to get into those deeper levels it really impacts the function of the body looking at toxins we live in a toxic world right it's not a matter of you know do you have toxins is how many do you have right you know you know persistent pollutant toxins that will just mind you know we'll just camp out in your fat and just leech into your system on alter how your mitochondria work alter how your immune system works yeah great case that I had it's a gentleman who has Alzheimer's he was seen in a very large institution in Boston and he was diagnosed at the age of 56 with you know moderately advanced Alzheimer he was he had a basic evaluation was a SPECT scan and he was told he had Alzheimer's he was given a pill that we know doesn't work for more than 18 marrow stabilize it right he was given it doesn't work even fresh I was just trying to be Jefferson and then that's on our baby this is basically the major medical journals the pills rousing yes don't worry these don't work so then then he was given you know start behavioral therapy and cognitive therapy again hasn't been proven to do anything to slow the progression or improve cognition at all so he's you know at a major institution given those two things to do he is he is a very very active gentleman with a great deal of huge responsibilities in his life very dear man and he comes here for the first visit and he's you know he's you know you see these these issues and so we start talking and I start testing so we do the tests let's look at the gut let's see if there's toxins let's find out about your hormones all right let's see if you have any autoimmunity let's do some we do some you know we do specific autoimmune testing to see if your your body is making auto antibodies against brain tissue so why would you do that because Alzheimer's is what it's Alzheimer's is a multi-faceted multi causality disease inflammation it's inflammation in the brains that's yes driving it right and there's and there's lots of things that can cause an inflammation right so we're gonna look for everything that can cause inflammation and there's also disruption of normal function right that that might be distant so what effect does having a low testosterone have on the brain testosterone has a you know as a big impact on the brain it can have an impact on on inflammation it can have an impact on how the pituitary and hypothalamus is secreting other hormones how those hormones will work now your newer transmitters it may work so here are some of the things we found with this gentleman you had a mercury of 120 oh wow now put it in perspective like zero is normal zero to four and anything over ten I worry about 20 is bad and like 120 is you know a handful of people yeah that you see over the course of decades have 120 yeah yeah very very few people mercury level testosterone level from where fish water air but like you know who's a fish eater in his lifetime and again you know he wasn't like an extraordinary fish eater but if you look at his detox genes yeah he had a lot of on his genes he had a lot of variants that put him made him susceptible to not being able to detoxify as well as he should so you know you and I could go eat sushi the whole week not me I got those same genes okay god that's why I got mercury poisoning all right so I could eat it I don't have an issue with mercury right my mercury wasn't high at all and I love fish I eat a lot of fish so jealous okay well so so mercury his testosterone level was 150 so at his age his testosterone level should be 600 on average eight hundred eight hundred sixteen hundred yeah right so 150 is like nothing about what a woman has almost exactly so so he had testosterone as though his mercury was bad and of course there was C Bo and he had dysbiosis so not only did he have this gut was all messed his gut was all messed up and then finally on top of it he tested positive for Lyme disease so that's another thing that we do here at the Ultra Wallace Center is you know you can't practice functional medicine without coming across Lyme disease almost every day you know it's it's stealth infections lyme disease and the co-infections that can be found with it along with other viruses are a big part of what impacts people he had Lyme disease so we had four strikes against them and so so here's what's really interesting we've arranged for him to get some really intensive Lyme disease treatment at another clinic in in Germany and where they do hyperthermia hyperthermia and they they give IV antibiotics when you're you're by making somebody really warm you are able to that's when the bacteria can be most susceptible to antibiotics and so at that really high temperature about 107 degrees they're going to put an IV infusion of an antibiotic in and fight the infection I did that I went to Salem even I had hyperthermia and I liked Lyme disease and Babesia and I had night sweats all the time and I did the treatment and it kind of went away and I've seen this case after case now it's not something that's available in United States but it can be very powerful - yeah so in his particular case we chose that direction because of the degree of the severity of what he was facing yeah so we wanted to let's just let's just hit this hard hit it fast it was something we really believed in so arranged for him and I work with this doctor to the st. George clinic and then we treated his mercury we we started treating his testosterone using first getting him to sleep better working on his nutrition I always like to work on lifestyle before I start treating directly with hormones then we added in some hormones that would benefit his testosterone levels and at six months he had stabilized so he had he had not worsened I didn't a six-month actually about the eighth month mark when we saw you is that he was still working and he had he'd noticed that his memory had not gotten any worse than it had been and so we're continuing to work it's a story that's ongoing but really really exciting because that's important to say that this is a progressive disease because usually you're later people are a lot worse right I was thrilled that he once he wasn't worse and where his numbers better but although oh absolutely Austrian levels are up to like 500 at that point mercury level was coming down mercury can be hard to come in and bring down you can take a period of time but I do like to remind people he was very excited to know there are things I can work on see he left it a large institution with things to do that we're not gonna work sort of hopeless so this is a really important point with functional medicine Alzheimer's is a diagnosis it's not the cost no and functional medicine helps you figure out what that is not doesn't mean everybody with Alzheimer's has those things although they're common but you know tick infections heavy metals hormonal issues gut issues things you can actually treat and I think this is such an a big difference between functional medicine what we do here at the ultra Wellness Center in Lenox Massachusetts and what people get when they go to a traditional physician they're not having somebody pull back the hood and look underneath and see what's going on they go I know what's wrong with you have Alzheimers no that's just the name of the problem right now let's start to figure out what's going on that's beautiful please you know you know we see everything here we see autoimmune diseases from Hashimoto's thyroiditis to all sort of colitis to rheumatoid arthritis we see Alzheimer's disease ADHD autism we see people with doesn't matter what diagnosis you have the system not the symptoms or disease do that whatever they have has a chance of that's what I want to make you know we see everybody with everything from every age and we end up being able to help them more than the specialists did because we're looking at everything and we're getting to the root cause and so in a course of a week I can see a two-year-old or a three-year-old with autism yeah and I can see I can see a sixty two-year-old with ALS right I can see a woman with depression no libido fibromyalgia and it's all it's all in my purview yeah and it's all really a slightly important point you know people say well do you treat this you treat them like I treat things I've never seen I never had a patient with vestibular migraines before I mean I don't know that much about it other than you know the basics what I heard in medical school and but I know how to treat the body I know how to treat the system I know how to treat a human being and look for the root causes and when you do that even if you don't exactly understand the disease it'll often dramatically improve or reverse completely absolutely you know but you know I like to let people know it's it's it's hard work it's good work it's really good hard work never not like take this pill see in six months right change your diet you have to take care of your lifestyle issues you have to take things to help reset your system yes sure God do the hormones treat the lime right like the example I think is a good one is my own daughter she went you know she started having I have permission from my daughter actually he said I gonna say my name I said you want me to she said yeah so my daughter has a bell so my daughter Isabel so she started having her period and about you know in the first year of her cycle she was very irregular and she was really getting more and more fatigued so it was around school time as long as you guys are a pediatrician yeah yeah so you know no no because no you know my wife goes with her and I do you know my wife is she she's very attentive to these these health issues and nutrition and so she sat in the visit and she came back and she shook her head George she said I am done I am so done I told him that Isabel had fatigue never once asked her what she eats and talked about nutrition whatsoever basically said you know barely asked her about her period other didn't know that was irregular and really basically said you know you just started your period give it some time you're an adolescent you know you're you sleep more you're gonna be fatigued it's sort of the natural process so I'm like thinking nope so I wanted to know I know my daughter's diet as hard as we try in our home my wife and I eat Whole Foods she will tend towards carbs and sugars outside the home and even inside them so I had a lot of suspicions from watching her in our house that she was having issues around her diet and nutrition so the first thing I wanted to do was find out if she was having any food sensitivities so we did some IgG antibody testing which looks at food sensitivities not necessarily food allergies so IG he looks at food allergies let's give up peanut allergy peanuts anaphylaxis you'll know you turn blue but I feels like you might not know we might be right you know us Monday and on Wednesday get ahead strawberry on Friday night and Sunday you have you know red cheeks that's sensitivity now you can have sensitivities and you never make the connection to food my daughter had huge sensitivities to gluten gluten there's really bad thing we're gonna talk about a second milk egg and then multiple other foods which goes that a whole leaky guts Italy key gosh yeah leaky gut check the thyroid your TSH should be you know in general you know if you look at numbers four point five or less hers was five point eight because that's like low thyroid I checked her thyroid antibodies when the body begins to make antibodies against self tissue my daughter had antibodies against her thyroid Wow again fourteen years old right and she was told most doctors don't check anybody just check a TSH if it's around normal they'll just say it's fine right and and her CBC her blood count we have him hemoglobin hematocrit or two numbers you look at to see if you have enough blood blood carries oxygen options required to make energy energy gives you energy if you don't have it you're fatigued and she was fatigued these tests I mean she was anemic her her hemoglobin her meta hurry hemoglobin was nine point not zero that's really should be thirteen to fourteen yeah right that's like that's like down like three points no these these aren't lab tests or available to conventional doctor mmm-hmm so now here's my daughter with all this going on so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna change your diet but here's the key thing the gluten piece see that gluten sensitivity triggers everything as we know you know gluten is what triggers the the you know can be a trigger for your gut to make something called Zhaan Yulin ands on Yulin is the molecule that opens and closes those gates in that membrane that protect the lumen you know your body from what's in the lumen of your gut in the intestine right in the intestines so when you're sensitive to gluten and you start to trigger that you create as leak that's when you really open up that door as we talked about for autoimmunity and malnutrition and then on top of that she was having these bleeds glassing a check mark was her hormones well before you can't I just want to recap that because that's important so gluten basically damages your gut lining which then causes leaky gut but it also prevents iron absorption yep which is why she was anemic it also triggers autoimmunity particularly thyroid autoimmunity yeah other people Hashimoto's caused by gluten so we need to dial back you can get to the right cause okay let's see what happens so so okay so and on top of that is a quick aside I checked their hormones and you can do this ratio between your progesterone and your estrogen when a woman is irregular like that you should really check that because if you have a relative elevated estrogen compared to progesterone that's called estrogen dominance and estrogen dominance can impact your cycle it can make it irregular and it can make it very heavy it can lead a lot of PMS and depression yeah and it can last for half of the month yeah okay so all this was going on would 75 percent of women have PMS that is not a normal condition so it's not it's because of our diet our stress our lifestyle our gut our food food so many it has eggs driver it has as hormones in it you know we just you know the whole you know issue with hormones and our food and guess what's the biggest driver of highest region levels sugar sugar and hormones in our food starch exactly so my daughter is a perfect example of the modern diet despite believe I got to say this parents who eat really well have a garden in the backyard and do something and an teenagers are temporarily psychotic it's a hard at the point I want to make and this is this is the point is that she is fortunate to have me as her dad because if she didn't have me she could have gone a decade or two decades thinking hmmm that's just me only in her 30s after a baby or before a baby or in a stressful time to just completely break down and all of a sudden have Hashimoto's or rheumatoid there's some other energy disorders that could have been prevented and this is what happens I've seen this over and over in patients I start out and you can track their history all the time functional medicine we track okay this person was born by c-section their gut doesn't get developed when they might microbiome they had antibiotics early on because of your infections disruptor got might microbiome maybe they developed some acne or maybe they got some allergies and you then they get maybe thyroid issues when they're twenty then they get when they're 30s they start getting autoimmunity like rheumatoid arthritis and it's the same frickin story and once every time all the time and you can track it back so the fact that you got your daughter early is a huge thing that allows her to then maybe develop normally and not develop these autoimmune diseases and so forth that we see in so many here's here's one of the things I want to say about functional medicine applying everything that we discover as we ask those questions why we do this advanced testing that you're not going to get at another Center it's not easy right and I know I ain't know first hand what it's like to have to change lifestyle not only my daughter's but in my own when I dealt with my brain injury but with my daughter having to help her sleep better create a sleep ritual help her to learn how to meditate help her to make good food choices that is that easy work and so you know it the ultra Wellness Center we also have coaches so we have coaches that will come alongside of you and will hold you accountable work with you to help you devise strategies over a long period of time to change these lifestyles we know habits don't change for at least three months how can we anticipate that some of the most critical things are gonna make you healthy are gonna happen in two weeks six weeks or eight weeks it could take three years yeah that was vesting - is that what I see here is that it's not as hard as you might think because when we put people on a regimen and I do this pretty aggressively to get them now feeling better fast yeah because I figure if they can have the experience of feeling good even if there's more work to do they're gonna do it right in other words in ten days or two weeks by changing your diet and doing a few simple things you often see profound differences and that's true forever so there is work to create sustainable lifestyle change but if you get people to do an aggressive change quickly hmm you know like if if you're allergic to five things and you stop one of them you're not gonna feel better if you stop three of them you're not gonna feel better you got to stop all five and that's why we do the kind of work we do here we get people to actually quickly shift their biology because we know how to do that with functional medicine and then they go oh my god like this woman who you know got rid of her migraines who's got normalized - lost 20 pounds who had energy back who's anxiety depression went away like she's gonna be motivated to stick to the program that's hard yeah yeah yeah so I mentioned something briefly I want to come back to which is your brain injury you just sort of slip that in there so tell us what happened it happened actually while you've been working here yeah and it was a shock for you and for all of us tell us about yeah so I was doing Crossfit one morning and if anybody knows anything about CrossFit you think oh he was doing some crazy thing if he deserve to get injured now that's not at all what happened I would just want to do a pull-up but we have these things called the racks and so you go to a rack you go to do a pull-up but every other station in the rack has another bar that sticks out it's called a kipping bar it's a way you can do a pull-up using your momentum when I went I was talking to the instructor I got into there - into the rack the cage and I wasn't looking to see which which one I was in I just looked up so my bar I went to do a pull-up and hit my head on the kipping bar and I hit my head a lot worse in my lifetime and I didn't make too much of it 20 minutes later I was jumping off in a often on a box and I got the worst headache of my life that was on Thursday before Christmas 2017 and it turned out over the next four days that the headaches would come and go but get worse and worse and worse I end up going to the emergency room that I used to work in when I first came to our community and the nurse recognized me and I put my head down at the triage desk I couldn't even look up and I said Elaine I have like the worst headache of my life that's a line in medicine you learn a lot so so here I am in the emergency room that I worked in when I first started practicing medicine and I hear myself say that is it the words are coming out of my mouth yeah I'm saying you have a subarachnoid hemorrhage an aneurysm well and it would turned out to be I did not have an aneurysm so it's just that you banged your head and well here's this story they get the cat scan 20 minutes later I'm an ambulance I'm headed down the Beth Israel and I'm at what that means is you have a bleed and your brother bleeding my brain so basically it was a bleed and center of my brain it was leaking out of a blood vessel and it creates this this huge headache it's called so when you're in an emergency room and somebody tells you this is the worst headache of my life the first thing you think of is a subarachnoid hemorrhage that could possibly be an aneurysm in my case it turned out they did a 3t a 3d CT angiogram of my brain which is a really cool thing they can they can map out every blood vessel in your brain and just you just see these blood vessels and then they rotate it and they can look for aneurysms and they did it that night and the neurosurgeon came in us have great news for you you don't have an aneurysm because if you did that changes everything I had what's called a para messin cephalic bleed so it's right in front of the pond or the midbrain it's usually very isolated and here's what he said to me it had nothing to do with you hitting your head really we said they can have their own literature he said there's usually spontaneous and it there's no link directly to trauma there's no link to anything you had to heal your brain after right so so that's good you tell your brain so I was told after three days in a neurosurgical intensive care unit which is is sort of like a it's a strange place for a person with a brain injury because they're waking up every two hours oh my god you know to make sure they awake I'm trying to sleep the hill my terrain so Mike I saw the third day my work goes you want to get better the hospital so so the day after Christmas I miss I recently had an arrhythmia and I had to go and get treated and I had to stay overnight in the hospital yeah and the bed that I was on was designed to prevent bedsores for people that don't move but it literally went on every half hour right we're like blah blah wake me up and I couldn't sleep so I'm like I actually pulled the plug on the bed so I could sleep but then the bed deflated it was like sleeping and have Paisley oh my god a depression in the bed was the worst yeah I remember having my compression stockings on when I had my hip replaced they had the compression stockings on that whole first night and every every late 20 mins oh yeah it's great way to wake up the patient so anyhow you know so much for helping you sleep and regenerate so I leave the ICU my wife rescued me the day after Christmas and said you just coming home so that I came home and I was told you'll get better with time that was it you'll get better with time hmm so of course I'm here and I'm talking to you and I'm talking to Todd and I'm talking to Liz and I'm doing my own reading and I'm learning and I understood this before my own brain injury that number one I better make sure my guts in the water because I just had inflammatory process in my brain that's gonna affect lymph drainage it's gonna affect the the blood-brain barrier which protects my brain if that's if I have leaky gut I've got leaky brain and after trauma you you will have an autoimmune response and in that Ottoman response if your gut isn't healthy it could be quite dramatic yeah and now on top of your your brain injury you're having autoimmunity which is going to prevent you from healing well so I started doing some different things you know one of the things that you really want to try and do is you want to make sure that you again you go to the gut make sure your guts healthy and you're eliminating any inflammation that you can have so I really cleaned up my diet and when you're sick you begin to realize yeah maybe my diet wasn't as good as I thought it was and I made some significant changes I went gluten-free and all of a sudden that bloating I to get occasionally that some of those GI thinks I've been ignoring went away so I went gluten-free really a big deal I started using really high dose fish oil because there are studies that show higher doses of fish oil can really help in the brain injury brain injury improving neuronal regeneration for membrane integrity so I went up to ten ten grams per day let's like ten pills almost yeah I was taking a lot of fish oil the the real first inflection point though was my sleep brain injuries definitely impact your ability to sleep so I needed there really find ways to work on my sleep I tried melatonin which you will trigger your body into the right rhythmic pattern but it just triggers you to get into sleep it won't necessarily maintain it I was really having a hard time maintaining sleep so I started working with a advanced medical provider who grows organic hemp and he was able to create a combination of CBD THC with botanicals specifically to help me sleep when I started using that I started to sleep that was the first time I started to feel like I might get better because up to that point I was depressed flat really had to work hard for memory recall everything I did took me so much longer to get done yeah I mean I I was working 24/7 just to keep up with stuff that should have been done in you know six hours so that was a that was the big first inflection point and I also started taking lithium orotate which is known to increase BDNF which is miracle-gro for the brain so BDNF helps with neuro Regenesis it also helps your your neurons speak to each other it makes those transactions occur faster and allows more neurons to combine at a at a junction to talk to each other so I started using that but then the next big major inflection point was when I'd started meditating I had never meditated and I came across a book just serendipitously I Amazon books as a library and I was just flipping three different things then I look up some things on Amazon I found a book and I started using this technique and I started as kinda mention the book sure yeah so it was a stress less accomplished more by Emily Fletcher and I think we've been on my pod you write the foreword for that I did right so that's my thought so I the forward I'm like Oh My heavens mark wrote the foreword for this it must be good book so I start I start my meditation teacher so I started listening to it and she narrates her own book it was just amazing and she went through the science of meditation and what it actually physically does to the brain you know it increases the thickness of the connection between the right and the left brain called the corpus callosum it increases the size your hyper campus decreases inflammation decreases inflammation it increases that decreases the size of your medulla giving you more control over your anger and frustration when I started meditating that was a huge inflection point my focus became clear my worries my negative self-talk resolved I was able to a huge step forward and it's not just for people with brain injury No it's for everybody and we all sort of have chronic brain injury from chronic stress so that as a way to actually so so there were things that I could actively do but the critical pieces were get to sleep get the nutrition in order get to sleep in order and then you know I did things that were known to enhance healing and I will say and I will have to emphasize what you just said meditation isn't just for injury meditation should be taught as part of basic life hygiene for your entire community alimentation yeah it's it's huge and then the then I was able to have enough energy to start exercising and so I started running running is probably the ball the exercises increases BDNF miracle-gro for the brain more than any other exercise so running is not something I've done for a long time but my wife encouraged me to do it and I've been running and that is just really gives me a lot of mental clarity so grace so that you can feel from brain in absolutely you know my traditional approaches are lacking and right I think it's one of the things we do and if I know now if I know then what I know now I would have forced myself to exercise earlier because new research has come out that says with brain injury particularly concussion don't wait to start exercising actually when you start exercising sooner and modulated ways you'll enhance recovery fantastic well this has just been the most extraordinary discussion ranging from brain injury to gut injury there's so much more we could talk about there's just so much we you know yes stomp yeah we see so many cases here at the ultra wanna Center that have really been difficult for people to live through and we help them navigate to what's going on we help them diagnose it in the right way and you know George you're just such a fantastic physician the work you do here is so important and and any last thoughts on what you want to share with our audience yeah or you can ask me that question about if I was me yeah I wanna make sure this isn't a meter my answer so I would say you know working here is an extraordinary experience because we're working with people that have a real vision for helping patients really get to the root cause and get better and if we can do that in six weeks great but if it takes us three years we're there for the long run and we're constantly working at it so just the the dedication of the entire Center and staff to working towards getting people healthy using a functional medicine model has been an extraordinary experience and having colleagues that we can talk about cases and help each other answer those why questions and get people better just multiplies my effort exponentially that's true we do we work together we review the research we're always looking at the latest things we're looking at new diagnostics new therapeutics we're going over cases together it's really pretty amazing it is and so and I would be remiss if I didn't say one of the big impacts that we have on patients here is when it comes to food food is huge and it's interesting because throughout my entire career even before I was you know fully engaged in the functional medicine model I would always tell my patients the the the path to health is a path that leads to a 10 by 10 or 20 by 20 raised bed organic garden in your backyard grow your own food grow it without toxins eat it and then help have your kids help you grow that garden have your kids help you harvest that help you shoot your kids had him down take that food and prepare whole food meals I was telling my patients that for the last 18 years and so so food I think is really critical to our health and I think if we really and I've heard you talk about this and I just I think if we cook or if we grow our own food and we demand food to be healthier from the makers of food we can change the world absolutely we can't change the world amen to that well thank you George for being on the podcast dr. George Papanicolaou at the ultra Wellness Center here we are recording right from the center it's just great to have you if you want to learn more about our practice go to Ultra Wellness Center com and if you love this conversation please share with your friends and family on social media subscribe wherever you get your podcasts leave a comment we'd love to hear from you and we'll see you next time on the doctors pharmacy [Music] hi everyone it's dr. Mark Hyman so two quick things number one thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast it really means a lot to me if you love the podcast I didn't really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family second I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called marks picks every week I'm gonna send out a list of a few things that I've been using take my own health the next level this could be books podcasts research that I found supplement recommendations recipes or even gadgets I use a few of those and if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list all you have to do is visit dr. Hyman com forward slash picks that's dr. Hyman com forward slash picks I'll only email you once a week I promise and I'll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations so just go to dr. Hyman com4 slash picks that's P IC K S to sign up free today

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 225,454

Keywords: autoimmune, gut microbiome, traumatic brain injury, the ultrawellness center, functional medicine, food is medicine, dr mark hyman, the doctor's farmacy, health podcast, health and wellness, food to heal, brain injury, hormonal imbalance, thyroid disorder

Id: AaZbJgQZvFY

Length: 81min 57sec (4917 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2019