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525 How Seeking Holistic Health Saved My Life, Addicted To Wellness with Ashley James and David DeHaas 0

Jul 21, 2024

Check Out My Latest Book: Addicted To Wellness

https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

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524 Neuroscience Breakthrough Ends Food Addiction Creating Healthy, Sustainable Weight Loss & Peace Over The Plate, Susan Peirce Thompson, Ph.D. 0

Jul 2, 2024

Check Out My Latest Book: Addicted To Wellness

https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

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https://takeyoursupplements.com

Dr. Glenn Livingston's Free Book Defeat Your Cravings:

https://www.learntruehealth.com/defeatyourcravings

Check out Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson's Free Masterclass:

https://brightlineeating.com

brightlineeating.com

Susan Peirce Thompson, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester and a renowned expert in the psychology of eating. She is President of the Institute for Sustainable Weight Loss and the founder of the worldwide Bright Line Eating movement. Her first two books, "Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin, and Free," became New York Times bestsellers and instant Hay House favorites. Her work weaves the neuroscience of food addiction with powerful insights from Positive Psychology, IFS, and 12-step Recovery to outline a roadmap for achieving true integrity and self-authorship around food. The Bright Line Eating mission is to help one million people around the globe discover lasting food freedom and have their "Bright Transformations" by 2025.

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523 Headache Decryption: Understanding Your Headache or Migraine Pain Location To Decode Root Cause Holistic Solutions, Dr. Scott Vrzal 0

Jun 24, 2024

Check Out My Latest Book: Addicted To Wellness

https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

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Dr. V's Website: www.HeadacheAdvantage.com

523: Headache & Migraine Pain: Dr. Scott Vrzal’s Guide To Root Cause Solutions

https://learntruehealth.com/headache-migraine-pain-dr-scott-vrzals-guide-to-root-cause-solutions/

In today’s episode, we dive deep into the world of chronic headaches, exploring their hidden causes and pathways to relief with expert Dr. Scott Vrzal. Specializing in natural approaches to pain, Dr. Vrzal shares insights on how headaches reveal clues about our body’s health—from digestive imbalances to emotional blocks stored in physical pain. Join us as we explore the surprising connections between emotions, nutrient deficiencies, and detox pathways, uncovering how holistic health practices can not only relieve headaches but restore balance and vitality to the entire body. This episode is packed with actionable tips and wisdom for those seeking true relief and long-term health.

Highlights:

Headache location often indicates specific health issues (e.g., left-sided for stomach/spleen, right-sided for gallbladder).
Emotions can be stored physically, leading to chronic pain and health issues.
Neuro Emotional Technique (NET) helps release stored emotions to aid physical healing.
Magnesium and zinc deficiencies are linked to stress, pain sensitivity, and immune health.
Gallbladder and liver are essential for detoxification and proper digestion.
High homocysteine is a stronger cardiovascular risk marker than cholesterol.
Organic, mineral-rich foods improve emotional resilience and physical health.
Glyphosate exposure inhibits bile production, affecting gallbladder health.
Hormonal imbalance, especially with estrogen, can cause headaches and other symptoms.
Physical pain often relates to deficiencies or imbalances in specific nutrients.

Intro:

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Ashley James (0:03:13.690)

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host Ashley James. This is Episode 523.

I am so excited for today's guest. We have with us Dr. Scott Vrzal. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and people who are sick of suffering are going to be singing your praises. My heart is so full now because I know that some of my listeners are just so done with the suffering and the pain. Today, you're here to deliver the information that they've been praying for so that they can no longer be in pain. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:03:57.351)

Well, thank you. Yes, that's why I got into it, because I was suffering and I wanted that victory for others.

Ashley James (0:04:03.427)

Exactly. That's why I started the podcast also. I started this podcast eight years ago because I was suffering for so many years from several major medical issues and I used holistic medicine to get better. After being with MD medicine for so many years and under the MD's care, I got worse, not better. I felt sicker, not better, then found true holistic medicine. There's a lot of people these days that call themselves holistic that aren't. You have to buy or beware. I found my mentors and not only did they help me get better through true holistic medicine, true holistic medicine is supporting your body's ability to heal itself and getting out of your body's way. Stop doing the things that are hindering your body from achieving homeostasis, then giving your body what it's missing in order for the body to do the healing, your body wants to heal. It wants to come back into balance. These simple changes make such a profound difference, in the instance of headaches, sometimes no matter what we try, even when we go to holistic practitioners, the pain is still there and we're left so frustrated or the imbalance is still there. That's why we want to come to Dr. Scott V. I know you like to be called Dr. V.

A little plug, your website is headacheadvantage.com and we're going to get into how you help people, of course, we want to talk about your story and what led you to this but before we do, I got to share a little story about a headache in my life with you and because you had asked before we hit record, you're like, so do you have any headaches? I'm like, well, let's hit record so we can get started. My husband who has never suffered from headaches unless we lived in Las Vegas and he forgot to drink water. You do that once or twice. The dose dehydration headaches are the worst. You do that a few times, you learn your lesson. You learn to always travel with water with you, other than that, he never suffered from headaches. Two years ago, he moved in with his parents for five months and lived in a bed beside his dad and did 24-hour hospice care until his dad passed away. He and his dad didn't have the best of relationships. His dad never said, I love you. He was a very stoic person. On his deathbed, he said to my husband, my husband was 54 years old, heard I love you from his dad for the first time. It was a beautiful experience. They both bonded.

I believe it was a very healing, cathartic experience. When he passed away, we weren't all torn up. We had spent a lot of time processing it. It wasn't a sudden thing. It was slow and we pretty much did our grieving and our processing while he was going downhill.

the day he died, my husband had to get a root canal, which was botched. So they extracted the tooth. It was tooth 15 all the way back molar 15. This was about two years ago. He proceeded to develop constant chronic headaches. Now we go to a naturopath. It's been the naturopathic doctors, we eat super clean.

He goes to a really good chiropractor, acupuncturist. We went down the list, and could not figure out what was going on. We went from practitioner to practitioner. We tried everything, homeopathy, everything. Some things worked a little bit temporarily. He had all kinds of different facial massages. He went to three different types of manipulative massages and these headaches would come on around 11am every day, almost every day. Sometimes it was every other day.

Sometimes you get a break and it'd be every three days, but this was for two years. They were so bad. I describe it like a migraine in his neck and it would radiate. It was a tension headache. It would radiate up into his head, typical of either a scalenes trigger point or sometimes it would move and be an upper trapezius trigger point, a very typical radiating pain pattern.

Also he had ischemia in those muscles. The muscles were really hard, like hard as a rock, and we would strip them and get heat on them and everything, but we couldn't get the pain to go away. No practitioner could figure out what was wrong other than he had this problem that would come on and then release six to eight hours later. He would have this pain, but it was like a migraine because he could barely drive. He could barely talk. He'd be wincing. Then afterwards it was like an old neurological event. He would be left completely exhausted, the rest of the day could not function, like just zero function. So he was going through a migraine and that it would exhaust him. Also it would take all of his effort, all of his concentration away.

I was talking to so many different naturopaths and trying to figure out what's the next course of action because I knew that there was an answer out there and one of my good naturopathic friends said, you should try going to Dr. Jeff Harris, who does prolotherapy and he also teaches it. So my husband's been seeing him and now he went from one headache every day to a headache every three days to two a month.

With the prolotherapy and we're onto something because the prolotherapy that Dr. Jeff Harris went, there's something going on with your spleen channel, tooth 15, my husband has a giant scar by his spleen because he had an accident, he almost lost his spleen when he was nine. Also the headaches would start at the same time in Chinese medicine as the spleen time.

It's interesting because every problem a husband's ever had has always been on his left side. That's where the headache is. That's where the spleen is. The problem is, it would add up. He's had a few sessions and just with a few sessions, it's gone from I said, one every day or one every three days to only two a month. We still don't know a hundred percent why. But I definitely feel the trigger was the botched root canal when they pulled the tooth, everything leading up to that. Now we also have explored, is it the stress of doing palliative care for several months with his dad and being in a weird bed and being in weird positions, having to pick up his dad off the floor and all the things that could go wrong there. But the headaches didn't start till after the dental stuff, so that's my headache story is that we tried everything. One thing we saw that temporarily would shift it a bit is fasting. Well, of course you're getting rid of all the kinds of foods that inflame, even though my husband eats clean, for example, corn, which I know could be inflammatory for some people, he might have it sometimes in his diet.

We don't know what's giving him inflammation. When you fast, it's like this amazing elimination diet and you're left, wow, I feel so much better. Well, you might've been eating 90% good and 10% bad and what's bad for you might be fine for someone else. It didn't 100% go to his headaches, but we saw a huge shift. We knew that inflammation was a stressor that played a role, but it was multifaceted and it's fascinating and we couldn't quite figure it out. I'm super interested in talking to you today because I know that there are people out there suffering from headaches and a headache doesn't just have to be in the head. It can start in the neck and radiate up like I said with my husband but there's so many different ways that we can approach it to help the body. But the most important thing I feel is to listen to the body and figure it out. Why is the body speaking this language? ? Why is the body saying, Hey, I'm so out of balance, I'm creating pain and let it be a lesson. Let us learn from the body so that we can support the body to heal itself. I know that's what you do. You've unlocked the secrets to listening to the body around headaches and how we can stop them. My first burning question is, do you also help people end migraines?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:13:14.543)

Absolutely. It all comes down to the location of the headache. In your husband's example, you said left-sided predominantly, but then a lot of what you were talking about sounded all the way up to suboccipital on both sides. Is it both sides or left?

Ashley James (0:13:31.296)

No, it was typically left side, and sometimes now with all the therapy he's done, it stays in the neck, but it's like a headache in the neck. But sometimes it radiates just the upper trapezius trigger point, which is on the left side of the occipital, all the way around the parietal, the temporal, and then kind of above the eye.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:13:58.638)

So a left-sided headache is going to be a stomach issue. Stomach, pancreas, and spleen in acupuncture are all related and have their own emotions. The first and foremost in there is over-sympathetic. Certainly, your husband's having to take care of his dad. There was some strain there. Praise God, they were able to kind of get some resolution.

Unfortunately it was at the end, but that saves him a lifetime of challenge just solving that emotion to finally hear I love you from his dad, which we all need to hear. Dads, make sure you're doing that if you're listening. Left side of the headache is going to be a stomach potentially spleen issue. So we'd want to look at what else in his life beyond the emotions.

Clearing, treating, desensitizing for those emotional challenges are going to help the stomach and the pancreas function better and the spleen, again, they're all in acupuncture related, especially emotionally, that stomach meridian does a ramhorn around the left side of the eye and down the neck as you described into the scalenes and so on. The other potential and why I asked, whether it was all left-sided or both is the overzealous response to stress inhibits the thyroid and can cause the suboccipital, so when it's all the way up the neck and the back of the head, what people would typically call a tension headache, tends to do with that chronic cortisol secretion and ultimately under-functioning thyroid. We want to facilitate thyroid function in that case and the consequences of the chronic stress. That make sense?

Ashley James (0:15:47.478)

Yes, totally, and it's so exciting that you are the expert. You're the headache guy. Everyone who has chronic headaches needs to know that you exist and then go get help from you.

I was just two days ago talking to a friend of mine who is also in the holistic health space. She was telling me about a client. She goes, I have a client who's had headaches since he was born and both his mother and father have chronic headaches also. The father now is on dialysis because he's been put on pain meds for so many years. She goes, could it be that there's mold in their house? We're trying to figure out why this whole family who lives under the same roof, why did they all have headaches? I’m like, it might be, but there's so many factors. There's so many different reasons, but it's fascinating that the whole family suffers from headaches. Obviously we're looking at something that impacts all of them. It could be food, it could be mold, there could be so many factors. Have you ever seen a whole family have headaches?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:17:08.709)

. So our first question in that sort of situation is how is the head? How are the family doing when they're away from the house? If they go away to Disneyland for a week do all their headaches go away, symptomatically or historically, then that helps us know that yes, it's something in the house. I mean, certainly their diet's going to change when they travel. But I mean, yes, mold, there's obviously many different types of mold. But I mean, one of the most common things is mold compromises the immune system and can set up any number of symptoms.

Yes, we see that often and often with the testing that we do we can even narrow it down to where in the house, in their bedroom window there's mold, or those types of things that are compromising a person's health.

Typically in that scenario obviously we want to remediate and get the mold out of the house but then strengthen the lungs because the lungs are chronically compromised from being challenged with the mold so we want to do vitamins A and vitamin C certainly are typical anti-antioxidants to facilitate lung function, or even lung tissue, if you will, in a supplement to rebuild the lungs to help it handle the environment, especially while they're trying to remediate, while they're trying to get that mold out of their environment. Just out of two of those yesterday, clinically, that we had to address. The fun story on that I saw several of them, but one gal said, you have mold in your bedroom. She said, no, you're crazy. That kind of thing is often we hear. She didn't really believe it or hadn't seen it and then she went home and checked the window where it kind of narrowed it down to pulled back the drapes and realized that there's a black stripe of mold down the middle of the window that's over their bed and realized she sneezes, she was sneezing twelve times every time she walked into the room and she'd wake up in the morning feeling doo-doo because she was sleeping with mold, inhaling mold all night. The good news is that it was an easy fix to just clean up the mold in the window and live happily ever after.

Ashley James (0:19:19.321)

. Also do a little bit more investigating because it might be deeper with mold. It's typically what you see is the tip of the iceberg.

I have a few really interesting interviews about mold remediation. Listeners go to learntruehealth.com typing in mold and listening to those. I have at least five episodes with mold remediators that will just blow your mind. But I was also thinking about that family and what people often don't think about is that a lot of food sensitivities are passed down genetically, food allergies, food sensitivities, but also the microbiome.

We share the same microbiome just because of exposure to one another and microbiome, which is from our mouth to our anus. It's not just in the big colon, and your microbiome is in your skin too, but as far as your digestion is concerned, it is the entire digestive tract has a microbiome. It's about six pounds of bacteria and either good or bad microbes, depending on what you feed.

You eat junk, you're feeding the bad army that lives inside you. You eat good, clean food, you're feeding the good army. But the thing is, it's so fascinating. I have two interviews about this with the Viome experts. You can type in Viome at learntruehealth.com to listen to those. That the bacteria in your gut digest your food and produce chemicals. Now, some of these chemicals are really helpful and some of them are harmful and you can actually then have a reaction. It's not necessarily that you're allergic to that food, but your microbiome is producing a chemical from that food that then makes you sick. If you're all eating the same because you're under the same roof and you share the same microbiome, it might not even show up on a blood test that you're allergic to that food. But when you remove that food, you start feeling better.

So, there's food, there's also because we typically as families eat the same or very similar, we typically also suffer from the same nutrient deficiencies, plus with genetics, your genetics can determine what nutrients you're processing more of. I just got some genetics testing back and I think it's fascinating that my body burns through B12 and folate at a much faster rate than others do. So I have to be careful and make sure that I'm on top of those nutrients for myself.

Your genetics, like, one person, and I see this all the time, I see my clients, the wives will say, my husband can eat anything and he doesn't feel sick and then I eat the same thing and I'm throwing up, I'm so sick or I feel miserable when I eat the way my husband eats.

His genetics are completely different. His microbiome, if you're fairly newlywed, are completely different. You could live under the same roof, but there's so many factors. Do you have a checklist that you go through? How do you go through all the factors that could be leading to headaches?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:22:29.633)

So much in that statement you just had I mean first we want to kind of shine light on the fact that that biome you're talking about the lactobacillus organisms are the main producers of B12 or methylcobalamin, which is the main nutrient along with folic acid and B6, but those are the main nutrients that drive that methylation pathway that is so often deficient in the genetic tests you're talking about. That's kind of how that correlates the whole biome with the proper detox of the liver, for example, that methylation pathway gets inhibited by stress, gets inhibited when we're deficient in B12, which again is made from the microbiome, the gut microbiome. so that is also, methylation activates the tumor suppressor gene.

The long term consequences of having say the B12 deficiency and under functioning methylation is opening the door for the big ugly stuff, unfortunately, that's how this whole body concept comes into play. We can take B12. Let's correct that. But ultimately, eat your vegetables. Your green leafies and the foods that are going to feed those lovely lactobacillus organisms that are then going to be in your bodies, if you will, to make the nutrients that you need to thrive and to flourish and to stay young.

It all comes to the whole body concept really comes together. To tie that in, as you were asking, with headaches. The reason the book is called The Headache Advantage is because for me, clinically, a person will come in with a list of 15 symptoms, for example, one of my burning primary questions is what area of the head hurts? If they've got a whole list of say digestive related symptoms and pain in the left pectoral muscle and bicep tenderness and all these other areas that are physically related to stomach and then they have a left-sided headache, I know that stomach is going to be the be-all or the keystone to get rid of a lot of these other symptoms that are going to be tied to it. They could have colon-related symptoms and it's going to manifest as low back pain, all these other things, but if their headache is on the left side, I know that fixing their stomach is going to take care of all these other symptoms. So, it saves me some pursuit and helps narrow down the pursuit of where the chief weakness is in that person's physiology. It makes the clinical certainty and the effectiveness of our natural healthcare just kind of go through the roof utilizing that information.

Ashley James (0:25:11.647)

When you say fixing the stomach, is this the metaphorical stomach? Is it the traditional Chinese version of stomach or is this the Western version of, yes, there's something literally wrong in your stomach, or are you talking about all of digestion?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:25:30.671)

Yes, great question. In this case, we're talking about stomach specifically. I talked about digestion as a whole, if they have symptoms of digestion all up and down the track, if you will.

But when it's a lesson and when their pain is on the left side of the head I know as you called out, fixing the stomach and fixing means either a structural change. Chiropractors are going to adjust t5 or c1 if there's allergies related to it. So we have the structural aspect and we've got the nutritional needs. Are they eating something that's compromised in the way the stomach's functioning or do they simply need nutrients like thiamin, vitamin B1, calcium, zinc. Some of the nutrients to help make stomach acid or have they had an emotional overload of over sympathetic, low self-esteem, disgust type emotions that laid down accumulated and compromised the way the stomach functioned. That's the fun, the art of natural health care is identifying the structural, the nutritional, the emotional triggers that are causing in this case, the stomach to not function up to par and then manifest as symptoms of a left -sided headache. That's what I call fixing the stomach is incorporating the structural, the nutritional, supplemental, emotional triggers.

Ashley James (0:26:51.844)

A lot of people discredit emotion as having anything to do with physical health. But as you just pointed out, that emotion directly impacts whether we're in that sympathetic fight or flight response, in which case when we're in that response, the body is shunting blood away from our core, away from our organs, and it's limiting the acid production.

What I tell people when I'm explaining the stress response, I'm like, have you ever been stressed out and either you're not hungry or if you force yourself to eat, it's sitting a lump in your stomach. Some people when they're under stress, they'll even throw up because their stomach, it just shuts down. It's shunting all your resources to your limbs and we're supposed to run away from the bear and then it's supposed to shut off. But now we're constantly triggering that stress response and our emotions trigger it.

We could be sitting safely in our home, but we start watching TV or looking on our phone or even just thinking about something stressful and we trigger that response. We don't even realize we're turning our digestion off and that wreaks havoc on the whole body.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:28:06.605)

Absolutely, and every organ has associated emotions. A lot of those come from acupuncture thousands of years old that correlated all of that. We talked about the stomach with over sympathetic, low self-esteem, disgust, gallbladder, which tends to relate to -sided headaches.

Those are going to be more your liver emotions of anger, frustration, resentment. So that's where chronic illness really becomes a challenge and becomes more chronic, if you will, because they've got chronic stomach weakness, for example, then they're going to store more emotions in that area, in that now weak link, if you will.

To give you kind of an example of emotions, they totally affect it. I mean, I see every week people or new patients that have seen other chiropractors and blame ever since I've had, I got rear ended 20 years ago, I've got this chronic neck pain and it's just my plight and becomes their identity. Unfortunately that's because nobody had addressed the emotional component. they'll get adjusted, get their chiropractic or their massage and feel good for a bit. Then when they see another Red Honda or whatever car rear ended them, it brings back that emotion and puts them back into that fight or flight weakness that then causes again, the weakness of say the neck extensors and leaving them back into their headaches or back into their neck problems. We want to have tools to release that. Even if it's thinking about the accident or the first thing you remember here in skid marks or whatever, think about that as a person gets adjusted or as they're getting their massage. Your listeners that are doing bodywork, how often do they see a person break into tears for no quote known reason?

Ashley James (0:29:53.916)

What do you recommend for people that recognize that a major issue is trapped unresolved negative emotion from the past? What tools do you recommend they use to gain resolution and release those trapped emotions?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:30:16.049)

There are a lot of great tools. The tool I use clinically is an approach called neuro emotional technique or NET, super well documented, proven out approach on the ONE foundation, O-N-E ONE foundation.

They've done the research of pain patterns and even tested cholesterol and inflammatory markers and watched them go down by desensitizing people to these chronic effects or the physical manifestation of emotions. That's what we use clinically on my Dr. Scott Vrzal Instagram page I've shown a couple videos of how I kind of apply that so that a person can clear their own emotions by touching over the pulse points on the wrist. They'll basically help a person cover every organ and then doing a gentle flexing of the chin with the hand on the forehead That's a way to clear clear emotions for you the person the consumer that has the emotional triggers in other words if you feel your blood pressure going up when your spouse says something that rubbed you the wrong way you can do this approach by again touching the pulse points, putting the other hand on the forehead and doing each side of the pulse points. That clears in general every organ.

There's also tapping approaches and other approaches that people can use to self-desensitize to these emotional manifestations because unfortunately, the body physically stores emotions. Let's talk about the nutritional component that goes along with that though. In general, my statement is you want to be more rock-like than sponge-like. So to be more rock-like, we want to keep our minerals up. Minerals come from rocks, so minerals make us more emotionally resilient to shed off the back of a duck.

When those emotions come along, having a good mineral reserve will help us shed those emotions and not physically store them. Whereas if we're eating sugar that leeches zinc, that leeches minerals, our system's acidic, we're going to be a lot more prone to physically store those emotions. Then, you're going to be more sponge-like.

If you're eating the sad, standard American diet that has a lot of processed foods and trans fats, then that person's going to be a lot more prone to store every emotion that comes down the pike and they end up with that chronic physical illness. Whereas the person that's eating a lot of organic food eats organic because it has thousands of times the amount of minerals in it, literally thousands of times the amount of minerals in it. Pesticides also are the toxic metals that compromise mineral status. When we eat organic, we don't get pesticides, we get those minerals. That can help us be more rock-like and resilient when the emotional stress happens. Think of the calmness of a person that seems totally chill, even though their dad died, their mom died, that sort of stuff or the work goes bananas then that person that's eating calm and alkaline is going to handle that emotion much better. The other obvious kind of trigger is exercise.

Exercise allows us to raise dopamine levels at runner's high that we get with exercise. Exercise raises dopamine that tells us, hey, everything's okay. This is a good season. We're cool. It also allows us to sort out and collect our emotions, if you will. I'm a crazy avid cyclist. When I'm out on my bike, I'm listening to books, I'm listening to your podcast, things that feed my mind with healthy, beneficial stuff but it also gives me the opportunity to sort through the triggers, the stressors that have happened and kind of categorize them, if you will, and solve them mentally. Exercise and organic vegetables are a great way to prevent the physical storage of emotions.

Ashley James (0:34:15.864)

Oh my gosh. I love everything you said. I have a few things to share as well. I lost my mom back in 2002 and I wanted to grieve healthfully. I was devastated by losing her. She was my best friend and I was 22 and I didn't know how to grieve healthfully. I really woke up to this realization that we are not given tools to process emotions healthfully to have conflict resolution healthfully. I looked back on my years from K through 12. I grew up in Ontario. Actually at the time we had in high school, Grade 13, can you imagine being held back the entire province of Ontario for many years. We graduated when we were 19 from high school because we did, it was called OAC, which was grade 13 but so for my 13 years, this is before I went to college, I was in college when my mom died, but just looking back on the standard 13 years that kids are in or 12 or 13 years, kids are in school and realizing that not one class, it wasn't mandatory. It's not even known. It's so off the radar that we could be teaching children how to process emotions healthfully, how to grieve healthfully, what happens when there's loss in the family, and now they're introducing new things that are teaching children, but they're not teaching them real emotional life skills. They're still not teaching them how to. You're going to eventually lose someone, how to grieve healthfully, how to gain conflict resolution. You're going to have a fight with your friend or your spouse or a family member, eventually, or, a gas attendant, you're going to eventually have a conflict with someone. How do you manage that? How do you do it healthfully? How do you maturely de-escalate, communicate?

These are things that I had to go and find. I had to seek. I went on this excursion and I discovered, well, Landmark Education, which is a company I highly recommend. Now they're all online. They used to be all in person, which is cool because no matter where you are in the world, you can take their live training. They teach amazing life skills for communication. I took all their courses and it helped me improve so much my abilities to communicate and process emotions. I just think it should be taught to everyone. Then I discovered as a result of Landmark Education, I discovered neuro-linguistic programming. I went into that. I became a master practitioner and trainer of neuro-linguistic programming, but I was lucky enough to have found the creator of timeline therapy and studied under him.

Timeline therapy, I have not found something that's more effective than timeline therapy at helping people to consciously have an experience of the unconscious mind of going back to the root cause of the event, gaining resolution and releasing the emotion.

I'm excited to look into your NET because I'm always interested and I believe that the more tools, the better. I highly recommend you check out Timeline Therapy because it is phenomenal. Within 15 minutes someone can have, I'm just saying 15 minutes arbitrarily, it could be 5, it could be 45, it depends on the person, but in one sitting, someone can go back and even the most horrific, tragic, what they think they could never resolve, they can walk out of your office having 100% resolution, feeling so good about that memory and no longer having the negative emotion when they think about that memory but actually positively gaining these skills and these positive lessons from the memory, and that's what helps resolve.

When we get a new perspective and we learn the strengths that we gained from that, the body lets go, and we no longer have negative emotions. That's so freeing because holding onto anything negative, especially when you perceive someone's done something to you, it's like shooting yourself in the foot. You're hurting yourself. You're not hurting them. You're not hurting the person that hurt you. You're just hurting yourself by holding on. We don't let go until we gain that resolution.

Those three systems helped me to fully heal from losing my mom. In doing so, I was able to help clients because that's why I got to start. I can't believe it. Everyone needs to know this. That's what led me down the path of working with people. Then that's when I found holistic medicine because I was suffering physically and there's got to be more to life than just an MD telling me to get on drugs and that's what led me to the podcast, but I see that, what we need, what everyone needs to know is that there's a direct connection between your emotions and your physical health and that they're not separate. I just love that you're shedding light on that and that sometimes headaches can even manifest because there's unresolved emotional conflict inside.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:40:05.546)

There's so much to talk about in that statement. I mean, for starters, the lung, the emotions associated with the lung are grief, sadness, yearning. A lot of the stuff we go through and I share your emotional thing. I lost my mom in January. She went into the hospital just before the holidays, just before her 79th birthday. It was a very short three week challenge for her and she was done.

I had a lot of stress with that, but I was okay with it in the fact that I knew I was confident that she left no strange relationships and I was able to get to her and be there to say goodbye and that sort of stuff. Again, taking care of myself and having these tools to get through the grieving process, kind of tie that back to your situation as I've kind of listened to your podcast and stuff. It sounds like the loss of your mom was about the time you were transitioning from your younger years. Sounds like you grew up in a pretty healthy environment and then started kind of going wayward if you will and eating more of the processed foods. That situation was then used in your life to redirect and now look at the tens of thousands of people that are benefiting from that change, that shift in trajectory in your life. So that kind of brings us back to one of my favorite statements that really will help us shape the paradigm of when these stressors happen.

I look at everything happens for us and nothing happens to us. If we look at these challenges, you lost your mom. Obviously it hurts. The other statement that goes along with that is pain is intended to elicit change. If we've got the pain of loss of our mom and our mutual experiences there.

I was already a nutcase about changing lives but I told my mom 25 years ago how it was going to go for her based on the diet sodas that she was living on and the lifestyle choices that she was making. They were not conducive to a healthy life and she was following the medical model and getting her methotrexate shots and all the other craziness for her arthritis and brain was starting to go.

She totaled three cars in 18 months with driving the wrong way on an on-ramp and just kind of losing it that way. Fortunately she was super adamant about not being dependent on anybody and she went out quick. Other than the three weeks stay in the hospital, it was quick for her. Having that resolution in my mind that, hey, it kind of went the way she wanted to, but there were predictive factors in there that just strengthened my resolve to be.

People that are making these choices, this is the consequence, this is the outcome. Learn from The Headache Advantage. Learn from where your pain is and learn to listen to that pain because your body's telling you to make a change in your life. Every pain physically in the body is going to relate to an organ system that is trying to get your attention. Every muscle has associated glands or organs, so we can use that physical pain, whether that's back pain that's associated with the quadratus lumborum and bottom muscle that kind of attaches from the ribs to the pelvis, that muscle spasms out, the intestine is not happy. The thumb will get sore when the intestine is not happy. When you have those pains, then is there a grief situation? Am I eating too much corn or wheat or dairy that's compromised the intestine? Then maybe it's a food journal. You realize, okay, every time I eat pizza, my back hurts, or whatever that situation is. Learn from the pain that, again, your body's trying to elicit change with that pain. Learn from what your body's trying to tell you so that we can change the trajectory and flourish and have the quality life that is intended.

Ashley James (0:44:09.941)

I want to say that when you experience pain, even just to view it as a gift, because pain is temporary and it's as horrible and uncomfortable as it is, it is the largest motivator, like you said, for change. It's shining a light on something and if you act fast enough and find the right holistic doctor like Dr. V, get his book, it's coming out soon, The Headache Advantage. Your website also is headacheadvantage.com, by gaining this understanding and then diving into, okay, where's this pain located? What's triggering it? Going through and figuring out what the root cause is, make the correction quickly instead of it going deeper because if it's a nutrient deficiency, it only gets worse. If it's stress, things only get worse. We want to listen to pain when it first comes up and not wait because the longer we prolong it, the harder it is to support the body in recovering. Catch it quickly, listen to the body.

I love that you're exposing that there's a way that we can hear the body. Listen to the symptoms of the body. This is what I was taught by one of my mentors is the body speaks in symptoms. If we listen to those symptoms, we can catch things really early and make small corrections instead of waiting for the really big problems then you have to make really big corrections. I've met so many people who develop cancer and they're always surprised. But then when they started really going down the rabbit hole of healing, there were warning signs that they ignored. I can only speak to what it is to be a woman, but I know women ignore, I think men do too, not everyone, but women ignore because they put everyone else first. They’re like, I don't have enough time for this. I'm taking care of my husband. I'm taking care of my kids. I got to drive them to soccer. I've got to cook dinner. I've got to clean. I just came home from work. I get it. You have taken on the responsibility of other people. You are the executive function of an entire household of people. But if you stop functioning, everything grinds to a halt. You really do need to prioritize you. Listen to those symptoms. If your body is crying out, it's time to put the pause button, ask for some help from friends or family members to take over some of your tasks so that you can carve out the time that's needed to take care of you.

You had mentioned nutrient deficiency, and I think that's really important to bring up the minerals. In fact, I have two interviews, one Kristen Bowen episode all the way back in 294 and an episode with Dr. Joel Wallach, one of my mentors who's absolutely amazing, episode 435. With Kristen Bowen, she sells a magnesium soak where you absorb grams of magnesium from it. It is phenomenal. 76% of people reach full cell saturation within a month of soaking daily in this magnesium soak. She offers listeners a discount. Her website's really cute, livingthegoodlifenaturally.com and use coupon code LTH as in Learn True Health. Use coupon code LTH to get the listener discount. She gives us a great discount. Get the magnesium soak, do it every day. Just get a basin, just put your feet in it. When you're watching TV, reading a book, even when you're at your desk, just put your feet in it and soak every day for 30 days. Within the first day, you'll notice a difference.

Most people have amazingly deep sleep and then such great energy. One of the things I learned from her, and I've learned many things, she's come back on the show about four times so you can listen to her, all the episodes I did with Kristen Bowen. But she said that if we're magnesium deficient, pain receptors cannot turn off. That we need magnesium for the pain receptors to even close. I had pain in my foot the other day. I was , I know what I got to do. Did a foot soak, immediately the pain resolved. This is so cool. Magnesium is so cool. it's the most needed of all the minerals. There's 60 minerals the body needs, but it's the most needed.

We always think calcium is the most important. It's not. It's not. Magnesium and zinc are more important than calcium in terms of how many enzymatic processes are used. The body needs magnesium to make over 300 hormones and proteins and 1800 enzymatic processes. It's crazy. People are walking around completely deficient in minerals, especially in magnesium, because the farming practices of over the last hundred years have depleted.

Our food supply of minerals. I love that you're stressing, eating organic, and finding farms. If you can find a local farm that does biodynamic farming, that remineralizes their soil, that also is so helpful. Dr. Joel Wallach has amazing books that'll blow your mind on utilizing minerals to support the body's ability to heal itself. That was episode 435. I love that you brought that up because when we're deficient in one of the 90 essential nutrients, the body just starts to break down. I described this to my clients. It's like the workmen showed up to build the house, but the lumber didn't get delivered. Your body wants to heal itself, but if the lumber doesn't show up, your job is to deliver the lumber, your body or the workmen, they want to rebuild. They want to build healthy cells. If you don't deliver the lumber, they're not rebuilding healthy cells and you begin to break down and then pain.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:50:24.894)

I agree 100%. You just called out the two primary mineral deficiencies.

You talked a lot about- magnesium is so calming. I often have people doing that soak or take a magnesium supplement at bedtime so that'll help colon function and the calmness as you so eloquently described. But then zinc that you mentioned, we also need to talk about that. Our soils are depleted in zinc, sugar leaches zinc, stress leaches zinc. Zinc helps us break down that stress hormone. It helps us make stomach acid. I alluded to that earlier. Helps us make and break down most of the estrogens, most of the hormones and it's prolific in the immune system. With the whole viral challenge that we went through over these last few years zinc got a lot of press. Fortunately people are starting to recognize that zinc deficiency is real. So a physical symptom of zinc deficiency is the white clouds in the fingernails. Those listeners look at your fingernails if you have the white clouds it takes two months to grow out from cuticle to tip.

If you were sick or super stressed or eating too much sugar two months ago, you'll have a white cloud near the cuticle of one or multiple fingernails. That's a sign that you've got really significant zinc deficiency. We want to load up on good quality forms of zinc made from organic vegetables, obviously, so pumpkin seeds are a simple solution. Pumpkin seeds are beneficial for most blood types. There's a whole nother discussion, but pumpkin seeds are great for A blood types and O blood types, which is 84 % of the population. They're great for the prostate gentlemen. I mean, pumpkin seeds is an easy snack to kind of start bringing that zinc level back up. But most people need to supplement because it's so profoundly deficient in current living.

Ashley James (0:52:13.261)

That's if the pumpkins were grown in zinc rich soil. I like to tell people when you think of spinach, we think of Popeye, Popeye the sailor man, and he ate his spinach. What nutrients do you think of? What element do you think of when you think of spinach?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:52:33.533)

Great point. Yes, iron, folic acid, yes.

Ashley James (0:52:39.809)

Folic acid or folate we should say can be there. Folic acid is not in nature but we think of iron. Most spinach is grown hydroponically. So there's actually zero minerals, almost zero. I don't know if you noticed, though, if you're older, if you consider yourself a seasoned person on this planet. I'm not going to put an age out there, but there are people who are old enough to remember what a carrot and a tomato tasted like. They taste like carrots and now they taste like cardboard. You have to go back in your memory when you were a kid. You remember biting into something and being like, I could sit here and eat carrots all day. I go to a local farm and I get them fresh out of the ground and they taste like back in the 80s when carrots taste like carrots. They're candy. I just sit there and I eat them raw like candy. I just can't stop. It's so delicious. It's so good for you. If your produce tastes cardboard, guess what? Probably no minerals in it. I'm just going to say if it's grown in minerally rich soil, you want to become a raw vegan. You just can't get enough. It's so good. It tastes so good. You just want to eat it raw right out of the ground.

I love pumpkin seeds for many reasons. They're also anti-parasitic and they're a really good source of protein and a really good source of healthy fats, but whether there's going to be enough zinc in them, I don't know. It just depends on whether that soil even has zinc in the first place. Because plants can grow. All they need is NPK. Plants can grow without most of the minerals, but you can't as a human, we need 60 minerals. Plants don't need them to grow produce. I have grown a vegetable garden. I remineralized the soil and it's like the garden of Eden. These things grow like I poured steroids into the ground. They grow beautifully. There's different kinds of zinc. There's the picolinate. There's the, I'm going to totally butcher this, the bisglycinate. What do you recommend is the best type of zinc if someone were to buy us a zinc supplement?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:55:03.870)

Yes, I use whole food based supplements that are basically going to be, if you will, organic pumpkin seeds vacuum dried into a zinc supplement. It's more as it would be found in your former garden.

Ashley James (0:55:20.198)

Got it. Digested by the plant. It's plant derived and digested by the plant. But the company that you sell, do they test to make sure that there's actually zinc in the pumpkin seed?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:55:34.134)

Absolutely, I mean, it may not be pumpkin seed. They're using high zinc vegetables that they grow in their own organic farm to produce the supplements that I typically would recommend for zinc.

Ashley James (0:55:47.870)

Got it. You can't say exactly what kind of zinc, because it's the kind that comes out of the ground. It's not picolinate or any of those. Okay.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:56:00.752)

Right. I hate to say, but call it lab grown almost, if you will, so taking zinc that we're going to want to balance it with the copper and the magnesium chromium that all helps it synergistically function. That's part of why I prefer supplements that come from the organic farm, ultimately. Because it's going to digest better, it's going to not create other deficiencies. If we over consume zinc in a synthetic form, it can create deficiencies of other nutrients. Vitamin E is a great example of that. Vitamin E is found in walnuts and organic nuts and that stuff. But if we extract it out and do d-alpha-tocopherol, then it creates a functional E deficiency and then that person is going to have back pain or potentially cardiovascular weakness from creating a functional deficiency by not having the selenium and other synergistic nutrients that go along with E in that case or zinc as we described.

Ashley James (0:57:07.426)

We've touched on some important subjects. Your environment that you live in can play a role, like, mold, for example. There's also EMF exposure. I have several episodes about that. There's environmental, there's emotional, there's whether the food you're eating can play a role, the nutrient deficiency can play a role. There's these different layers.

When someone comes to you and you've talked about this, they come to you and the first thing is, well, where's the headache? We talked about the left side. Let's talk about the right side. If someone comes in and they have headaches always on the right side, what is that an indicator of?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (0:57:51.579)

The gallbladder is a right-sided organ, similar to the stomach meridian, but the gallbladder starts right behind the eye where the V, on the outside of the eye, goes down the side of the head. It goes down both sides, but again, the gallbladder is a right-sided organ. When the gallbladder doesn't function, when it's congested or, if emotionally we talked about anger, frustration, resentment, if that's been stuffed away, compromisingly the gallbladder functions, then that's going to set the stage for a right-sided headache.

Physically, the muscle that sports the back of the knee, there's a little tiny muscle called the popliteus muscle, that gets weak and tender and creates instability in the knee when the gallbladder simultaneously is compromised. These are other areas that would physically manifest, if you will, when the gallbladder is not functioning properly. Then we want to look at food triggers potentially, glyphosate. I mean, here comes a whole other episode. Glyphosate inhibits bile production so then they end up with bile stasis or congestion, which is a very common trigger to set up right-sided gallbladder headaches.

Glyphosate is the toxin within Roundup that is used to kill wheat, the crops of wheat, corn, soy, oats right before harvest so that they can harvest it all at the same time. It all comes back to the manufacturing processes, but that inhibits bile production. That also obliterates the intestinal lining. That is the most common trigger I see to set up right-sided headaches. Certainly then we've got the balance of omega-3s to omega-6 fatty acids. There's some ratio in there that a typical, sad, standard American diet tends to have more omega-6s as opposed to the omega-3s that the body really needs for anti -inflammatory. Omega-6s are good, nuts and seeds, we need them, but most diets have too much of those, and so that inverse ratio can also congest the gallbladder, which then leads to constipation and other things that go along with poor fat metabolism, even nutrient-wise. B6, pyridoxal 5-phosphates, the active form, functional form of B6, that also helps facilitate methylation again where a lot of the bile is made and facilitates the functioning of the bile. If a person's had chronic gallbladder problems, and they've had their gallbladder removed, typically we want to replace that bile. My canned joke is until the gallbladder goes back.

Ashley James (1:00:20.939)

Yes. So, the rest of their lives. When I have a client and they start telling me about certain issues that sound like a fat deficiency, a healthy fat deficiency, I'm like, do you still have your gallbladder? Almost always they say no. Then I'm like, okay, so let's, we need to back this up. Your gallbladder was so important. God gave you a gallbladder for a reason that it would store all the bile and then when you ate food, the fat in your food was not water soluble fat. You see oil kind of floating on top of water? It's not mixing together. Even though your stomach would produce the enzymes to break down the lipase, to break down the lipids, to break down the fat in your food, whether you're vegan, there's even fat in apples and potatoes. t's in small amounts and it's a different kind of fat, but there's fat in plants. There's fat obviously in animal products, but regardless of what you're eating, there's going to be some amount of fat and that fat is important for the body. There's a good kind, like you said, pumpkin seeds, great. then there's bad kind, anything fried, not good for you. Fried, bad, just giving you an example, there's a big spectrum of fats that are not really helpful and then fats that are extremely unhealthy and very damaging.

Then there's fats that are super healthy for you. But you can't digest them because they're not water soluble. The stomach then empties the small intestine. The bile is supposed to then empty out the blood is supposed to squeeze and let all that bile mix with the contents, those liquid contents now of what you just ate. It emulsifies sort of what a soap does. The digestive enzymes that break down fat allows them to then blend with the fat. If that process doesn't happen, no matter how much fat you eat, you're digesting one hundredth of what, I don't know, because the liver, is just dripping, just drip, drip, drip instead of squeezing a tablespoon or an ounce or whatever it was, however much bile it was squeezing into the contents. It's doing such a small amount of bile now that you're barely able to digest. Here's the kicker. What I've learned from naturopaths is that usually a bile problem was already a healthy fat deficiency to begin with because we need healthy cholesterol to make healthy bile and buildup of gallstones is a lack of healthy cholesterol. What I've seen naturopaths do is actually help the body slowly increase through supporting the digestion and healthfully increase the healthy cholesterol production, which then breaks down the gallstones in the gallbladder, and then that restores function.

If you can catch this early enough, this is again where the pain matters. If you start to have little aches and pains or, I ate a fried egg and then I get a little gallbladder attack, it's small. If it's small, you run to a naturopath. You run or run to an amazing chiropractor with an extensive knowledge such as yourself. We run and we do what we can to support saving the gallbladder because if once you've had it removed, you need to be on and your surgeon will not tell you, which is a crime. Every surgeon who's ever removed a gallbladder that doesn't tell their patient that they need to support their body with basically exogenous someone else's bile or an ox bile or whatever, or sometimes people get, I think there's papaya enzymes or something, but I haven't seen that work as well. I don't know. I'd like to hear your feedback on that. But basically you have to take it exogenously. You have to take it from outside your body instead of your body making it for the rest of your life because that was removed. MD medicine does not tell you that. I think it's, I really do think it's on purpose. I don't think the surgeon is doing it on purpose, but I think the whole system, the education system is designed to not have the surgeon tell them and then they go home and get sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker and get on more drugs and more drugs and more drugs and more drugs and just more hospital stays and they become a cash cow for the mainstream medical system, which I'm on my soapbox again raving about how angry I am that this system is designed to keep you sick and make your loved ones suffer when it's needless and it doesn't have to be that way. When you have a client come in, they've got right-sided headaches and you're beginning to detect gallbladder problems. You're there quickly to help them make some nutritional changes, make some dietary changes to get that back on track. But when someone comes to you and they no longer have their gallbladder, what kind of supplementation have you seen works best?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:05:45.736)

Yes, so replacing the bile salts so they no longer have the storage mechanism of the bile. Typically I have a person taking one to two a night of I use a product called Cola Cal, but something that, or we have several others as well that physically contain bile salts. Unfortunately people have probably known the taste of bile salts when they've drank too much and threw up. That's bile actually that they're tasting. We need to replace those because it's not being stored. Typically bile is recycled from pre-absorbed back up through the intestine into the liver and recycled.

Part of the other part of the mechanism with bile is that it's taking the toxin. The liver takes the toxins that it's taking out of the bloodstream, puts it into the bile to then eject into the colon to get rid of when we eat good fats. That's another mechanism that we need to consider that those toxins are potentially part of the reason that the gallbladder is congested. Another mechanism that takes place is as bile squirts down the bile duct, there's actually a release of eosinophils, an immune modulator that helps kind of antibacterial, if you will.

I kept finding that gallbladder was helping people's immune systems. How's this working? and Dr. Goodheart, the founder of Applied Kinesiology often talked about bio being the most dense antioxidant available. There's that benefit of antioxidants that also facilitate the immune system. We've got all these little interplays that go along, go in the body that is just so profound and exciting as we start learning these mechanisms and how they all interplay.

Ashley James (1:07:27.335)

I geek out. I'm so excited. It's so interesting. I had a guy on my show a few years ago. I've had him on a few times and he's a really interesting fellow. He was an acupuncturist who became a high school teacher. He doesn't have a ton of money, but he has invested about, I think $40,000 of his own money into lab tests that he does on himself before and after 30 day fasts. Every year he does it during the summer, because he’s a teacher so he can take the summer off. He does a 30-day fast and he's really trained in fast. He's been doing it for a long time. I don't recommend someone jump into a 30 day fast if they've never fasted before. Listen to episode 230 to learn more about fasting and how to do it healthfully. Dr. Alan Goldhamer is an amazing guest on episode 230.

This is why it costs so much money. He tests for the things that are not normally tested for. He tests for obesogens and forever chemicals, microplastics, all the things and glyphosate, all the pesticides, everything that is incredibly harmful that we've been wondering how can we get this out of our body? How can we detox this? Because it just is stored in our fat.

He's not an overweight person to begin with. He doesn't have a lot, but even people who are skinny still have fat and their body is trying to store all these chemicals. He would do this every year and he would experiment. One year he just did fasting and then he puts it up on this website just so people can see. Then the next year he incorporated sauna in some supplements. Then he put those results up.

The time that he has had the single handedly, the best result with permanently removing and lowering the needle, permanently removing all across the board, all these very harmful man made chemicals that are get stored up in our body that cause cancer and epigenetically change our gene expressions for really nasty stuff is when he added a binder.

It was explained to him by a camera where some PhD guy goes, bile. The bile we've been talking about. Bile is a wonderful thing that digests our fat like you've said, a wonderful antioxidant, has so many properties. It is also the mechanism in which the liver uses to remove all these chemicals from the body. But bile is so precious, it gets reabsorbed in the intestines, most of it gets reabsorbed. Now our body thinks that we're living in the Garden of Eden. We're eating super clean. There are no such things as chemicals. So if that were the case, if you were never exposed to these chemicals, most of it would get reabsorbed and then through the fiber that you're eating, some of those toxins get out, because we pretty much everyone, unless there are listeners, everyone eats crap.

Everyone eats 15 grams or less of fiber. Everyone's constipated. People are reabsorbing the forever chemicals right back up into their body and also the estrogens, the estrogens are broken down and then reabsorbed because people are constipated and they don't eat enough fiber, they don't eat enough binders. During his 30 day fast, he took binders so that with the bile, which your liver's always, even if you're not eating, the liver is going to still have to get rid of stuff. It's still pumping bile out. He took binders and it lowered significantly across the board, all of these chemicals, which just goes to show bile is very important. Digestion is super important. If you're constipated you are reabsorbing toxins. Fiber is so important because it's helping bind, helping get rid of those toxins from the liver all the way out of your body without being reabsorbed and I thought that was fascinating because we don't think about how we get rid of this? We're eating glyphosate. Even if you go out once a month and you eat some kind of fast food or restaurant food, you're eating tons of manmade chemicals. Even if you eat clean most of the time, and then some of the time you go eat from a restaurant, you are absorbing these chemicals. So it's so important to consider. We've got to help the body get it all the way out of the body. It’s wild.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:12:16.459)

Absolutely. It's such an intricate mechanism and it reminds me of a gal that I actually evaluated up on stage at a seminar I was teaching and then she kind of hit me up a year later that she was about to have her gallbladder removed. Yes, and this is a health practitioner. This is a qualified natural doctor and she tried everything else and was trying to figure out what was going on. I ran a quick evaluation and it turned out her ovary was dysfunctional. So the body was overproducing cholesterol to compensate for the hormonal problems and the hormonal deficiencies. We put her on a supplement to rebuild that ovary and her cholesterol stabilized, her gallbladder corrected. I kind of wondered what happened with this gal because I hadn't had follow up with her again. Then she came up on my Facebook page where she hit me up and did this whole testimony about how we saved her gallbladder, hormones corrected, and so on. It kind of brings it back to the cholesterol we were talking about a minute ago. A couple of things that are often missed as far as triggers for high cholesterol are hormonal deficiencies because that cholesterol is the building blocks for most of those hormones, including the stress hormones and, the girl hormones. So if those are deficient in the body, then the liver's going to overproduce cholesterol as a compensation to correct them.

It’s not so much that it's plaquing up the arteries or those things that most of us have been led to believe it's the deficiency of hormones that the body's trying to compensate for. Hypothyroid, low thyroid is another very common trigger for the body to overproduce cholesterol as a compensatory mechanism to try and find homeostasis when things are out of balance.

Ashley James (1:14:12.749)

Yes, cholesterol is really important. Most people have taken on the mainstream just because, listen, we need to question everything. We've been taught cholesterol is bad, it causes heart disease. I'm not going to because I want to hear from you, the guest, but I could talk for at least an hour on how that is such a sham, such a lie.

Cholesterol is needed because 70% of the white matter of the brain is made of cholesterol. Every cell in your body that has a nucleus makes cholesterol, not just the liver, the liver only makes about 30%. It is such an important nutrient for your body that every cell wall is made of cholesterol. You said, sex and stress hormones are made of cholesterol. The myelin sheath of the nerves that protect the nerves are made of cholesterol.

It's so, so vastly important and also bile is made of cholesterol, to emulsify fats so we can absorb them. Many reasons why we need just any nutrient, too much, not good. Too little, not good. Goldilocks. We need to have that Goldilocks.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:15:26.497)

Perfect bottle of boiler porridge.

Ashley James (1:15:28.633)

Yes, we got to have that Goldilocks for every nutrient in the body. We're kind of running around stressed out. I don't know, just whatever animal you could think of. We're just running around very animalistic, being stressed out and kind of ignoring our body then self-medicating with either over-the-counter pain meds, coffee, alcohol, sugar.

I was just talking to a woman yesterday. She wanted an example of how a very simple change can make a profound difference. I said, I'm going to take water. Everyone ignores the importance of water. If you drink 5% less water than your body needs, you have a 25% reduction in your energy production in ATP. Cellular energy production goes down and then you're tired. What do you do? You probably have headaches. What do you do? You pop some

Tylenol or Advil and then you drink some coffee while you dehydrate yourself further. Then you have another slump. Then you eat some sugar or maybe go for some sugary frappuccino. Then you're completely tired, wired, super stressed out cortisol through the roof. You drink alcohol at night because it's a socially acceptable way to “calm down”. Now you're in a vicious cycle every day of doing tasks that dehydrate you. Sugar, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, alcohol, caffeine every single day. You're setting yourself up for exhaustion, burnout, poor sleep, tired wired, and then you're stressed out. Then you lose your capacity to handle stress. So you start snapping at people, but you don't realize you're the problem. You think everyone else is a jerk and then you're affecting your hormones and your digestion and your hair starts falling out. Every single aspect of this in the mainstream is acceptable.

Go, go get over the counter meds too, to medicate, self-medicate, go do sugar, alcohol, caffeine to self-medicate. If we just got off that bandwagon and started drinking enough water, all those things would be thrown away and we'd have great skin, great sleep, great energy. Our joints would stop aching. That's a simple one change. I know you teach us hundreds of things. One change, one little change can change your life and that takes calming down, taking some breaths, calming down and starting to listen to the body connect in and ask, what does my body need? What is my body asking for?

Okay. We talked about left-sided headaches, right-sided headaches. What if the headaches are on both sides, right in front of the eyes or behind the eyes, I should say.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:18:10.928)

Great question. I'd like to go back just to finish up the conclusion or conclude the discussion on cholesterol. If people are listening to this and they're truly concerned about cardiovascular risk, a much better thing to look at is going to be high homocysteine. That's an inflammatory marker that can be tested in lab tests. Homocysteine is something that should be recycled and broken down, kind of we're talking about with bile, but it should be broken down. It breaks down into pathways in the liver called methylation and sulfation to keep pathways that are often compromised in people.

Physically, if you're concerned about cardiovascular risk, when homocysteine is high or elevated, physically on the body, it's going to manifest as the little red petechiae, they're called cherry angiomas. If it looks like somebody took a red felt pen and polka dotted here and there, or you see those starting to manifest on the body, they may even be as profound as a mole size or raised red dot. It's not cancer answer risk per se, I mean the dermatologist is not going to say, we need to remove this. But that is a sign that your body's overproducing homocysteine and that is way more directly related to cardiovascular risk. So when homocysteine levels are up above nine, nine, five, the higher that is, the more relevant, the more risk there is for cardiovascular disease and the more likely it is to be a fatal event. If you're truly concerned, you've got the family history of cardiovascular challenges, look at your homocysteine, it's so much more directly related to risk than cholesterol. Is cholesterol 50% or half the people with high cholesterol don't have any cardiovascular problems. You don't have to have low cholesterol, but still have cardiovascular problems.

Homo-assisting is almost a guarantee based on that number of what the risk is. It's very modifiable. The reason we don't see it in the big pharma world, is because it's nutrients like B6 and B12 that help break that homo-assisting down to reduce the potential of plaquing. What that, again, those red dots, the petechia, the cherry angiomas, those are indicators that you're setting down. You're setting the stage for plaque in the arteries and that's way more relevant to what the risk is going to be long term for cardiovascular problems. Just to kind of give the listener a to do, to know something else to look for to have that long term quality of life. Now to take it back to your question, the bitemporal headache, if they've got pain on both sides, that is a hormonal issue that typically most of the time tends to have to do with estrogen metabolism. Again, we go back to some of those liver pathways, methylation, sulfation. There's another pathway called P450. Sorry to use terms like that, but these are key pathways in the liver that break down estrogen when we're done with it.

So if one of those pathways in the liver isn't functioning properly, then the person doesn't break down estrogen, then they're going to be a lot more prone to cancers, and to these other hormonal swings and high cholesterol and temporal headaches. The muscle that physically will get weak and tender when estrogen metabolism is compromised, or in other words, the ovary is not functioning properly, it's called the gluteus medius. It's kind of the top of the butt region. That muscle will get weak when the ovary or in the male, the gonads are not functioning properly and so that'll affect the way they walk in kind of a shuffle if you will, a lateral list during their walk. There's an acupuncture point right on the outside of the elbow that's going to get very tender, think tennis elbow. That is a sign that hormonal regulation is out of balance and so we want to look at mechanisms to break down estrogen more appropriately. Nutritionally, it might be that corn, we mentioned corn earlier in the podcast, that corn is a massive trigger for ovarian cysts and it will literally create damage in the ovary. Sorry, this might rub some people, but from a blood type perspective, O blood type females that are drinking coffee, another massive trigger for ovarian dysregulation and setting the stage for some bigger problems to come. Coffee is fine for other blood types for the most part, but corn and coffee are the most common triggers I see to set the stage for this bitemporal headache showing up on both sides.

Ashley James (1:22:44.942)

Oh my goodness. That just blows my mind. Going back to what you said about homocysteine, just, we got to go a little bit deeper there. What nutrients would be good to make sure that we're getting. I know folate, B12, what's really important to help the body to, is it to break down homocysteine or just lower the production of it? What are we supporting to get it lower? What causes it? What's the most common cause to be high? Just walk us through this since you kind of presented us with this. The most important thing to look at for heart health, it's this little truth bomb. Yes. Let's unpack that truth bomb.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:23:40.679)

You laid the stage talking about, we call it energy drinks, sodas, things like that are going to leach alcohol. A hangover is the functional deficiency of B6. Pyridoxal 5-phosphate is the active form of B6 that drives the methylation and sulfation pathways. Again, homocysteine is something that should be recycled through the body. These two pathways in the liver that don't function properly, when they don't break it down, then it continues to elevate. That's where the plaquing, the big risk comes from if we're doing things again, sodas or sugars that leach the B vitamins. Zinc is another nutrient that helps drive these pathways. Methionine, the best sources of methionine are beef, tuna and eggs. If we're eating beef, tuna and eggs, then we have the methionine amino acid to facilitate that methylation pathway to then break down this homocysteine, to break down the estrogens so that we are less prone to have this significant cardiovascular risk.

Ashley James (1:24:51.482)

Do you happen to know any vegan sources just for those listeners who don't eat those animal products?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:24:58.219)

That is a great question and I run into that often. Unfortunately, it's only found in those foods as far as I know. Often, I mean, my favorite example of this is a third generation hardcore vegan that unfortunately had MS and was in a wheelchair and was unable to walk, she had ulcerations all up on her feet and shins and everything. What we had to do for her was give her a methionine supplement to offset that significant methionine deficiency. She was an O blood type. I mean from a blood type perspective, an A blood type will do much better that way. An O blood type is more dependent on the methionine. Again, because it's beef and that's a big need, in the O blood type for that detoxification process. Often it ends up being taken an amino acid supplement that has that methionine in it if it's a vegan.

Ashley James (1:25:55.791)

Got it. I think it's really important to recognize that food is medicine. We should be using it as medicine. The body goes through seasons. I've had a few interviews where the doctors talk about how they'll use a vegan, very clean vegan diet. Listen, oreos are vegan. I'm not saying all vegans are healthy but to call it a whole food plant based diet where whole food, meaning it's a single ingredient, like there's broccoli. You can recognize everything on your plate. There's no chemicals, there's no weird stuff. You could actually pronounce every single ingredient that's on your plate. It came from a farm, not a manufacturing facility. No lab grown stuff.

Whole food plant-based, very nutrient dense, lots of good fiber. There's a lot of benefits to a whole food plant based on a mix of raw and cooked for those varieties of the enzymes and the different types of fiber. Because when you cook something, it changes the fiber. You're feeding a different gut bacteria. There's lots of fun stuff that you can play with. What I've heard from several doctors is that they use it like a cleanse, like a season. You might do this for a few months, few weeks, few months, few years.

Then there's a time where some people require animal products or you could, like you said, find it from a supplement. But if we're using food as medicine and we're being pragmatic, not dogmatic around diet, but pragmatic, I want to give my body exactly what it needs. A lot of people just run around and shove the food in their mouth that tastes the best.

If you're allowing your taste buds and your dopamine response to guide your diet, you're going to end up a statistic. We have to be more calculated. You wouldn't just put any fluid into your gas tank. Why are you doing that to your body? Sorry to give you a little shame session there, but not calling anyone out in particular, but just do a little internal check and go, because I do this to myself every day. What do I feel for dinner?

Wait a second. It's not about what I feel. What's fun? It's what my body was asking for. Sometimes it's a big smoothie. Sometimes it's a big salad. Sometimes it's something else. But listening to my body and going, what is my body asking me for? What nutrients should I be giving my body? I'm not saying that everyone should be vegan or everyone should eat meat. I'm not dogmatic when it comes to diet but a lot of people haven't explored the healing benefits of a whole food plant-based diet or as Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Joel Fuhrman will point out, eat mostly plants, just Nutritarian style, eat mostly plants, eat a variety. If anything, treat animal products as a condiment rather than the main event. So many people gain such benefits from that.

But thank you for pointing out that we don't see multiple generation vegans, if they're not being smart about their nutrients, we don't see them have great outcomes. But we also don't see Americans in the South that eat fried food for multiple generations of good outcomes either. It goes both ways. We have to be cautious about how we cook our food, what we cook our food in, whether it's nonstick Teflon or plastic, in the microwave, that matters too.

Again, I'm on my soapbox raving about, it's kind of, once you wake up to this, it's everything's trying to kill me. Everything's dangerous. My friend just literally woke up when she was in a grocery store reading packages and she had that aha moment. She texted me angrily. She's like, how do you do this? Everything's dangerous. Everything's killing us. How do you do it? How do you not get angry every time you go into a grocery store? It's liberating when you learn what's healthy for you and what your body needs. I am super excited for what we're learning from you. I have to have you back on the show because you're a true holistic doctor. I've had a string of interviews where they claim to be holistic and then they talk about, well, you could get this drug. I'm like, are you kidding me? Or they're treating supplements like it's a drug? There's a big difference in the philosophical lens that you view the body. We have a God-given ability to heal. That our body is constantly wanting to heal and let's make sure we're delivering the lumber, then also getting out of our own way. Stop feeding it what hurts it. Stop putting us in an environment that hurts it. Do the responsible thing of cleaning up the emotions, lowering the stress, making those lifestyle changes, and then delivering to the body the nutrients it does need within the Goldilocks zone, and also doing the right labs just to check in. But you know what? You could probably listen to the language of the symptoms, the language of the body speaking. You said, if you start to have those little red dots on you, or those little things that look freckles or look moles, but they're red, hey, that's high homocysteine, that's early warning signs of heart disease. Let's catch it when it's a whisper. Let's catch it when it's that first pain before it's the big nasty.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:31:38.655)

Can I add a little thing to kind of follow what you're saying? One of the symptoms of zinc deficiency is lack of smell or taste. A lot of people had that during the virus we just went through. The person that eats the sugar, for example, and then ends up zinc deficient, they need more sugar to offset, to give flavor to their food.

Whereas a person like us that's eating a plant-based diet and getting proper zinc levels, that food, the organic vegetables are actually going to taste good and taste better to us. The child, for example, the mom's allowing them to eat crackers and sugar and junk for food, they're going to be zinc deficient. So those plants are not going to taste good to them.

One of my solutions, moms, we carry a couple of different forms of liquid zinc. To then start getting that child's zinc levels up, their immune system's going to function better, they're going to handle stress better, and their palate's going to expand, and they're going to start actually appreciating those good, healthy foods that actually you consumed when you were in your youth, that your mom was feeding you. Those are foods that are going to flourish and thrive and build health. Similarly, adults, if we're eating trans fats and a lot of fried type foods, the liver being stressed out will actually crave more of that and it creates that whole conundrum, that vicious cycle of pursuing the things that are making a person more and more unhealthy. That's how that vicious cycle goes where a person just starts going downhill because they get so far disconnected from their body that they start craving the things that are making them worse. That's part of our job, as clinicians is to help break that cycle, get them eating the healthier foods and kind of suck it up if you will initially to eat the healthier foods and start redeveloping that taste for the things that are going to allow us to flourish instead of taking us down that ugly, terrible quality of life road that Ken and Sue.

Ashley James (1:33:43.743)

We just touched the surface. We just discussed a few different headaches. We didn't even go into what if it's the back of the occiput? There's so many different types of headaches. We didn't even really get into migraines. I want to definitely have you back on the show. It would be so cool. Now you've got a book coming out. You got a website for people to check out. Let's talk a bit about how my listeners who want to stop suffering, how do they connect with you?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:34:12.895)

Thank you. Last name is Vrzal, V-R-Z-A-L. I post things on social media, on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Periodically little one minute quippy fun triggers about this type of stuff that we've discussed today. Certainly the most beneficial aspect or an area is headacheadvantage.com, headacheadvantage.com on that site. It's neo. It's young but on that site there are links to the seven different patterns of headaches and you can click on that link and it'll list out some of the food triggers or some of the potential supplements that you can take to hand in each of those patterns. I put kind of a little Q&A to help direct to what the best supplement would be to solve those headache problems that's there and then you put your email on there then I can let you know when the book is officially available which is at the timing of this recording about a month away.

Ashley James (1:35:12.381)

Yes, I'm going to be publishing this today. In about a month, your book's going to come out, which is really exciting. It's going to be called Headache Advantage. We're going to be able to see it then. Now you have something called How to Handle Stress Better. Tell us a bit about that. Do we sign up for your email and get it or is that just on your website?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:35:13.291)

That's one of the chapters, the frontal headaches typically have to do with chronic cortisol production. Either the body's not breaking that cortisol down properly, which opened up another Pandora's box, but often things like Lyme disease can compromise the body's ability to break down that stress hormone and set the stage for a frontal headache. What a person would get when they enter their email is a link to that chapter going into how to modulate that stress response a little more healthfully.

Ashley James (1:36:12.833)

Cool. You know what? I personally have some people I'm going to be sending to you the second we get off of this recording. I know my listeners. I bet you guys are thinking of some friends, some family, some coworkers, or like hey, my cousin's mom. Everyone knows someone who has headaches. Now, do you also work with people that have chronic pain in other areas of their body, or do you just specialize in headaches?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:36:43.639)

Chronic pain, the whole body tells a story. The reason I focused the book on headaches is when I started out trying to write a book that covered the whole body, but it was way too all encompassing, ominous.

The book would never be done because I'm learning every day. When I kind of realized I got into healthcare because of my own headaches, unfortunately, about 50% of the population suffers with headaches. When I did the research, unfortunately, no one talked about headaches in this regard. We mentioned migraines. For me, migraine ultimately, as far as everything I've seen in the literature, migraine ultimately just means it's debilitating or it's gnarly.

It all comes down to the location. I mean, my original title for the book was Headaches, Location, Location, Location, because location is everything. Where the position on the head that the pain is, that tells us the story of what the trigger is. But yes, that relates to the head, then there's all these other physical manifestations in the body or on the body in the body that are going to also relate to that same area. That's how we think. L5 does central low back pain goes along with that frontal headache, overzealous stress response we talked about, knee pain, weakness in the inside of the knee or ankle weakness, plantar fasciitis or bunions, those are all signs of chronic cortisol secretion. We can pull all that together. I guess that's the long answer of yes, I deal with chronic illness, the whole body. I got into healthcare because I'm a fitness junkie. That's how I lab test everything on myself. But by default, I mean, chronically ill people are talking to chronically ill people about what's going on. That's our niche. It’s helping those people that need it so desperately.

Ashley James (1:38:38.728)

Can you be my new best friend? You're speaking my language. Yes. Okay. I've got one for you. I recently, a month ago started doing two workouts a day and, I guess maybe I didn't stretch enough, which I'm totally ashamed of, but I developed something super weird. I have a friend who's a podiatrist. I saw him, he's an amazing sports podiatrist. If there's any listeners in the Seattle area that have a foot problem, I got you, I got a guy for you and he's okay. This is not common, but what's happened is the muscle that lifts the toe is getting entrapped on the interior. The inside, not the outside, the inside part of the ankle, I’ll take a few steps and then all of a sudden it's excruciating pain because it feels like my joint is crushing my tendon. He’s like yes, it is. I'm like okay. I've been doing more stretching, which is helping. Obviously seeing my chiropractors, great. I've been doing all kinds of stuff, anti-inflammatory stuff, phototherapy, that's all helping, but it's not gone 100% away. I'm going to seek out physical therapy, but I was wondering, you talked about ankle, high cortisol. What would you say to someone or me? What would you say to me? What did I do? 1:40:10.999

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:40:11.166)

Is the pain in the big toe specifically?

Ashley James (1:40:15.502)

I don't feel any pain just sitting here. I'll just be walking and then the joint will crush the tendon. Also what's developed, because I started walking on the outside of my foot, which shortens that tendon, so it stops happening, but don't ever do that. Don't walk on the outside of your foot, because now I'm getting a shooting nervy pain, around the big toe. Everyone told me not to do that, and then I did it. I'm not doing that anymore.

It's such a bummer because now I can only do the bike for cardio because even the pool messes it up and he's like you can't do the treadmill. You can't walk. You can't go do the pool. I'm just stuck doing the bike, which is a bummer because I like the variety. Also I can't be more active. I have to kind of like not do things until I really heal this.

That is a good lesson to learn. Don't go zero to 60 in any fitness protocol whatsoever. Just slowly ramp up. I thought I was there. I thought I was ready to do two a day and apparently I wasn't. Yes. I'm super motivated. Yes, but my body was nope, a little too motivated.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:41:38.079)

Good on you. I love your motivation. That's all great.

We have good news for you. Liver two is an acupuncture point at the area you were talking about in between the two between the big toe and the second toe.

Typically it's a liver problem that causes that big toe to hurt. What I was referring to was bunions and plantar fasciitis. That's all an adrenal problem or adrenal fatigue, a typical mechanism that sets most of those problems up. But when it's specifically the big toe, it's poor functioning of the liver. I found it to be specifically related to glutathione production. There's a key pathway in that liver that functions to help the detoxification and immune function and it's very antioxidant dependent.

I'm just confident that what I do know of you my new best friend is that I imagine you're getting plenty of those but we'd want to look at things to facilitate that glutathione reduction technically or but glutathione production you do the right thing and that toe pain literally would go away in minutes, that's the good news and the beauty.

I've had that kind of toe off tenderness on my big toe in the past. I have a liquid glutathione product I've used and literally the minute it touches my tongue, the pain is gone in my toe. That's how profound this kind of stuff can be.

Ashley James (1:42:58.831)

Interesting. I have a phototherapy patch. I don't know if you heard about this. I've had a few interviews about it. Is the liver channel up by the chest. Is it?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:43:20.902)

Yes, there's a glutathione point.

Ashley James (1:43:24.407)

It's LV14. I know LV3 and that's by my foot, which I've been stimulating, but I have a patch that stimulates the body to produce more glutathione. I typically put it up by LV14 because that's like this gateway for the liver, but I'll try putting it down in between those two toes, that little tender spot.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:43:54.807)

There's a glutathione reflex over the liver. If you put your left hand over the liver, so your long finger's going to be at the spleen 21.

Your second knuckle is probably going to be probably that LV14 point you were talking about. That is kind of where the body refers pain when glutathione is not functioning properly. I would think putting that patch there should be super, I mean you'll know, you put it there, within minutes your toe's going to tell you whether it's the right place or not.

Ashley James (1:44:27.879)

I'm going to try it. This is so much fun. You see, this is why people want to dive into this and advocate for themselves and learn this because stuff happens. Maybe you sprained an ankle or something, and then all of a sudden so many things that you can do and homeopathy is another fascinating thing.

One of my family members has a symptom in the middle of the night. I get up, turn my flashlight on, because I want to turn the lights on, turn my flashlight on, and run to the bathroom. I have this big cabinet full of homeopathic remedies. I grab one and give it to them and then boom, it's better. It's the coolest. I'm half awake doing it. I'm, yup, that worked. Okay, go to bed. You only needed one dose. My husband once had this trapped gas feeling. He woke up in the middle of the night and this was a few years ago, but he was just like, I can't come out on both ends. It's just trapped gas. He felt so weird. I'm okay. I looked it up, grabbed the homeopathic, gave it to him and immediately it just came out both ends. I feel so much better. You burped and farted. How cool is this?

Homeopathy is amazing and weird and almost instant for so many people. Then that's the least invasive, least toxic thing. If it doesn't work, you got the wrong remedy and that's okay too, because it's not hurtful. The body's going to just come back into balance. This is what I love about holistic medicine. We can go down all kinds of rabbit holes. You could do acupressure. You said, you can push on these points on the body and you can stimulate a specific response.

You can change the little things in your diet specifically and shift the body. We can do things gently to make profound changes.

Dr. V, I want to have you back. This has been a true pleasure. I'd love for you to come back and teach.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:46:30.986)

I love to. Can I throw a quick thing out just to make sure listeners don't miss the fact that sweet wonderful Ashley listeners just confirmed that she can do this in your sleep. Don't miss that aspect, huh?

Ashley James (1:46:41.295)

Well, I was half asleep. I got my little phone out and I know what websites to go to and look up the remedies and I have the remedies here and am half asleep. Well, I don't know about you, but as a mom, I always got one ear listening if my son's going to cough or my husband's going to snore or whatever. We're just wired to be the herbalist, the healer of the whole house? So we're just listening for everyone.

It might be annoying to people, but the second my friends do come to me and they're like, what do you think I should do for this? I give them a whole health lecture. They're like, I can't believe that. How do you remember these things? I'm passionate. I'm so passionate. But I think at the end of the day, this is the gift God gave me. It took me a long time to find it. I think everyone is born with a gift and this is the gift that God gave me as my passion for helping people to help their body to come back into balance. Now my new best friend, it also is the exact same. God gave you the same gift too. How cool is that? Love it. Love it.

Thank you for coming on the show. Definitely going to have you back, especially when you launch the book in about a month. We'll have a big book party. So, headacheadvantage.com listeners, definitely check it out.

Can you work with clients like telemedicine? How does that work if they want to work with you?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:48:13.891)

I do, yes. In fact, the gallbladder gal doctor that I was telling you about, we actually did telemedicine while she was the passenger in a car, of all things, and was able to figure out that it was her gallbladder, and we solved that.

Yes, I do telemedicine. I have several docs in my office as well that are all doing the same work, and most of them came to me as interns and kind of came up through the ranks that way. I say that because at this point, I tend to be booking about two months out, which is good news bad news. But yes, I still very actively treat people all day, every day, and try to do this book stuff on the side.

Ashley James (1:48:55.367)

Nice, nice. Well, good for you for duplicating yourself and for finding true holistic-minded doctors who want to support the body's ability to heal itself. I’m kudos to you. If they go to your website, headacheadvantage.com, is that where they can find information about doing the telemedicine at your clinic or is there a different website?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:49:20.979)

My office website is drvrzal.com. That's the office website.

Ashley James (1:49:28.715)

I'll make sure that the links to everything that Dr. Vrzal does is in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. It's been such a pleasure having you. Is there anything left unsaid that you just really want to make sure you leave us with?

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:49:43.949)

It comes down to listening to your body. Listeners, your body's trying to tell you a story. Pain is intended to elicit change. When you have pain, it's not a deficiency of aspirin or Advil or Tylenol. It's your body yelling at you to go forth and learn.

Listen to what it's trying to tell you so that you can thrive. I mean, it's your early warning that God forbid you've got a cardiovascular incident not pending, looming. Your hormones are not functioning, so you're going to create mutated cells. Learn from what your body's trying to tell you so that you can thrive and enjoy this blessed life we have.

Ashley James (1:50:31.037)

Love it. Awesome. Well, can't wait to have you back on the show. It's been such a pleasure.

Dr. Scott Vrzal (1:50:35.443)

So fun. Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity, Ashley.

Outro:

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522 Confessions Of A Male Gynecologist, Author of The Hormone Balance Bible, Dr. Shawn Tassone 0

Jun 13, 2024

To book a free session to discuss experiencing this technology with me, visit learntruehealth.com and click Work With Ashley James in the menu!

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Dr. Shawn Tassone:

Americas Holistic Gynecologist | Tassonemd.com
Tassone Advanced Gynecology | Drshawntassone.com
Author of The Hormone Balance Bible https://amzn.to/3VF9m7j

522: Confessions of a Male Gynecologist: Dr. Shawn Tassone's Hormone Balance Guide

https://learntruehealth.com/confessions-of-a-male-gynecologist-dr-shawn-tassones-hormone-balance-guide

Discover the power of holistic health and self-advocacy as we navigate the complexities of hormone replacement therapy with holistic gynecologist Dr. Shawn Tassone. We explore the transformative potential of taking charge of your health, emphasizing the importance of holistic approaches such as dietary changes, lifestyle adjustments, and alternative therapies like acupuncture and chiropractic care. With Dr. Tassone's personal journey as a backdrop, we uncover how personal experiences with loss can ignite a passion for integrative and functional medicine, empowering you to support your body's natural healing processes.

Highlights:

Supporting the Body for Optimal Health
Thermography for Pain Relief and Healing
Patient Symptom Evaluation and Treatment
The Power of Maca in Health
Benefits of Maca on Hormones
Exploring the Mystery of Plants
Fasting Before Chemotherapy for Cancer
Temporary Testosterone Increase for Muscle Loss
GLP-1s and Changing Eating Habits
Empowering Women Through Social Media

Intro:

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health Podcast. Today we have an interesting discussion with a doctor and PhD as we navigate the world of hormone replacement therapy and navigating our own care in this system that is not perfect and really requires us to be diligent when it comes to our own advocacy, which, if you're listening to this podcast for a while, you are well aware that we need to stand up and do our own sleuthing, do our own research, do our own detective work and educate ourselves on how to support the body's innate, god-given ability to heal itself.

Your body wants to heal itself, and that's the first philosophical shift that takes place, that first belief system shift from the standard model of wait to get sick, then go to a doctor and they give you a drug and you go home and yay, you're better, which that's not how it works, as we know from experience. Yay, you're better, which that's not how it works as we know from experience, you're not better. Even the so-called cure has a list of side effects. It causes stress on the body and really was that drug ever the cure? In the first place, it was suppressing something, killing something, shifting something in the body. But is that what the body needs to heal itself? Now, yes, there's times when you break an arm, you get a cast. We definitely wanted that support, and a cast is a wonderful example of supporting the body's ability to heal itself. It takes a lot longer and it's a lot harder for a bone to heal without the support of the cast. So there's times in modern medicine where that support is wonderful and necessary.

Now, if we took that same philosophy and went well, how can I support my body to have more energy, to maintain a healthy weight, to grow healthy muscle, to have healthy digestion and bowel movements, to have healthy hormone levels sex hormones, stress hormones, all the other hormones How can I support my body's ability to maintain and achieve optimal health? We have to look outside modern medicine to gain these answers for a variety of reasons, and we talk a bit about this in today's interview, and one thing that I wanted to let is that it's totally worth going down this one rabbit hole If you are sick of being sick and you are looking to support just like a cast supports the body to heal the bone so that it keeps it stable, allows the body to heal, and then we remove the cast, because a cast left on too long becomes a hindrance, So if you're looking for holistic medicine, meaning how can I support the body as a whole? Because the body is constantly trying to come back into balance, it is constantly trying to achieve homeostasis and something as simple as a small change in your diet can make this huge difference or small change in lifestyle, like an increase of even by 20 ounces of water a day, going to bed an hour earlier, getting 20 minutes of walking just these little, tiny additions. In some cases it's herbs. In some cases it's seeing a holistic practitioner for other therapies, like chiropractic and acupuncture, there's all kinds of different kinds of frequency devices out there, like PEMF. These are all supportive to support the body in doing what it already is trying to do, which is come back into balance.

Now I've had several episodes on why is the body so out of whack in the first place? We've got crazy or over 80,000 man-made chemicals since I was born. In your lifetime there have been 80,000 man-made chemicals added to our air, water, food, added to the soil and it's really scary. Why are we so out of balance? Well, think about how your grandparents ate. They ate whole foods, not from boxes, not from factories. They ate from farms. Now the farms use so many chemicals. So just to give you a few examples, we used to walk more, we used to play more, we used to rest. When we rested, we really rested. When we played, we really played. We used to have large family support and now we're isolated alone, stagnant and filling ourselves with man-made junk and we're constantly in stress mode because of all the things we're taking in, all the media that we're taking in.

So the body's in stress mode and it is depleted of sunlight, fresh air, clean water. Depleted of nutrients. I have some wonderful interviews, like with Dr. Joel Wallach. Highly recommend listening to that. When it comes to the 90 essential nutrients the body needs. The body needs 90 essential nutrients every day for optimal function and that episode, episode 435, is wonderful to listen to. Highly recommend going back and listening to episode 435, if you haven't already.

Now, 18 months ago, almost two years ago, I was introduced to and I'd heard of it before, but my skepticism went up. I'll say on the show, I'm the most open-minded skeptic and I think it's good to be that way. You probably are too. I'm willing to listen to what sounds really woo-woo, sounds really out there, out there. But I'm going to use my critical thinking, but I'm going to make sure that I don't allow my preconceived ideas or my belief system cloud the new information coming in, like allow myself to be open. So my skeptic pops up and I go, wow, I'm rejecting something just based on my skepticism alone. Sometimes things sound too good to be true and we often just negate it. That probably is not real, it's probably fake. It's probably snake oil, and there is a lot of snake oil out there.

But I started to see thousands of people getting results and there's over a hundred studies that show powerful results, and they had a money-back guarantee. So I was like, okay, I'm going to give it a try. It's a technology. It's a wearable technology. It's quite affordable. They could charge a lot more for this, which I was really surprised about. It's very affordable, it's a wearable technology and it stimulates your body, your body wanting to heal itself. It stimulates it and there's no side effects. It's safe for infants. It's safe on pets. It's safe on any, any anyone, any age, any size, and you don't absorb anything. It's not a molecular medicine, it's a frequency medicine. So, with that said, I tried it. I got huge, huge results, which I was really shocked because of how skeptical I was. But there's a money-back guarantee, so I was going to give it a try and I couldn't believe how well it was working, not only for myself, my son, my husband, and my other family members. Then I got my friends to try it and it all worked for them. Then I started introducing it to my clients and now I have over 200 clients using this successfully and getting great results.

They're getting so healthy that their doctors are taking them off of their medications, and that is my goal. My number one goal and I've probably said it 100 times on this podcast over the last eight years that this is my number one goal is to help you get so healthy that your doctor takes you off your meds because you no longer need them. Now, whether you need them in the first place is another thing. That really is person dependent, but I think people are being over prescribed drugs and under prescribed lifestyle changes and dietary changes and the things that we're lacking.

Dr. Joel Wallach, the man I had mentioned, who's one of my mentors. He will often say, like you didn't have a drug deficiency, you had a blank deficiency like a calcium magnesium, B12, whatever the nutrient was. People will have deficiencies in those, but the symptoms show up in a way that the doctors will prescribe drugs or that there needs to be a necessary diet change. I've seen Dr. Wallach get people so healthy using natural medicine. When I say natural medicine, I mean as close to nature as possible. I've seen him get people so healthy their kidney function returned and they no longer needed dialysis. I have seen him help people save limbs, gangrene in the feet about to be amputated. He helps them and now they no longer need their feet to be amputated and now they no longer need their feet to be amputated. I have seen him reverse all forms of disease, all common, the most common diseases you can think of. If you could think of a disease, he's helped people reverse it using natural, as close to nature as possible, holistic medicine.

So when I say holistic medicine, I mean supporting your body's ability to heal itself, because your body is constantly striving for homeostasis and it wants to heal you. It wants you to be as healthy as possible and we are getting in our own way by making silly choices like staying up late and eating sugar and drinking alcohol and the regular stuff that we do that we don't know, because everyone does it, but everyone's sick. Everyone around us is sick. Everyone around us 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription medication. That should tell you something. We should not be this medicated and yet we are.

So I'm on my soapbox letting you know there is a holistic, very effective, very affordable type of technology and you can listen to two interviews about it, episode 496 with Trina Hammack and episode 517 with David Schmidt, who's the creator of this technology. It's been around for 20 years, so I started using it, started using it with my clients and got just such good results. My clients have their doctors take them off. Their doctors like after the labs are showing, oh, you no longer need this thyroid medication. Okay, we're taking you off that. Unbelievable! I have a few clients who their fractures healed in half the amount of time needed and they freaked out. I've had clients text me their x-ray report saying that the doctor couldn't believe how quickly they were healing. So your body wants to heal itself and this is a technology that stimulates and helps your body get over the other side.

Really, really exciting stuff decreasing inflammation in the body, decreasing pain, increasing muscle mass, increasing healthy bones, healthy joints. There's women who've reported after their DEXA scan, after using this technology for about a year, sometimes half a year, as little as half a year that their DEXA scan showed that they're no longer in osteopenia or osteoporosis. So it's really, really exciting stuff. But there's, like I said, about 100 studies and in addition to that, I've spoken with many doctors who are holistic doctors, who are using this technology with their clients and with their patients, and they're seeing these results. The people are feeling better. But it also shows up in the lab. So something that's energy medicine, frequency medicine, is now showing up in the physical realm because labs are changing, and that's really exciting.

So if you want to check it out, listen to those episodes, but then book a free session with me. I love chatting with you guys. You can go to my website, learntruehealth.com. In the menu, click on work with Ashley James, select the very first thing at the top. It's a free, about 20 minute, sometimes a bit more if you have more questions, I'll sit there longer on the phone, if you have more questions. About 20 minute phone call where we discuss this type of technology and I can help you order the kind, because there's different ones the kind you need and I'll show you how to use them so that you place them correctly on the body, on the meridians of the body, for you, for the outcomes that you're looking for. It is phenomenal.

The cool thing is there's a money back guarantee. I haven't had someone yet who didn't feel a shift in themselves, that they didn't feel like it got results. I also don't believe in silver bullets out there, like, oh, this works for everyone, I think we're so unique that I'm not going to say everything's going to work for everyone. So if it doesn't work for you, the cool part is you can get your money back and there's no risk. There's no risk, but I've seen so many people get such great results that I'm singing this from the rooftops that if there was a natural way to support your body's ability to come back into balance without side effects, with no risk and it's affordable, then you would want to know about it. That's why I'm recording this for you, letting you know you could also share it with your friends and family, and even pets! Amazing.

I've seen so many things with animals. I saw one animal who, in 10 days of using two specific patches for this stimulating and healing. Their milky eyes went away. The glaucoma in their eyes went away. They got their vision back. I watched as a dog with hip dysplasia went from being in excruciating pain within minutes, you could touch the dog down by their hips and within two weeks the dog was able to jump back on the bed to help its owner, it was a service dog and this dog wasn't able to jump before because of how much pain it was in. Everyone around this dog is saying it's a new dog, that the dog is just completely out of pain, is jumping around, it's happy, it's running. It wasn't doing that before.

I had a client who had a puppy who was dying. They had no idea why they spent $7,000 on this dog, and had no idea why. I told them what patches to put on the dog and three days later they texted me back and said the dog is completely back to normal. Do not know why. The vet had no clue why this dog was sick in the first place, but they spent so much money on this dog with medications and oxygen tent, everything. The dog was just wasting away. Went from lying there all the time just wasting away. Three days, less than three days, the dog was eating again and just up and at it. I've seen people use this on horses. We have actually a lot of studies done with horses and how quickly it gets them out of pain and decreases inflammation.

Now it's really cool and anyone who wants this, sign up for a talk with me, a little chat with me, a free chat with me. Go to Work with Ashley James at learntruehealth.com and I can share.

They take a special camera that 's called thermography and the camera can measure your heat in your body and inflammation. You could see it visually and there's video thermography of people who put the patches on and you watch as the inflammation leaves the body and you watch as the person, like the entire body, decreases in inflammation and the person's out of pain. It's so cool. This helps with sleep. This helps with hormone balancing at the hypothalamic, pituitary,\ adrenal access. It's really cool. So I mean, I could go on for days about how cool this stuff is, but I wanted to let you know. If you didn't know about it already, you're going to want to try it.

Learntruehealth.com. Sign up for a free chat with me. Work with Ashley James in the menu bar. I'd love to help you with this and go check out those two episodes David Schmidt 517 and Trina Hammack 496. I'd love to be your guide to helping you to purchasing these and how to apply them, because we use this in conjunction with Chinese medicine protocols, so you're going to be able to increase your vital life force energy. It's one of the first things we do after we balance the polarity of your body and we do a protocol for decreasing inflammation, and then we increase your vital life force energy and then we do a protocol that opens up all the different among three systems and balances every system in the body. It's really cool. People notice away better sleep, more energy. They just feel like they can go, go, go. So if you're dragging, you're going to want to try it.

Ashley James (0:17:23.374)

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 522.

I am so excited for today's guest we have on the show, Dr. Shawn Tassone, who is an MD and they want to become holistic, they want to look at the body as a whole and help the person and the patient as a whole and see them as a whole person instead of just a broken down pieces Like I'm just going to treat your uterus. You're looking at the person as a whole and you're looking at how can we help your body come back into balance instead of well, I got my prescription pad here. What drug can I throw at you today?

So I'm thrilled to dive into this world of holistic gynecology and first I'd like to know a little bit more about what guided you towards going holistic. I'm always interested. Was there an event where you went, hold on, my traditional MD training isn't enough here. Was there a specific event, or was it just like a series of events that led you to want to explore holistic medicine?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:18:43.005)

Well, thanks for having me on. I get asked that question a lot and sometimes you get attacked online for using certain words like holistic or integrative, functional, whatever, and that's because they are slightly overutilized. If I might share that, I think that it is a marketing technique in a way, but also I think it is a moniker that gives you an idea of who the person is and what they believe in. I would say that my journey began when I was a second year resident, I guess. So I was a resident OBGYN living in Oklahoma and basically one day my, my mom had to have surgery because she had this ovarian mass and it ended up being cancer and so so here I was, a second year resident and I knew a lot about cancer, knew a lot about ovarian cancer.

But this was my mom, and what I found was that over the five years that she survived, she eventually succumbed to it when she was 57. I realized she'd call me like the day before chemo, she would be all excited and happy because they load you up with steroids. So you feel good and you got a lot of energy and everything. Then the next day when the chemo kicked in and she had joint pain and all the stuff that goes along with nausea, vomiting I realized really quickly that I couldn't even help my own mom. I couldn't help her live a healthy, productive, happy life, and so I watched her over the years just succumb to this process and just not really have a great quality of life. When she died in 2004, I went on this journey as you do.

I'm an only child, so, as I went through this on my own, and as you find yourself in these spiritual crises, you often go to Sedona, which is where I went and I was living in Tucson at the time, so I was only like three hours away. Anyways, I was in Sedona and I was waiting for my significant other at the time who was getting a massage, and I was reading this book called Eight Weeks to Optimum Health by Andrew Weil. At the time, it was 2005, he was talking about all this crazy stuff like fish oil, coq10, vitamin d and oh my god, all this stuff, and I was like whoa, this stuff is mind-blowing. So at the end of the book it said hey, if you're a doctor and you want to learn more about helping people heal and blah, blah, blah, we have this fellowship. It just so happened that the fellowship was in Tucson, which is where I was living, because it was at the University of Arizona. So I just didn't even think about it, I just applied.

I didn't think I'd get in, it was late in the process. Anyways, I got in, did the fellowship for two years. In that fellowship there was an eight-week module on spirituality and health. That was another conk on the head. It just woke me up and then I just decided I needed to go deeper into that aspect. So I did a PhD from 2009 to 2015 and got a PhD in philosophy and in those six years visited indigenous shamans in South America and just looked at different ways to heal. I think I was trying to just figure out what else is out there, what else is there in this world, and this all culminated into the practice that I have today.

Ashley James (0:22:38.109)

My gosh, I so connect with your story. My mom passed away in 2002 of cancer. I'm an only child and that also led me down my road of being motivated to learn how to support the body's ability to heal itself, how to prevent disease, and how to come back into balance. Then my dad died six years later of a broken heart, and so I've watched both my parents die very young. My mom was 55, very, very young. My dad was in his early sixties. They could still be alive now. If there were just a few different choices. If they had just seen a different practitioner.

My mom's cancer was actually caused by and this is relevant to our conversation today was caused by a hormone that her doctor had put her on, and it was a synthetic hormone that was taken off the market in Canada, where we were in Canada at the time. The week she was in the hospital, the week before she died. So I was living in the hospital with her while she was in palliative care, listening to the radio, hearing the news that the very drug that had put her in the hospital that had ended her life was being taken off the market for causing too much cancer in women and the prescribing doctor ended up also getting cancer and she was sort of a very famous doctor in Canada, she's like Dr. Oz of Canada, always on the TV, always on the news. She ended up going on to write a book about it, about her experience. She got cancer but then she caught it quickly and survived and wrote a book about it. Whereas my mom and many of her patients died from that synthetic hormone that she had been put on that this doctor was pushing every single woman my mom knew that was going to the same doctor was being pushed.

I remember the day my mom came home when she was first put on that drug. My mom exercised seven days a week, she took supplements. She ate very healthy, she really watched her health and my mom was a very strong, emotionally strong woman. She came home crying. This MD said to her she put the fear of God in her and said if you don't get on this drug, your hips will break because you don't have enough estrogen. Your hips will break and you'll fall over and you'll die. This MD put so much fear into my mom that she, like fear-forced her into getting on this drug. My mom wasn't on any drugs at the time. She was very natural-minded, and that one decision ended her life prematurely.

So I think there's a lot of people out there that are scared of using hormone replacement therapy in a healthy way, because they don't know, is it healthy. I know that's one of your main things is helping women to bring their bodies back into balance, and sometimes the tool in your tool belt is bioidentical hormones, so much different from synthetic. But I'd love to dive into that concept of like, when, when hormones are out of balance, when is it necessary to bring in hormone replacement, and are there other alternatives that we can do that you see as effective, like herbs?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:26:14.921)

First of all, the concept of hormone imbalance is hotly criticized by many of my OBGYN colleagues that are quote-unquote influencers online. They will say that hormone imbalance isn't a real thing, it doesn't exist. The reality is they're getting caught up more in the semantics of the word imbalance because theoretically, yes, a woman is always cycling, hormones are always in flux, they're up, they're down, they're all around. But that being said, we know where the hormones are supposed to be at certain times in the cycle. So any self-respecting physician that is, quote-unquote, an expert in women's health would have an idea of where the levels should be at certain times in the cycle. So when you draw the blood, then that isn't where it's supposed to be. So I do think that they get caught up more in the semantics and shooting things down than they really seem to care about the actual balance. What's funny, if you look at an issue, say, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is an imbalance, you have high estrogen, high testosterone, low progesterone, insulin resistance, there's all kinds of things. If that isn't a hormone imbalance, then why is the number one go-to treatment for most of my colleagues' birth control pills, which are hormones which override the ovaries, shut the ovaries down and shut down the imbalance. It's contradictory to not see it that way. It's just that they get caught up more in the word.

So let's say, bioidentical. You mentioned the sham organization that I call, The North American Menopause Society doesn't like the word bioidentical and it's because they didn't come up with it so they changed it in their wording. They call these hormones, body identical, which just goes to show you the hubris of the physicians that they need to change a word that has been used for 30 years because it wasn't their word. It's the same thing, it means the exact same thing. It's just that they didn't come up with it.

So when you look at bioidentical, synthetic yes, those two things are different. The thing about bioidentical is there's multiple variations of dosages. Estrogen, progesterone, testosterone are all bioidentical. Then you get the confusing piece of bioidentical versus synthetic, FDA approved or not. A lot of physicians will say bioidentical hormones are not approved by the FDA, which is totally wrong. They are. It's just that the pharmacies that compound bioidentical hormones aren't FDA approved, but the actual hormones that are utilized are FDA approved. So there's a lot of misinformation out there. Let's just put it that way. Tons.

Ashley James (0:29:24.293)

So when it comes to a patient who is coming to you and you draw their blood, their labs showed that their hormones are not really like them to be. Is your first tool, bioidentical hormones or do you find that you can get really good results with diet, lifestyle, herbs first?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:29:54.716)

It depends. So when I see a patient that's new, obviously I'm going to get a set of labs and then I'm going to sit with them and go over their issues like what symptoms are they having? A lot of docs will say you don't need to test, I just go on symptoms. I mean whatever. That's fine if that's the way they want to do it. My thing is I would like to use the labs to coordinate with the symptoms. What exactly is going on, because some symptoms overlap. I mean you could have somebody that has fatigue, could be low thyroid, could be low testosterone, could be high thyroid, could be cortisol. There's so many different things that overlap.

To just say that you are psychic and you can just tell what the imbalance is based on. What the patient's telling you isn't necessarily true. Then maybe some of the things that she's telling you in the order that she's putting them in may not be the real order. Maybe she's just saying them as they come up or, maybe she's not telling you something. I think having as much information as possible would be the best. So, getting labs done. Getting a good history is always the first place to start, and then it's based on the numbers. What I always will tell people is hey, these are the things that are low. These are the symptoms that I would see associated with this. Does this resonate with you? Sometimes it's like yes, across the board, and then sometimes it's like this, yes, I do feel fatigued, but I don't really have a decreased libido or whatever, and so they'll tell me how they're feeling and then I'll just base the therapy on them and what they're trying to achieve.

Ashley James (0:31:45.970)

Every doctor I've ever been to my first visit. It's so funny that everyone they're like, aha, I know what your problem is, it's thyroid. I look at them before they do labs, everything could be a naturopath, an MD, but every doctor I've been to in my first visit they think that they're delivering news, like, I am such a smart doctor, I know what your problem is. They always tell me, just based on what I look like and the symptoms or whatever I share, what's going on with me. They always think it's thyroid and I have to break the news.

Every lab I've ever done, my thyroid is perfect. They don't believe me. It's hilarious, it's like that gaslighting, it's hilarious. They don't believe me. They're like well, we're going to run these labs just in case. I just want new labs. Every aspect of my thyroid health comes out perfectly pristine and they're like, well, oh yes, your thyroid is normal.

It's just really funny. Yes, we should listen to the symptoms of the body. Yes, you want your doctor to listen to you, but at the same time they like to jump to conclusions because they're like, oh, this checks off this box. Therefore, it must be this so, yes, you've got to have labs to show what's going on. So yes, you've got to. You got to have labs to show what's going on. Do you trust all labs? Are all labs fairly accurate or are there ever times when you're like well, maybe they didn't calibrate or maybe they messed up somehow, maybe we should go with a different lab? Or do you feel like, across the board, we're getting pretty much the same result, no matter what lab we go to?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:33:26.311)

They can be wrong, sure. If I saw a lab that had a weird thing, if it was something I wasn't expecting, like DHEA or something was way high, like four times normal or something weird like that, then what I usually will do is repeat it. If I get two that are that, then I usually will believe it at that point. But if it's an anomaly, like something that I've never seen, like my God, that's crazy.

Ashley James (0:34:03.205)

I just always wonder if the machines themselves, if they're not calibrated, or if we should go with a completely different company and see if we're going to get the same results?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:34:12.877)

That can always be an issue. I'm saying it now, but I usually never say never, or always there's usually something that can explain it. If not, then that's why we draw labs again or do other tests, with the example I gave, if the DHEA was still elevated, then I would probably get an ultrasound of the adrenal glands to see what was going on. Lab error is easy to figure out because you repeat it and it goes back down to normal. But, yes, there's somebody that has to make sure that the machines are running appropriately. So, yes, if they did it wrong, if they didn't zero it or whatever it is that they do, that could definitely affect things for sure.

Ashley James (0:35:20.561)

So, when a patient comes to you, you get the labs, you've talked to her, you've got what she's expressing, what her symptoms are and you've confirmed looking at the labs. What are your next steps when you see something's low, something's high, she's complaining about certain symptoms, what are your next steps with her?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:35:44.374)

Well, usually when they come in, I've already done their labs. So they have the labs and then they have then we go over their symptoms. So it's a matter of me sitting down with them and finding out what's bothering them the most. I try to get the order of things, like what's really bothering you and then what are some of the minor things. Usually when they come in for that first visit, we're ready to go, like, we have everything in place, where we've got all the stuff that we need, and then I just sit down and it's not like it takes a lot of work, because most women, like I said, by the time they've come in they've seen five other people.

So they're pretty easily they can tell me what they're feeling, because they've rehearsed it and they've said it a hundred times and they're used to talking about it. So it's something that usually over time it just comes out and I'll talk them about the symptoms of each of the imbalances that I see, and usually, there's a lot of head nodding and stuff like that going on where they're like yes, that's me, or I'm not feeling that at all, but usually pretty close. Then it's just a matter of figuring out the dosage that they need, the route of delivery that they need and what's going to work for them.

Ashley James (0:37:12.728)

So your next step, then, is to give them a prescription.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:37:19.334)

Yes, if they need it, I mean usually I'll make recommendations, prescription medications, supplements, whatever it is that they would benefit from, based on their symptoms, for sure.

Ashley James (0:37:35.223)

What lifestyle and dietary changes have you found to be the most effective at helping women balance their hormones?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:37:47.229)

Lifestyle changes. I mean, obviously, sleep is huge, probably number one. Some things you can't really change, like age. Sometimes the hormones are off because of your age and there isn't a whole lot you can do about that, but if you're using supplements and whatnot, I go through those to make sure you're on the right ones.

First of all, a lot of people are on supplements that don't do what they think they're doing and they're spending money on stuff they don't need and they're not using the ones that they do need. So we'll go through all that and base it on that too. We sit down, get a feel. Some people don't like supplements. I had a lady the other day. She can't swallow pills. So I'm not going to give her 17 pills to swallow because it's not going to work for her. So it really varies. Then some women don't want to use a topical cream, they want to use a sublingual tablet. I think the main thing that I like to do is really give people options, options, options. That's what's important.

Ashley James (0:38:55.226)

In terms of diet, have you found that there are any dietary changes that help to bring hormones back into balance?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:39:06.033)

I didn't really get into that. But yes, so like the things that I look at with hormones and some of them may not resonate, some of them do. But I have six areas that I look at. One is spiritual practice whether that's getting outside or journaling or meditation, whatever that is, depends on what the issue at hand is. Obviously hormonal modulation, so actually giving you the hormones.

A third one would be what I call the woo factor, whether that's essential oils or acupuncture, some sort of outside the box treatment that might have a little nugget of research on it or something that you could try. It may not work but it's worth a try and it's not going to hurt you. Nutrition, obviously super important, limiting processed foods and really focusing on good lean proteins, fats and limiting processed carbohydrates. Exercise is always great, depending on the imbalance might be resistance training, might be high intensity interval training, it might be walking. It really just depends on what the imbalance is. Then the last step that I look at is always the potential for using supplements.

Ashley James (0:40:27.239)

You had mentioned the woo factor, which then you said was outside of the box. That might be outside of the box of mainstream medicine, but that's inside the box of this podcast. Outside of the box of mainstream medicine is where I like to look and shine the light on, because we find that has, in many cases, the least amount of side effects and potentially the greatest amount of support, given that we're looking to support the body's own ability to heal itself and come in back into balance and also remove what is hindering the body from coming back into balance.

Inside the box of what you call the woo factor, can you share with us what you've found to have the greatest impact? Or do you have any stories where you've seen herbs, essential oils, acupuncture, chinese medicine, where you've seen that through labs or your experience, you've seen it bring the body back into balance.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:41:38.988)

I would have to say the number one thing that I see all the time is maca, I've been affiliated with maca for probably eight or nine years now. There’s a naturopath out in Oregon named Tori Hudson and I was given a talk at one of her conferences and there was a company there called Symphony and they have this product called Feminescence that I was really just interested in some of the claims they were making. The interesting thing about maca is it's grown in Peru. There's 13 different phenotypes of maca, different colors, different types and you could take yellow maca in part of Peru and grow it and it'll do one thing. You can grow it in another part of Peru to do something completely different. So these women that are using powdered maca, like in their smoothies and stuff in the mornings I hear stories all the time about how it didn't really do much. The problem is, when you have a powdered substance like that in bulk, you don't know what's in it, and what I found was that if you use a really clean maca like Feminescence or something what I noticed was, even women that don't want to go on hormones for whatever reason, they would get some relief, like whether it was better sleep or, the hot flashes would go away and what I've seen and this is just in my practice women tend to if they repurchase a supplement, it's maca across the board. I mean, probably 75% use it and like it and keep using it because they just find that it's so amazing. So if I had to pick a substance that I like the most, I would definitely pick the maca as number one.

I would say things that really also baffle me. I don't pretend to understand them, but acupuncture is amazing. We know acupuncture has so much data on fertility. I mean it's been researched extensively. Women that do this get pregnant faster, that have issues with fertility. I think part of the thing with something like acupuncture is just that it decreases stress. I mean, I do think that anything that's going to help you I mean I know it sounds funny, but it's like if you lay on a table for 45 minutes and just relax that could be part of it. Now I don't pretend to know the meridians and I have friends that do this for a living and they explain it much more eloquently than I do, but it makes sense to me that that would make things better. I don't understand it. I don't understand all the nuances behind it and everything, but it is something that I refer women out all the time for acupuncture and then I think the herbal stuff that's out there, Chinese medicine to me is probably the best thing ever, because these medicines they're medications in China. Here, when I go to this guy here in town and he has like a whole wall of drawers and when you tell him what your things are, he starts pulling on these drawers and he uses the actual herbs, and you get them weighed out and then you're supposed to go make a tea with them, It's pretty astounding and you don't just get it done. I mean, it's like it's a process, but these medicines have such power in them that I think it's one of those things that you just have to look at and go, okay, this guy knows more than I do then you go from there. But I do think, like maca, chinese herbs, chinese medicines for which I would refer out to somebody that specializes in that acupuncture. Then you can get into the essential oils. I think essential oils are tough because there's so much out there about them, there's so many people that are selling them and doing all these things, but it's like, do people really understand the way these things work, and I think those are extremely powerful as well.

Ashley James (0:46:06.622)

I interviewed Dr. Anna Cabeca, Episode 326, and she raves about maca, and it ended up maca was one of the things that really helped her in her health personally, so she ended up creating a drink. So the mighty maca drink. She might even give my listeners a discount. My listeners know to use coupon code LTH. Whenever they try to purchase things that are promoted on my show. I seem to remember she might have offered a discount, but, I drank it once, she sent me a sample. It was delicious. I was surprised because I was expecting healthy things don't taste good, and so it actually tastes really good.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:46:50.601)

I will tell you, maca doesn't taste good, there's something else in there that would make it taste great.

Ashley James (0:46:57.803)

Yes, probably like a buttload of stevia or something, whatever's in there, I was impressed that it didn't taste bad. I think I was expecting maca to taste bad. As far as essential oils go, that's the sticky wicket is that you can overdo it. It's a very concentrated form of herbal medicine and I have experienced that. I've known other people who have experienced overdoing essential oils but when you use them correctly, you're using concentrated plant medicine.

I've got a few interviews. I don't remember the numbers at the top of my head. But Dr. Z, he specifically does not tell us which brand he likes because he wants it to be more about the information and not about the sales. So listeners can go to learntruehealth.com and type in essential oils to find that episode. But there's so many resources out there when it comes to essential oils. Just know that less is more. Start small, start slow. It's very concentrated and just to understand, to use it with precaution so that you don't overdo it.

That concept for acupuncture, if you're just lying down for 45 minutes, you'd be relaxed anyway. I would debunk that because we go to sleep every night, we lie down eight hours or more or less, or give and take eight hours a day and we're still totally stressed out. But you get acupuncture and within 20 minutes and less than 20 minutes for me I am totally zonked out, like you put drugs in me, like an anesthesiologist came by and filled me up with some, something that makes me high as a kite. I can really feel my nervous system go into that parasympathetic rest and digest state and it's wild, it's absolutely wild.

You can do acupressure on yourself if you wanted to, if you want to just try it at home. But there is something to those meridian points, those acupuncture points on the body, and with my clients I've actually been able to help them with just acupressure get out of. I've had several clients get out of a panic attack with acupressure and that was phenomenal and I was on a video call watching them as they just their tension melted and you could just see them, their physiology come out of that panic attack, just really interesting how that we can use it even in our own home to bring down the nervous system back into state of rest and digest.

So the hormones you've been talking about things other than sex hormones. You've been bringing up thyroid and cortisol. But as a gynecologist, are you more concerned about sex hormones or, as a gynecologist, you're looking at all hormones in the body?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:49:59.508)

I think the hormones that I look at are obviously estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, thyroid, DHEA, vitamin D and cortisol. Those would be the big ones. I will look at insulin too, obviously.

Ashley James (0:50:24.314)

I love that you brought up vitamin D as a hormone, because that's not discussed well enough. What are the levels you want to see your patients like when it comes to their blood work? What levels would you say are ideal for vitamin D?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:50:39.051)

Vitamin D, probably 60 to 80, somewhere in there. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people out there that overdose themselves on vitamin D and you have to remember that vitamin D is fat soluble, so it will sit in your fat cells so you can’t eat too much of it. So I always want people to remember that. The point being is that 5,000 units a day usually is a good amount. Some people take more than that, but I wouldn't take more than probably 50,000 units a week. But yes, vitamin D, most people are low, but that's why some people I do see are a little bit on the higher side.

Ashley James (0:51:23.792)

What do you do holistically, naturally, to prevent disease? What are your main things that you make sure you wake up and do every single day to keep your body in balance?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:51:40.266)

I'm horrible, I die. I probably don’t do that. I am probably a bit of a hypocrite, but sometimes the doctors are probably the worst patients I do think that sleeping for me and men, don't have a menopause, but as I've aged I've really noticed that sleep is really hard for me and I can tell you that I do feel a lot better when I sleep better. So I would really focus on the sleep hygiene piece for me. Cold room, dark, if that's what you like, sound machine no, sound machine, whatever it is. Then in the mornings, you see people doing these cold plunges all the time, and women don't necessarily need to do those every day. I think if you do them every day, you could potentially give yourself a cortisol spike, which may not be something you want to do but maybe two, three, four times a week.

But if you don't have a cold plunge, when you're in the shower. What I usually say is turn the water as cold as you can, get it for up to a minute, and you can always work your way up to it. What that's going to do is one thing, it's going to just kick start you. It's going to wake you up more than any coffee ever could, but it's also going to give you a little bit of a reset with your adrenals. The other thing and this is a fun one is you can eat one or two squares a day of good cacao chocolate, at least like 67% chocolate.

I did a YouTube video a while back where I ate chocolate from milk chocolate all the way up to 100% cacao. I think I had eight or nine of them. Man, what an adventure that was. You start getting up around 80%, 85%. I know people out there that eat 100% every day. I don't know how they do it. It's like I remember one day when I was a kid. I was like I don't know, I was probably eight and I wanted my mom to make cookies and she wasn't doing it. She wasn't doing it and I was like really wanting this powder. I was like I'm going to just eat the powder and the thing was I thought it was like the stuff you make the chocolate milk out of that has the sugar in it. But this was just powdered baking chocolate. So it was like just eating fire. It just burns and I remember crying, the chocolate was all dripping out of my mouth.

It was a similar experience when I did the chocolate tasting because I was like, oh my god, this is horrible, but cacao is really good for your blood vessels. It's good for a lot of things. So I say, a cold shower in the morning, try to focus on your sleep and if you want to do something, that's a treat you can do, 67% or higher of cacao.

Ashley James (0:54:55.179)

Well, I would challenge you to try to get the 100%, but at least 80%. This is what I like doing. Get a chocolate that has no sugar added okay, so it's that like super dark chocolate, but hear me out, it's going to taste good, then you get dates, I wouldn't do more than like five, six dates a day. Less is more. A small amount is good, a lot might not be great, but get a few dates, take the pits out and then get your dark chocolate and you cut the date in half, or in a quarter, and then you cut your chocolate and you shove the chocolate in the date and then you dip that. This is optional; you could dip it in a seed or nut butter, like almond, or cashew. There's all kinds of different ones. You could do sunflower, or if you don't have any nut butters, you don't need to. As a kid, you liked, peanut M&Ms versus regular M&Ms, and then you pop that in your mouth and you chew, and the sweetness of the date will offset the bitterness of the chocolate and then you get that wonderful high from the really antioxidant-rich dark chocolate without the processed sugar.

So that's my little go-to, and you're not eating a ton of it, you're just maybe eating two or three squares. Also know the timing is really important, because if you do it late at night it can affect your sleep. So it's actually better even though most chocolate cravings happen later at night, it's better done earlier in the day.

I don't know how much caffeine is in chocolate, but I'm one of those people that if I even eat two squares of dark chocolate, I notice it. It affects my sleep, I don't fall asleep. So you have to watch that. Anything I can do to eat something that doesn't have anything processed in it, like processed sugar, as minimal processed as possible.

How about Vitex Berry? Have you explored or worked with your clients who come to you and say, listen, I want to do everything I can to balance my hormones naturally, to support my body, to balance hormones naturally, instead of getting a hormone replacement, even though it is bioidentical. Do you ever have patients come to you and say get me on some herbs first. Have you seen that Vitex Berry can move the needle?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:57:39.968)

Vitex can be good for women that have low progesterone. It's a claim to fame. The research, as with all supplements, is not super strong, but there are a lot of women out there who will resume ovulation or that will start having more progesterone production. The thing about Vitex is it doesn't contain any hormones. The benefits from the Vitex are actually from what it does to the pituitary gland. So it goes a little bit higher than the ovaries, obviously, and works on that pituitary axis and what it does is the production of the hormone, luteinizing hormone.

Luteinizing hormone is a pituitary gland hormone that indirectly increases the progesterone production. So with Vitex you can get an indirect response. Now I used to use a lot of Vitex until I started working with maca and once I started working with maca, I stopped with Vitex because I felt like the maca worked on much different levels. Vitex is going to work more specifically on progesterone, but the maca helps all the hormones rather than focusing on just one.

Ashley James (0:59:13.456)

Wow. Could you explain a bit more as to what maca does to the body? That helps all the hormones. Is it just because it's high in antioxidants, or is there a certain phytochemical reaction in the body?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (0:59:29.262)

The problem with maca. There's been quite a bit of research, especially by the company Symphony that does Feminescence. There isn't a definitive reason for it, like we don't know exactly, but it's obviously a natural antioxidant. It does help produce more glutathione and something called superoxide dismutase, which is a strong antioxidant, and we think that this may have something to do with it. I think one of the earlier studies that was done around 2006 showed that it can help modulate the hypothalamic pituitary axis. We don't know the exact mechanism of action, like they haven't been able to tell you. They haven't isolated why it does what it does, which is fascinating because you would think we could but that's what I'm telling you.

If you take, let’s say, black maca versus gold maca, one might be good for men, the other one might be good for a woman with PCOS. You might also have one that's good for menopause. So it's really interesting. Let’s say gold maca works for PCOS, but you take the gold maca and you grow it in another part of Peru, it might do something totally different. So you really have to have an understanding of the plant. Like I said, there's 13 different phenotypes of maca and what's fascinating is, if you talk to some of the indigenous healers and the farmers that farm this stuff, they used to use it years and years ago for, like hundreds of years ago, for women that had issues with their periods, like painful periods, heavy periods. They would eat maca or they would make tea out of it and they would get better. So it is just like anything else in this world, these companies that find things based on talking to the indigenous healers who like, yes, we use that bark of that plant. The interesting thing if you look at it and this is a totally different topic but if you look at a plant like ayahuasca, which is a vine, just sitting there in the forest, how did they know that eating that vine, you didn't just eat it, but you got to boil it for eight hours. If you boil it for eight hours, it'll give you this psychoactive thing. However, if you just took ayahuasca, there's a chemical in your stomach called MAO monoamine oxidized that will break down the ayahuasca in about three seconds. So you get absolutely no effect. However, there's this other vine that grows next to the ayahuasca, that if you boil that with the ayahuasca, there's a chemical in that vine that blocks your monoamine oxidase. So you have this psychoactive experience. How did they know to do that? If you ask the shamans because what I did when I lived, I'm like how the hell did they know to do that? How did you figure this out? And they're like the plants, tell us and so I do think there's this, I don't know, this unseen, unknown language of these plants that they're there for a reason, many of them, most of them and we just haven't figured it out yet. We've been living with plants for thousands and thousands and millions of years. They're there for a reason. It's like why do we have cannabinoid receptors in our body? Why do we respond to marijuana? Marijuana is not an essential element in our diets, but yet we have all these receptors in our body. There's something there and it works for pain. I don't know, but the maca thing is fascinating and I really respect the plant. I just think it's amazing.

Ashley James (1:03:47.953)

I have an interview about ayahuasca, episode 379, with Teresa Vigarino. Super interesting. For listeners who don't know a lot about ayahuasca. Really interesting to listen to Teresa's experience. She went down to Peru, had the experience. She's been back several times and now she takes a tour once a year. She found a really good center because she had some sketchy experiences which led her to find a trustworthy one. But she shares her experiences in great detail in that interview, episode 379.

It is so fascinating that when we look at Indigenous medicine, the medicine that's been here for thousands of years, and, of course, if you look at the world through the lens of the modern medical system, the average MD and I'm not bashing medical doctors, but we have to just take look at the stereotypical, let's say, MD. Look through the world through their lens, and plant medicine is poo-pooed, it's looked down upon, it's primitive, and we brush it aside because it's unscientific and it's primitive. Here we are with our modern, proven, double blind placebo, chemically created, pristine, sterile medicine. Then we're going to come swoop in, prescribe you a pill and save the day, kill everything, kill all the bacteria, sterilize the body and that's the key, that's the trick, and we know now very quickly, we've learned that MD medicine isn't the best, it isn't the entire picture of medicine. It's a slice of the pie and it has its place and it has its strengths and it definitely has its weaknesses, which it doesn't want you to know about.

In the last four years, people have gotten canceled, taken off of YouTube for trying to point out the weaknesses, So they do a lot to try to protect. The AMA is not in your best interests. The FDA, all these big organizations not always out in the best interests of our health and healing.

We just have to look at it a little bit cynically, but look at it through the bigger picture lens. How about we look at the world through the lens of like these shamans, for example, or indigenous healers? How about we look through the lens of a 5,000 year old form of healing, like, we go to Asia and India and we see these types of methods or we go to Peru and what we have been doing as humans for thousands of years, and now, through their lens. So they look to the earth, they listen to the plants, they support the body's ability to come back into balance and now stand on their feet for a minute and look at our world.

How crazy are we to think that we're smarter than plant medicine, that we're smarter than God, that we're smarter than how we've been living for thousands of years, to come in and, within the last hundred years, create chemical, petroleum-based medicine and say that every other form of medicine is quote unquote, alternative and outside of the box. So the quote unquote alternative has actually been here a lot longer, been proven, and even in the modern day world, we can't even figure out why, for example, maca even works but we know it works.

So it's worth stepping out of our own perspective and looking at it through the lens of someone else to see where we've been wrong, to see where we could learn and grow. I invite everyone to step into the shoes of someone who's in the politically opposite spectrum of you and actually genuinely try to learn. Look at your own political views through someone else's eyes. Try to learn what we are missing, what's in our blind spot. What's in the blind spot when you step into the feet of a different healer that doesn't necessarily grow up in the MD medical system, and what we see is we can learn so much from the earth and the plants. And what I love about herbal medicine, it just drives me crazy. It's so cool that when there's poison in nature, that within yards of that poison is the cure. If you believe in God, which I do, that has this amazing, world that has been built for us that the cure is close by. If you don't believe in God, but at least you believe in what you see, you believe in the earth. The earth was set up in such a way, in harmony, and we're supposed to be in harmony with it that the cure is close by to the poison. So it's so cool, it's so cool that with ayahuasca, the earth told them, or the plants told them, like, hey, take this vine, take that vine, boil it for eight hours, have a good time. I just love that it's amazing.

When you were traveling and studying with the indigenous people? What did you see that they do to keep their bodies in balance that we could really learn from?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:09:41.598)

You want the dark truth.

Ashley James (1:09:46.534)

Yes.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:09:47.270)

They die. I mean, I know it sounds dark, but really that's the secret, what they do. The Huichol, who are a group in Guatemala, they are the original peyote shamans, and if you go, if they allow you in, harvesting the peyote buttons off of a cactus, it's just the little circles that grow on top of the cactuses and then they dry them and grind them up and you can do peyote. In order to be a part of that harvesting process, which is very spiritual, they walk through the desert and the cactuses only grow in a certain area.

They will tell you that in order to do this, in order for them to let you in, you have to die, you're like okay, I'm already here. So what's this mean? Basically what it means is you go out into the desert and you dig your own grave. It's really fascinating when you do this, because even when you're dying metaphorically, you still have the same character flaws before you even got there. So I'm like okay, I got to do this, I'm going to do this.

But typical Shawn, when I'm doing stuff like that, or building Ikea or whatever, I'm cutting corners. I didn't make the biggest grave ever. Then at night you have to get in. They cover you with a piece of plywood and they cover the plywood up with dirt. They tell you you can bring in whatever you want, anything. So I'm like cool, I'm going to bring in a book, I got a flashlight, I got all this stuff and I get in there and they put me in.

The first thing I did was turn on my flashlight and I realized immediately that I didn't bring my grave big enough. I'm like, holy cow, this is tiny. So I turned off my flashlight because I was like I can't even look at this, it's too confined. But what happened was, over the night they sang. They sing all night while you're there so you can hear them. It was interesting because I realized all the stuff that I brought into the grave didn't matter, didn't matter. I couldn't use any of it. I'm dead.

What mattered was the songs, because it kept me tethered to the place. It kept me tethered to the land, to the people. What I realized was the singing, at least for me, were all the people that were still alive, that were talking about me, like I remember when dad did this, or yes, he was a great doctor or whatever good friend. That's what meant something to me, not all the stuff, it was the people.

Then in the morning you're born again, you come out of the ground and you're Jesus, you're reborn. So it was quite a profound experience and I think that experience in and of itself was profound enough for me to have really just moved on and gotten whatever I needed out of it. I had a great experience with the curandera in Mexico about depression and there's all spiritist hospitals in Brazil and there's all these different things out there that you can experience, for us to think that we have this one way of doing something is a bit ridiculous and narcissistic, I think, on our part. But the medical system, we can’t bash it but it is there. If you have appendicitis, you need your appendix out, so it's got its place.

Ashley James (1:13:56.451)

It absolutely has a place within our society, but it’s like a parasite. It tries to take over and be everything and cut out and all the other things.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:14:08.116)

You're seeing that right now in psychedelic medicine. So what are they doing there? There's ketamine clinics on every corner because of all of the people that are going to Costa Rica and Brazil and all these places to do ayahuasca. They're not stupid. It's business and they see this as a business. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't start seeing ayahuasca coming out like with a capsule or something but what's going to happen is when you reduce this down to business and you take out of it the spiritual aspect, the guided part of it you can't.

Like you said, this lady had a bad trip. Well, because it's shady. If you go to somebody that can actually take care of you and walk you through this process, it can be profound. If you're just some American 25-year-old that's bored and you just want to experience the high, well, that's the wrong reason to do it, unfortunately. That's why a lot of people do it because they're bored. But some people get it. I had a friend that did mushrooms and for four hours she sat in front of a mirror and her reflection told her how horrible she was. So you need to have a guide, you need to have somebody there that can help you get through that, like I did with the people that were singing.So you don't have that negative side effect but yes, modern medicine will co-op stuff. That's just what we do.

Ashley James (1:15:36.834)

Yes, so it really is up to us as individuals to advocate for ourselves, to seek out information. Well, I'm sure everyone listening is on the same page. If you're listening to us, you're actively seeking information because you realize you cannot blindly just wait to get sick. Go to the doctor, they hand you a pill and then you're all better magically. That's not how the life works, although that's how Hollywood has painted it. So when we know that Hollywood and the media, the TV, is funded by the pharmaceutical industry and the mainstream medical industry. We've been fed this one lens, this one perspective. Yes, if I have a broken arm, I am not going to my naturopath, I am not going to my acupuncturist, I am going to the ER. Right, like I'm going to a medical doctor.

But for complex, chronic imbalance, MD drug-based medicine fails us. It fails us over and over and over again, and that is because the body wants to heal itself, wants to come back into balance, and it's missing. So they're missing nutrients, there's certain lifestyle choices that are negatively impacting it. So there's things that we can do to support the body to come back in balance, and that's where I am wanting us to learn more about that, like what can we do to get our body back into balance? Naturally, yes, there is. What is wonderful is that there is available to us and that you can help your patients with. That is bioidentical hormone as needed. But I'd love us to get to a point where we don't need a prescription, where we're supporting us coming back into balance because the body really wants to. It's constantly trying. So what is holding the body back and why are so many women having hormone issues? Do you ever think about that or like to explore that? Why are we so sick?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:17:43.188)

You mean outside of menopause.

Ashley James (1:17:46.864)

Yes, just why are more and more women experiencing hormone related issues?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:17:53.740)

Well, menopause. I think the reason that we still have such a problem with that is because what happened was, if you look back 300-400 years ago, the average lifespan was like 46 or 44. So we didn't really have a big menopause issue because women didn't live that long. We started living longer, extremely longer, like the 80s and 90s, so much faster, like in 100 years. The lifespan has increased so dramatically that evolution hasn't really had a chance to catch up yet. So we have menopause. Now, maybe 300 years from now, menopause will move from 50 to 60 as the body evolves, if we didn't do anything. So that's one thing.

Perimenopause, women that are younger, like I see the number one hormonal issue I see across the board in every age group is low testosterone.

Low testosterone in menopause is understandable because, again, the ovaries make 50% of the testosterone, so it's going to go down. But in a younger population 18 to 35, why is it low? I can tell you why. Number one is because of birth control pills, and I don't mean to rag on birth control pills. I think they're fine for birth control, but what they do is they raise a protein in your blood called sex hormone binding globulin, which then drives down your testosterone. So younger girls, low testosterone and doctors will joke, well, that's just another reason why they work, because the young girls that are on them don't want sex because their testosterone is so low. When you get into that late 20s, mid 30s to 50, the low testosterone is more than likely from probably obesity, neuroendocrine, disrupting chemicals in the food supply and water, stress, not sleeping, just pretty much a conglomeration of living in the times that we live in now and the country that we live in.

Ashley James (1:20:11.661)

That concept that we didn't really live that long. I think that's only one part of our heritage, though have you considered looking besides white northern Europeans when we look at other cultures, like the blue zones, where we see that other cultures actually live much longer, and to this day, there are certain cultures where women have far less hormone imbalance than we do in the West.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:20:39.813)

I would debate the blue zone thing. The blue zone, at least what I've read. It's an interesting concept but it's never actually been proven. If you look at people like, say in Greece, they eat better diets. I mean, they eat more olive oil, they eat more fish, but they also eat quite a bit of meat. They just don't eat the processed garbage that we eat.

There might be more to the dietary aspects than maybe the age, but I think that what's interesting is, we can get caught up in blue zones or whatever, but it doesn't. I don't think it changes the fact that you could go into, say, a blue zone like Santorini or wherever one of those places, and you can eat exactly the way they do it. It doesn't mean you're going to live longer. You might have a different lifestyle. I think it's a combination of where do they live? Are they walking everywhere they go? Are they eating that food? What genetic makeup do they have? I mean, that a lot of these things are multifaceted, not just one thing, and that's part of the problem in this country. I feel like we try to adapt everybody else's stuff because we don't have our own thing. A friend of mine, she puts on quinceañeras, 15 year old women in Mexican culture have quinceañeras. 15 16-year-old Jewish people have bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. White general white people like my kids. There's no ceremony when you're 15 or 16. You can have a sweet 16, I suppose. So we're looking for something. It's like we don't have any culture. I don't know how else to explain it, but we're always looking outside of ourselves, I guess, to find these answers. The reality is, you start with your family, you can change things in your own group and live the way that you want to. Like I said, you can mimic the Mediterranean diet and you can start instituting those changes and walking more.

If you go to New York City, you don't see a ton of obese people because they walk everywhere. They literally walk everywhere. When I was there, I think my steps were like 20,000 steps and I didn't do anything different than I would normally do. But you just don't drive, you walk. I live 14 miles from my office, so I'm not going to walk to the office, but I mean I would if I could. But yes, I just think it's a combination of things, but I really feel like most of this, for our country anyways, is probably dietary and just that we're not as active as we could be.

Ashley James (1:23:34.649)

Yes, walk more, stop eating processed crap.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:23:38.255)

Well, we know people that eat less live longer. I mean that's pretty simple, not like starving yourself, but people that don't eat as much food live longer. I mean we've known that for a long time. Look at the prolonged fasting thing. Giving your gut that rest and having autophagy and the stem cell production is super helpful and I think you can get that by not starving but cutting back on things for sure.

Ashley James (1:24:08.030)

I have a great fasting interview, episode 230, with Dr. Goldhammer. He talks about that, the autophagy, and just a three to five day water fast once every few months is like turning on the dishwasher at night before you go to bed, but for the body and it's pretty phenomenal. He had one person, a woman, who had cancer riddled through her whole body. Her oncologist sent her home to die. She did a 30 day water only fast at his fasting clinic, medically supervised, and when she walked out of there she was cancer-free and he ended up publishing this as a study or whatever you do when you publish these things and just really interesting that the autophagy for some people is powerful enough to the body, wipes out tumors.

Not for everyone, but for some people. Then there's really interesting studies around fasting before chemotherapy. I am not in any way promoting cut, burn and poison medicine for cancer, but for those who choose the chemotherapy route, because I'm also pragmatic and I believe that whatever tool is best for you, you should go for the best tool for you but understand the pros and cons. You got to clean up the mess after chemotherapy. But what's interesting is that there are studies. This is fascinating. They did this in mice before. They did this in humans, but they studied it, they published it. It's out there. It's probably buried though, but you could find it if you looked hard enough. That fasting before, I think it was a two-day fast, it wasn't that long before every round of chemotherapy, significantly reduced all of the side effects to the point where some people didn't lose their hair, didn't get the nausea, like really interesting. Also it targeted the cancer better. Then there's this type of chemotherapy called metronomic chemotherapy, I don't want to say microdose, but it's a far smaller dose. They attach it to a sugar and then they get the cancer to be super hungry and then the cancer gobbles it up. So it's more targeted. So then they use fasting. It is so interesting how we can use fasting in conjunction with certain medicines. But I'd rather go natural. I'd rather prevent cancer in the first place. That's a big thing. Look around you in terms of what the statistics are. I like saying this on my show because it's real. It's a really quick wake up call. One in three people are obese, have diabetes or prediabetes, have heart disease, and get cancer is one third of each population are having this or about to have this problem.

Then look at what the average person is doing. What are they doing? What are they eating, What are they consuming? Do the opposite. Walk, try walking instead of driving everywhere. Eat whole foods instead of eating packaged foods. Go to bed early instead of staying up late and Netflix. Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing and see if you start feeling better, because it is the accumulation of what we eat and what we do that has led us down this road of disease.

Now you brought up obesity. Can you talk about and shine a light on the GLP-1 pros and cons? There's medications out there, but I also hear that there's certain things we can eat naturally to support GLP-1. What is GLP-1? Why are people in an uproar about it, and I'd love for you to go into teaching us a bit about this.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:27:53.465)

About which aspects in particular?

Ashley James (1:27:58.202)

Well, for example, for people who don't even know what GLP-1 is.But there's GLP-1 medications and then there's some natural things to raise GLP-1. There's people saying it's great. There's people saying it's horrible that we lose muscle mass.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:28:12.809)

Keep in mind the GLP-1s are naturally occurring peptides. They've been around for a long, long time, probably forever. They just were discovered.

The issue in GLP-1 is a glucagon-like peptide that is made usually in the small intestine and the cells of the small intestine usually in the small intestine and the cells of the small intestine, and, whether or not you believe that there's a lot of companies out there that are now capitalizing on it. So if you see a supplement that says GLP-1, like blah, blah, blah, to me that's just marketing and I find it somewhat atrocious because they're trying to sell a product.

The GLP-1s, though they've been used in diabetes for decades and what they noticed was that people that were using these were basically losing weight. The only reason that it recently took off was because of Kim Kardashian. I mean, she started using them, and my guess is that the celebrities have been using these for years, and just didn't talk about it but it caught on because of the attention that it got. What's interesting is, like I said, Semaglutide and Terzepatide, Ozempic and Manjaro, they are naturally occurring compounds. You can find them in nature, you can buy them. You could buy Semaglutide on your own. You don't need a prescription for it because it's a peptide. The problem is, what happened was so when, when you hear all these controversies, like remember a while back, the diabetics can't get it. All these people are using it for their weight loss and the diabetics can't get it. How horrible.

Well, the reason that the companies ran out wasn't because they ran out of semaglutide, they ran out of the pen. So when you patent something, you cannot patent a naturally occurring compound. So you can't patent estradiol , it's not patentable. But you can patent the way that it's delivered. You could use gel or a mist or whatever, but the actual medicine that's in there isn't what's patented. So semaglutide isn't a patentable medicine. What was patented was they come with a pen that has a button. You push the button and it gives you the device. Well, because of COVID, they ran out of the plastic and they ran out of the devices, but the product was still there, and so there's plenty of this product around.

What's the other one? The rates of thyroid and pancreatic cancer. Well one, pancreatic cancer was never an issue. But number two, the thyroid cancer that was shown in the study, was in rats. It's never been reproduced in humans, so that was another fear thing.

Then, lastly, the muscle loss. Anybody that loses 50 pounds, let's say they did Atkins low fat whatever they did, and they lost 40 pounds. On average, about 12 pounds of that would have been muscle wasting, 14 pounds maybe with Ozempic. So it's the same. It's because of weight loss, because most people when they lose weight they're in a caloric deficit. There's no way to really lose that much weight and not have some of it be from muscle density. There's just no way. I mean, you could inject yourself with testosterone and do some heavy lifting and do lots of protein, but in order for you to go into enough of a caloric deficit to lose and we're not talking about people that are losing 10 pounds, we're talking about people that are losing more weight.

The problem is that this got pushed to the forefront. This is again my theory, but you have a lot of people out there that make a lot of money on weight loss programs, coaches, nurses, doctors, whatever and if they weren't on board with prescribing those meds, or they couldn't prescribe those meds, they were losing a lot of business. So to come out and start trashing this medication that I believe has really helped a lot of people, and I think, if used correctly, obesity might be a thing of the past. I think chastising folks saying it's a crutch, the way I look at it is it's a tool, it's another tool. There's lots of tools out there which may work for somebody, may not work for somebody else.

But I don't think we should be judging people, like Oprah, she used Ozempic but she didn't talk about it for like a year and a half. Why, why? I don't understand why. Why is it so bad? The fact that you people should just be happy you lost weight, you're healthier, you're down 40 pounds, it should be a happy thing, not critical saying oh you cheater, why did you do that? That part I don't understand.

Ashley James (1:33:23.028)

Yes, it scares me though, the amount of muscle loss, I guess with any weight loss. You're saying that the muscle loss with other diets is similar to Ozempic?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:33:35.858)

If it was just somebody doing something at home, if you're just like I'm going to do Atkins, you're going to lose muscle mass. It's going to happen, and it's going to be about 30%, or probably 20 to 30%. The thing is, if you hired like a trainer, health coach, somebody that could help you with your food and then with your weight, and you were on testosterone yes, you wouldn't lose maybe half of that, but if it was just like a run-of-the-mill person that just did a diet, you're going to lose muscle density. It happens with all weight loss programs.

Ashley James (1:34:17.339)

With women who are wanting to lose weight and build muscle. Would you ever prescribe testosterone for them during that period even if their testosterone is normal, would you help them by increasing their testosterone temporarily while they're working out, so that they could prevent muscle loss, or would that be too detrimental?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:34:41.270)

It depends on how high. Most women that I test are low. A free testosterone, the range might be 0.2 to 6.4. That's a 32 fold range. So let's say you come back at 0.4 and then you get put on testosterone and you're up to two and a half. You're still in the lower half of normal. I could almost triple your testosterone and it would still be normal.

So there's a lot of play there with testosterone and as long as the levels aren't too high for too long, you won't usually get the negative side effects. If it's too high or too high for too long, you could have voice changes, hair growth, you can actually have the clitoris enlarged. Some of those things are permanent, they don't go away. So it really varies. I wouldn't want to make somebody super physiologic for an extended period of time, but helping them with muscle loss is fine, but most women that I treat don't go and get a DEXA scan before and after to know how much. They're just looking at how their clothes fit.

Ashley James (1:35:57.407)

Right, but the older we get our muscle, the amount of muscle we have really plays a role in our long-term health and in our longevity. I was told this many years ago by a functional MD. She was actually in the Olympics twice. Amazing woman. She's in her 80s now and still regularly runs marathons in the desert. This woman is super healthy and she says you must protect your muscles and she told this to me in my 30s. She goes, build your muscle now, protect it, because when you're in your 80s it could be, for example, just one bout of pneumonia. The amount of muscle you have in your body is the difference between whether you live or die, and your strength is so important when you get into your 80s if you're to prevent a fall. It's a difference between whether you're going to be cycling and walking or whether you're going to be in a walker or worse, bedridden, and so that's just the idea that we would lose so much muscle with a drug but, like you said, it could also be with other extreme diets where there's a great calorie deficit and of course, we want to help people gain balance and lose weight healthfully.

That's interesting though you're saying that in certain circumstances like taking the GLP-1 protocol, getting to a healthier weight and while also doing everything you can to protect your muscle doesn't have long-term negative side effects, because we've seen people have been using it for years.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:37:37.140)

Well, I mean, we have data on diabetics. The problem is, diabetics have other health concerns. So are we going to know because of the millions and millions of people that are now using this stuff? I saw another podcast where this person's a micro dosing now there and people just make stuff up and so I don't know if people are getting the doses or if they're getting legitimate product, because there's generics out there now and there's compounding pharmacies, and so it's one of those things, where it's hard to tell, because, people are using all kinds of stuff now. Should they be on it for years and years? Probably not. My goal is to just get their weight down and then wean them off the medication, but you also have to look at it like what if they were pre-diabetic? Or what if they had high cholesterol, high blood pressure? You now have a system where they've lost 35 pounds and their cholesterol is better, they're off all their blood pressure meds. I mean, yes, they lost a little bit of muscle density, but maybe they're going to live longer because their heart is healthier.

Ashley James (1:39:01.076)

Yes, there's other metrics that you're looking at. Have you seen anything natural? I know, of course, we're going to question everything and be suspicious of natural products in the market that make health claims, but I've seen interesting information around allulose that it increases GLP-1. Have you seen anything natural or something healthy for the gut that increases GLP-1 in the body that you would say is worth looking into?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:39:32.752)

I have not. No, but like I said, this area is so new. Allulose has some activation constructs in the neurons in your brain and those neurons respond to GLP-1s. So what it's thought is that allulose can potentiate the ability of GLP-1 to activate neurons in the brain. But that would be the only thing I could think of there that it wouldn't help you lose weight, but it might help brain function, and that's the other thing too. With more weight comes more inflammation, more inflammation, Alzheimer's, all kinds of stuff. So I think there's a lot of potential issues with GLP-1s. I mean, we may find that certain probiotics can help GLP-1 production. I just think we're so early on in the process. I do feel like what they're finding with these GLP-1s too, is there's people that are quitting gambling, drinking. There's a lot of weirdness around addictive behaviors because that's what I've noticed with GLP-1s, it curbs your appetite a little bit, but it also gives you the ability to think differently about food. You're not feeling the need to like to eat everything in sight. But you also can say okay, I'm standing at the fridge, it's 10 o'clock at night, I want ice cream. Are you hungry? No, I just want it. Okay sorry about that. Can you do two tablespoons, or do you need to eat the whole container? I think I can do two tablespoons. Before I even had that discussion, now it gives me the ability to think it through, and then by the time I've done that, I don't want it anymore, anyway, I kind of talk myself out of it.

I can't tell you how many women that I see, who during COVID and whatnot, would have two, three glasses of wine a night, and basically, that's probably 600 calories. Not to mention the alcohol is not good for you, but they stopped drinking because they just weren't even thinking about it anymore, and so it's one of those things where, I think it's going to make a lot of big differences in different ways if we could just get past the negativity on it.

Ashle James (1:42:27.564)

And if and if we can also create a system that protects the muscle loss as much as possible.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:42:37.216)

There’s going to be other peptides out there and they are not regulated so we can't know for sure if you're getting a good product and then the government comes in and shuts them down. Don't think for a minute, though. There isn't a company that's already looking at that. I guarantee you somebody's going to come out with something that can spare the muscle density, or they'll combine it with testosterone or something like that. If the women that I have on GOPs I usually also have on testosterone.

Ashley James (1:43:14.345)

Like you said, some nutritionist, health coach, guiding them with a healthy diet and going to the gym doing weights, because the only way to build muscle is to stress the muscle. So you got to get the weights in. Even if you start with bands, do it in a way that you're not going to injure yourself. The most common thing is people injure themselves within a month of joining a gym because they're using the weights too much, too long, too hard. Whatever they're doing, they're not doing it correctly. That's why it really is worth it to start slow build up. I just talked to a doctor yesterday about this. He says it takes six months before your tendons and ligaments get strong enough, because every time you go to the gym, you're there, you're strengthening them as well, and it just takes longer for the body, especially the older we get to adapt to our new fitness level. So it's best to get some fitness in every day, even if it's 20 minutes, just some fitness in every day, because we atrophy, and that is the scary thing is, our culture is conducive to atrophy. We just video gaming, netflix, binging, driving, everywhere, we atrophy. If you're not using it, you're losing it. So get in the gym or go for a walk, just do gentle daily and and progressively, slowly build the difficulty up.

I am one of those people that goes in guns blazing, doing the hardest exercise and then injures myself then I'm out for six weeks. I could have just been doing simple little stuff for the six weeks I was out because I was recovering from the injury. So don't go in guns blazing, it's that marathon idea, not the sprint. Every day, get some movement, slowly increase the weights and then, after you're used to it, do the stronger stuff. You're building muscle. Strength is using the muscle. So we got to use it.

You have a book, and this book looks fascinating, The Hormone Balance Bible. Tell us about it.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:45:30.448)

Basically, it's a culmination of all of the things that I was talking about with my mom and all that stuff and the culmination at the time also I was reading a lot of Caroline Mace and Carl Jung and Sally Hogshead and they use a lot of archetypes. So to tell stories.

Basically when you write a book, you have to show the problem and then you have to fix the problem. Well, I found that if I talk to women about low testosterone, they would get it to a certain degree. But then if I started telling stories because I'd sat with 40,000 women and I listen and I love stories, and so what I noticed was similar threads, and so what I did was I came up with these 12 most common hormone imbalances and I put them into archetypes. So low testosterone would be the nun, high estrogen would be the queen, low thyroid is the underdog, and the book talks about these imbalances in a way that makes it easier to understand.

So, like I would notice that a lot of women, when I would tell them these stories, would just start nodding yes, that's me or crying because oh my god, you're the first person that's ever put it into words me and it was funny because it wasn't me, it was just all these other women I had listened to. Then I came up with the shines protocol, which I briefly described earlier, which is a spiritual practice, hormones, infoceuticals, which is the woo factor, nutrition, exercise and supplements. So each of those 12 imbalances has its own shines protocol and put it into a book talked about, obviously, lab testing as well, what each hormone does and why, and it ended up being I don't know 500 pages, but it's a lot of information, it's a reference and, yes, it's a culmination of all these years where I was learning all this new stuff.

Ashley James (1:47:41.964)

That is so cool. I love that you gave each persona life so that we could identify and go wow, like I get it, that makes sense.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:47:53.970)

Well, I think that's how I connected people to it. They just got it. It was like light bulbs.

Ashley James (1:48:00.506)

Where can we go to buy your book, The Hormone Balance Bible?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:48:04.582)

It's on Amazon right now. It came out a couple of years ago with HarperCollins. It's on Amazon. I think it's $15 or $16 right now. You can also find me on Instagram. I post there sometimes twice a day, usually a topic of the day. I also have a great YouTube channel where I do YouTube live every day, talk about different hormones and balances.

What I found fascinating was I had no idea, but the demographic of women. The majority that are on TikTok are over 65. Fascinating for me, for my group, I did a post two months ago about a study that had come out that showed women that are over the age of 65 that were on estradiol had lower rates of lung, colon and breast cancer, they had less dementia and they had less morbidity by 19%. This was a study of 10 million women. I mean it went like I've never had something go viral in my life and that one had like almost 300,000 views and it’s just crazy, and it just showed me the power of the internet. There's so many people out there looking, and women especially, because they're getting gaslighted all the time. Oh, you're too young, oh, you're too old. Testing is stupid. So many things that you're told and all women want is help and an answer. They just want to get back to their lives.

Ashley James (1:49:37.360)

So do you teach through your instagram lives ? Do you teach women how to stop getting gaslit by their gynecologists, by their medical doctors?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:49:50.502)

I'm starting to get a little bit more into that aspect of it, because I have this thing that I hate called lazy medicine, which is where doctors will just say stuff to get you out of their office, oh, I don't do lab testing, hormones fluctuate all the time. Well, that's a fancy way of saying just I don't want to deal with it and get out because they just don't want to look at the labs and whatnot, and that's fine, that's their choice. Usually right now it's just being persistent, and I've had women ask me all the time how do I get a doctor to do this? You don't. You don't get a doctor to do anything.

If they're not going to do it, then you have to find someone else, and that's not your job. Your job is not to change their mind. Your job is to get what you want, and there are people out there like me that order stuff all the time and that do hormones and that are educated. It's just a matter of finding that person, which can be difficult. But the beautiful thing now is, since covid, we can get licensed in multiple states so that we can do telemedicine. So I'm licensed in like 27 states so I can see women across the country.

Ashley James (1:51:07.123)

Interesting. You have two websites. One of them is for people to book appointments and then the other is for just some great, more great information. You want to tell us about your websites.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:51:19.929)

So my website, Dr. Shawn Tassone, D-r-S-h-a-w-n-T-a-s-s-o-n-e is basically if you want to make an appointment, it just gives generalized information. tassonemd.com is my fun website that's got the book, it's got the quiz on there. If you don't want to get your labs tested and it's midnight and you're bored, tassonemd.com/quiz. Obviously I'm going to ask for your email, but you'll get an answer. You'll get one of those 12 archetypes and at least it gives you an idea of where to start. Nothing is obviously as good as labs, but I can't tell you how many times I've had women tell me how accurate they felt the test was. So I'm proud of it. I think it's a great quiz and something that can certainly open your eyes to certain things for sure.

Ashley James (1:52:20.747)

Is there ever a chance they get the, “You're perfect, there's nothing wrong with you” as an answer.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:52:27.755)

Not unless you answered every question, that you didn't have a problem. But I guess then you wouldn't be taking the quiz in the first place.

Ashley James (1:52:34.161)

Right, yes, “You're great! Go home!” You have a podcast, Confessions of a Male Gynecologist. I just love the title. How did you come up with that?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:52:45.909)

I don't know. I guess you always try to think of things that are a little bit off or edgy. I also am acutely aware, because I'm reminded daily of the fact that I'm a man in a woman's world and 75% of OBGYNs now, I think, are females, so we're a dying breed and, you get people all the time no uterus, no choice, no opinion, blah, blah, blah. I get it, I know where it comes from and I understand it. But to negate all the 50,000 women that I've sat with, because I have learned from that and not to mention the training and all that. But I think I was looking for something to be a little cheeky and allude to the fact that I am a guy and maybe I know some things you don't.

Ashley James (1:53:46.091)

To be a good male gynecologist, you have to actually work harder because you don't have a uterus. You don't have a female cycle, you haven't experienced it. So you do have to in some ways to be a good one. You have to work harder as a man to be a good gynecologist. Also, I think you do have an interesting perspective because you haven't lived in it, so that you really have to listen and be present, I mean, to be a good one, which sounds like you're a good one. So I wouldn't throw away all the male gynecologists.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:54:26.709)

No, I'll tell you what. There's a lot of something I don't do that I couldn't do that I've seen women do. I've seen women say stuff like oh, she says she has a bad period. I have a bad period. She thinks she has a bad period. You tell me your period hurts. I'm like, okay, I get it. I can't compare it and I wouldn't because I can't, but I think it can go both ways too. If the female thinks you're a complainer, I don't think that because I don't have anything to compare it to. Also, the flip side of that is that proverbial end of one just because you know your uterus…

Ashley James (1:55:06.731)

it doesn't mean you know other ones.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:55:08.462)

Yes, so it's the same argument. Well, you're not her, so you don't have a choice, and it's an interesting concept, for the most part I don't have to be a woman to understand that perimenopause and menopause sucks and that you're having issues with sleep. Sure, I can do it, but yes, I get it, I understand it.

Ashley James (1:55:29.956)

Well, I'm intrigued and I know my listeners will be as well to check out your podcast Confessions of a Male Gynecologist. It does sound intriguing and you're edgy, so that's fun. You could be like the male gynecologist Joe Rogan, Yes, I think you could do it. You sit there with a cigar.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:55:55.319)

I would actually do that. I would do that.

Ashley James (1:56:01.055)

You should get on this show. You've got the edge.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:56:03.892)

Well, we're in Austin, but I don't think I'm on Joe's radar.

Ashley James (1:56:07.768)

Not yet. With a podcast like that Confessions of a Male Gynecologist I think you could do it.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:56:16.710)

We shall see, I'll do it.

Ashley James (1:56:19.516)

Yes, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Is there anything left unsaid? Is there anything you wanted to make sure that you said to wrap up today's interview?

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:56:29.328)

The main thing is don't give up. I say it all the time. It's frustrating. I get it. Sometimes you got to see four or five doctors.

There was an article that just came out in the UK a couple weeks ago that said women in the UK have to have 10 visits at a physician's office before they get diagnosed with menopause. Totally ridiculous. But it is what it is, if you give up, then you're not helping to pave the way for the women that come behind you. The more that you speak up, the more that you say no, the more that you make demands.

You're doing that not just for you, but that doctor is going to learn eventually, because if they've got five women in there in a day or 10 in a week that are coming in demanding these things, they're going to start looking into it and why? So you can. It's an educational thing on your part too, and think of it also as being there for the women that come behind you.

Ashley James (1:57:30.740)

Be willing to fire your doctor and go find one that will treat you the way you want to be treated and also look into the things you want them to look into. So don't don't try to force the doctor to do something they're not willing to do because they wouldn't even be good at it anyway.

What are they going to do with labs if they're not even willing to run them? They're going to take one, look at them and be like, okay, what are they going to do there? That's not their wheelhouse, go find it. I love saying you don't take your car to the plumber, you don't take your car to the electrician, we do this all the time, we go to the wrong specialist or to the wrong doctor. So it's okay, go to different doctors, get different opinions, get a second opinion, get a third opinion. Find the right team that's willing to listen to you and work with you and, yes, advocate for yourself. If they're not receptive, walk out of that office there. Don't put them on a pedestal. You're employing them, not the other way around. So you're allowed to fire the doctor and go find one that listens to you and you can say that Dr. Shawn Tassone said so.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:58:44.297)

I don't want to be as dramatic as firing them, but just go somewhere else. How's that?

Ashley James (1:58:50.773)

Okay, then they won't learn if you don't fire them, they'll never learn. They need to know that they've been fired by a handful of women until they start waking up.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:59:00.309)

Yes, that's true, it works.

Ashley James (1:59:02.785)

Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been such a pleasure and all the links to everything that Dr. Shawn Tassone does, is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. Truly a pleasure to dive into this topic with you and if anything groundbreaking comes about, I'd love to have you back on the show to continue teaching us.

Dr. Shawn Tassone (1:59:23.992)

Sure. Sounds great.

Outro:

Are you tired of guessing your way through supplements, Feeling like each choice is just another shot in the dark? Unlock your health potential at takeyoursupplements.com. Here we don't just sell supplements, we customize wellness. Connect with a true health coach who tailors your nutritional path based on your unique health goals and challenges. From fatigue to vitality, from confusion to clarity Start your transformation today. Visit takeyoursupplements.com and discover how feeling amazing is just one free consultation away. That's takeyoursupplements.com.

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521 Quantum Physics Meets Holistic Medicine, Dr. Vaughn Cook Shares Cutting-Edge Biofeedback Technology That Reads Your Body's Needs 0

May 31, 2024

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521: Dr. Vaughn Cook’s Revolutionary Biofeedback Technology in Holistic Healing

https://learntruehealth.com/dr-vaughn-cooks-revolutionary-biofeedback-technology-in-holistic-healing/

In this episode, Ashley James interviews Dr. Vaughn Cook, creator of the ZYTO technology, to explore the cutting-edge intersection of technology and holistic health. Dr. Cook delves into how energy medicine, voice analysis, and quantum-based tools like the ZYTO Hand Cradle are transforming health assessments. They discuss how these non-invasive approaches provide personalized insights into the body’s wellness, helping practitioners guide patients toward balance and healing.

Highlights:

Supporting Holistic Health Practitioners
Energy Medicine Technology
Evolution of ZYTO Scanning
Voice-based Health Assessment
Hand Cradle for Practitioners
EVOX for Emotional Healing
Clinical Validation through Case Studies
Non-invasive Health Monitoring
Quantum Field and Energy Healing

Ashley James (0:00:00.000)

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host Ashley James. This is Episode 521.

I am so excited for today's guest. We have Dr. Vaughn Cook on the show. This is such an interesting topic. I feel we're finally into the years of Star Trek. We're living in the future. I was such a Trekkie as a kid and growing up. I love Star Trek. I love the idea that health and technology could come together and that we could use technology to end all disease and end all suffering. That was such a neat concept. a few years ago, I saw the ZYTO at a chiropractic office and I was like, what is that? then Jennifer Saltzman from takeyoursupplements.com, who I'm a huge fan of and I rave about their services. They really are just a wonderful mix of holistic health practitioners and coaches that are committed to helping people get their health back through nutrition and supplementation. They've been using the ZYTO in a new way. I said, I need to learn more about this becauseI tell my listeners, I'm the biggest open-minded skeptic. So my first reaction is skepticism. then I go, okay, well, let's stay open -minded, let's go deeper. Usually when I do, I'm pleasantly surprised at what I find.

So you have a technology that now we can use through an app on the phone, along with our holistic health practitioner, when you go to takeyoursupplements.com for example, and they can hook you up with this and it scans you and tells you, in such a crazy detailed way tells you where you're off in your body and what we can do to support your body to come back into balance. I've scanned my husband, myself and my nine year old son and it was eerily accurate. So I can't wait to dive into the science. So excited to have you on the show, Dr. Cook.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:02:27.575)

Hi Ashley, it's good to be here.

Ashley James (0:02:30.712)

Yes, absolutely. I pretty much laid it out. This is the technology that shows us how we can come back into wellness. we're living in the future with Star Trek like- technology now. But , my first reaction is skepticism, because you're telling me that with an app and with what I hold in my hand, my smartphone, that we can learn about what my body needs and how we can support the body's ability to heal itself, that little skeptic, and I know some of my listeners might be skeptical, but of course open-minded, because they're listening, and curious also, wanting to know how can they learn how to bring their body back into balance. So I want to jump all the way back to the beginning of ZYTO. How did you get into this because it's a super cool technology.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:03:24.454)

Well, I got into it about 40 years ago. When I was a teenager, I developed horrific allergies and they went away and then they came back. In the early 80s, my wife and I moved our family to Las Vegas, Nevada. When we got there, my allergies came back with a vengeance.

I had a neighbor who was a dentist and he said, it's probably just something in your yard you're not used to that you're reacting to. So he said, I have this interesting technology I use in my clinic as a hobby. Break a twig off of everything in your yard and bring it down to my office tomorrow at five o 'clock when I close and I'll test you and we'll see if we can figure out what's going on. So the next day I had three big grocery bags full of twigs. I walked into his office and he pulled this piece of equipment out of his cupboard and it had a meter on it and a metal plate on top. Then he handed me a ground, a little hand mass that had a wire that went into this device. He would then put a twig, one at a time, on the metal plate on the top of the device and then he would poke my finger with a stylus and when he did that the meter would then go up and the machine would make a funny sound.

He explained to me that what he was doing was measuring the energy flow through my acupuncture meridian at the particular point that he was probing and the energetic influence of the twig on top of the instrument, its effect on my body would be reflected on my body's response as indicated by the meter and the sound. It was a totally goofy experience. If I hadn't been suffering from allergies as bad as I was, I probably would have gone, this is crazy. The other thing is this guy was a credible guy. I knew him and he was legit. So it was like, well, it might be nuts, but if it's good enough for him, I guess I can sit through it.

At the end of the experience, after we had tested every twig, he said, the only thing that you're showing a reaction to is Oleander and Pyracantha. I thought, well, okay, those are two things that we didn't have where we moved from, so it's possible those are the culprits. Then he went over to his cupboard again and he got another instrument out and he got out a little three ounce amber dropper bottle and a fifth of vodka. He poured some vodka into this little bottle and then he put the little bottle in a well. This new instrument he pulled out had two wells on top. He put this little dropper bottle with the vodka in it in one well and he took the Oleander and the Pyracantha twig and he put those in the other well. Then he twisted some dials on the front and he said, okay, what this machine does is it will transfer the energy from the twigs at a homeopathic potency and it programs it onto the water molecule and the alcohol molecule in the vodka. It was strange. I was a fairly open-minded guy, but this was just weird. It sat there for about five minutes, and then he said, okay, here's your remedy. Give me the bottle, he said, put 10 drops under your tongue three times a day. So I went home and faithfully did that because I wanted to get rid of my allergies, I was willing to try anything. On the 10th day, my allergies shut off completely. It was nuts, it was like God stuck his finger up my nose and turned off the valve. It was that dramatic. I thought, wait a minute, I've had allergies for so many years, nothing works like this. It's got to be that the Oleander and the Pyracantha have just gone out of bloom and there's no more pollen. So I went out in the backyard where the Oleanders were and they were still going crazy. I went out front, the hedge along the driveway where it was covered with Pyracantha and they were still blooming.

The only explanation was it had to be this magic stuff that he gave me. That was my introduction to energy medicine. it was so dramatic that I then inquired of him and said, tell me more about this. It turns out that what he was doing is a technique that was developed in Germany. It's called Electro Acupuncture according to Voll or EAV. Reinhold Voll is the doctor who developed it and then it came to the states in the 70s. There were a few clinics that used it, but it was mostly just, the Mavericks and they were doing interesting things. But I then met Bill Roberson, the name of the dentist and he introduced me to a doctor named Fuller Royal who had a clinic there in Las Vegas. Then Fuller, I got to know him pretty well in his clinic and he introduced me to a guy named Roy Curtin. See, I'm giving you all the names and genealogy here, Ashley. Anyway, Roy had a company that had taken the EAV manual technology and had computerized the library. So they had developed a way to represent Oleander or Pyracantha with a digital code.

Then instead of having the twig and putting it on the test plate, you would go into their computerized database and you would activate the code that represented Oleander or Pyrakantha. it would create the same effect as putting the twig on top of the test plate, on top of the metal plate. so that revolutionized the whole EAV world in a significant way. so I ended up going to work for Roy and his company for a while and then I left and started my own company and developed a similar technology and I started that, gosh, it was in the late 80s and it's just evolved since then.

So in the course of time I've built several different devices that we've sold to primarily health professionals. The reason is because with the EAV technology, back in the days when we had to take the stylus and actually probe the acupoint, the learning curve on that was fairly steep. Some people could learn how to do a point test in a couple of days, most people it took a couple of weeks. You had to commit yourself to the process. Meaning, if I brought EAV into my practice and didn't use it on a regular basis, I just would never get proficient enough to make it work well. So it was the doctors who were interested in that kind of stuff who really we sold the equipment to. Everybody said, gosh, would it be so easy if you just would invent a glove and we could just have our patients put their hand in a glove and then we could run all the tests that way. So they didn't have to point test. Eventually we didn't do the glove but we did what's called a Hand Cradle. I don't know if you saw the Hand Cradle Ashley.

Ashley James (0:11:54.736)

Yes, I have. I have seen it at chiropractic offices. That's really interesting. I've never used the Hand Cradle myself, but I have used your most latest technology. I said, it was a very accurate, really interesting experience. Well, I'm sure we'll get there. Let's go back to the Hand Cradle because I'm really enjoying this, this history lesson of this technology and how it's been evolving.

That made it a little easier, more accessible for the practitioners. So instead of having to learn the acupuncture points and know when to touch each one with the machine, now the patient comes in, puts their hand in a cradle with different metal pads, and then it can read them, essentially, read their energy signature, maybe explain a bit how that works.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:12:42.443)

I'm just pausing because I'm trying to think of how much geekiness to give you. Vole, the original developer of EAV, had a student, his name was Schimmel. Schimmel didn't like the idea of going from point to point because that's what Vole technology does. If you want to measure the large intestine,

You go to the large intestine meridian and there's a point on that meridian. It's called the control measurement point. It basically gives you the entire picture of the large intestine on the left or the right side. If you want to test the heart, you go to the heart meridian and you test the points on the heart meridian. So you can test points all over the body. The reason it works, frankly, is because acupoints are hardwired to different parts of the body.

There is a point that has a more direct connection to the valves in your heart. There's another one that has a connection to the bundle of his and one to the muscles. So you can get a very detailed electronic assessment or exam of your patient by just measuring those points. If what the points are, you get pretty intuitive and pretty uncanny in your ability to diagnose. Schimmel didn't like the idea of going from point to point. It was just cumbersome and it took too much. So he developed an alternative technique. He developed a technique where you would take a sarcode. A sarcode is a homeopathic remedy made from healthy tissue. So if you want to test somebody's heart, you would take a sarcode for heart and you would put that on the test plate and then you would just test one point and you test that one point over and over again because all you needed was just access to the body. He learned the most significant part of the measurement was called the indicator drop. Your body is a capacitor essentially and your organs hold energy. When you challenge the body with the Voll equipment, you're putting electrons into the body through the hand mass, and then you're taking them out of the body at the stylus when you touch the acupoint. the part of the body that that acupoint is most closely associated with will act as a capacitor and the ideal reading is one that goes up to 50 on the scale and stays at 50. What that's telling you is there is a proper amount of electron flow through that part of the body, and the body has the ability to sustain that flow over time. But when you get an indicator drop, when you touch the point, the meter goes up, goes up, then as you hold the pressure on the point, the meter drops. So it goes whoop, and then it goes whoop. See, I'm even making sound effects here for you. What that tells you is that that part of the body is not functioning in a healthy capacitive way, and the resistance is going up and the electron flow is dropping, and so it indicates a chronic problem.

So that's the difference between acute and chronic in EAV. Anyway, Schimmel developed this technique where instead of going from point to point, he would put the sarcode on the test plate and then he touched the point and watched the meter. If the meter dropped, then okay, that's an indication we got a problem with heart, okay? Then what he could do is he would take remedies and he could put those on the test plate at the same time the heart sarcode does on the plate and he would then repeat the probe until the meter responded in an optimal fashion. When that happened, then he would say, okay, there's a problem with the heart and these remedies correct that problem. So here's what I'm going to prescribe to you as the patient.

Ashley James (0:17:26.803)

So that could be herbs, that could be supplements, that could be...

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:17:31.939)

Yes. Could be drugs, could be anything, yes.

Ashley James (0:17:35.475)

But that really takes a lot of knowledge. First, just understanding the body, understanding remedies, understanding what the body might need. The practitioner is still very much the computer. The tool at the time was an incredible tool, but it wasn't intelligent in and of itself. So you still needed really smart practitioners. Because if a practitioner like an MD who's not trained in supplements or herbs or lifestyle medicine, if they only have drugs, they only have one slice of the pie. So even if they had this machine, they couldn't really serve that patient because they didn't know all the available possible remedies for that person. So the practitioner had to be really well -versed to be able to correctly identify what that person's body needed.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:18:28.881)

Well, honestly, that was one of the fun things about EAV was you learned that stuff really fast. For example, homeopathy. I'm an expert in homeopathy and I got that way in six months. The reason it only took me six months is because I was using EAV equipment instead of going in and memorizing the remedy and the rubrics, et cetera, I would just test and I'd say, okay, here's the energetic profile of this patient, and this remedy balanced it. So now I know that that matches. So it's a fast way to get a lot of knowledge, and honestly, that makes it kind of fun. But at the same time, not every practitioner likes to do that. It's not necessarily the most lucrative practice you could run.

Ashley James (0:19:27.428)

Well, you're helping people get better and then they don't come back, but they might send all their friends and family.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:19:31.964)

Well, that's true, but let's say that you're a chiropractor and you're making significant money adjusting people and then you take time to do this kind of assessment, you could probably adjust four or five patients while you're seeing one with the EAV equipment. So, you would get incorporated into practices. A practice like that may say, hey, we're going to hire a technician. They'll run the EAV equipment, et cetera. But. yes, you did have to know more. The biggest challenge frankly though was the point testing because when you're mechanically applying a stylus to an acupoint, you can manipulate the response. If you push hard, you'll get more electrons and the meter goes up. if you don't push as hard, you don't get as many electrons and the meter doesn't move as much.

So the practitioner was actually part of the circuit. A good practitioner would develop the ability to know where the point was, apply the stylus in a consistent way, and once applied, they would hold the pressure constantly and give the meter a chance to move. But in the process of becoming a good practitioner, you also became incredibly intuitive. It was because you were dealing with the body's energy and you would just gain an incredible sensitivity to the energetic situation or status of your patient. You would even get to the point where as you move the stylus to the point, you would know what the meter would indicate when you actually probe the point, you would know what's going to happen before you even did it so that was also one of the interesting things about it, but it was one of the challenging things about it too, because a patient who might be skeptical would watch this and they would experience the doctor pushing the stylus at the acupoint and they would see the meter change and they'd say, you just pushed harder or you just didn't push as hard.

The reason they would say that is because if you push on a point that's compromised, in other words, the part of the body that's associated with that point has a problem. The probing will actually be painful. So it can be an owie experience and then you put the remedy on the test plate or you bring it up on the computer and that's the balancing remedy, the pain goes away. So a patient, even though you're pushing as hard as you were, the patient will say, you just didn't push as hard, because it didn't hurt. Well, the reason it didn't hurt is because we've got the remedy in the circuit now.

But that was problematic because if somebody is not convinced that what you're doing is legitimate and you recommend a course of therapy to them, they're not going to follow through. if they don't follow through, they don't get the benefit. Unlike prescriptive medication where sometimes you say, hey, take this pill and it's going to make your headache go away, natural remedies sometimes take a couple of weeks to work. So you have to have a patient buy in and willing to follow through. If they think that the experience was bogus in the first place, they're just not going to follow through.

So, and that wasn't much of a problem really, because most people, , were me who would come into my clinic. They were there looking for help. Even if I said something that they thought was goofy, they're going to follow through because they want the help. Anyway, so we're back to Schimmel. Schimmel had developed this technique called using filters where you put the sarcode on the test plate.

When we got into the computerized library, we had the ability to use either technique. So you could use a direct Voll technique or you could use the filter technique. You could load a virtual item into the circuit and leave it there like a heart. Then you could go look for a solution or you could not put it in and just test on the heart meridian.

I'm thinking now as we progress forward, the biggest challenge as a manufacturer of the equipment, I was a clinician, I used it, but I was in the business of building this stuff and selling it. The biggest problem was the learning curve. It was a matter of finding practitioners who would be willing to commit themselves to the point of becoming experts and proficient.

Honestly, I just got tired of teaching doctors how to point test. I mean, I taught so many doctors how to point test and I was a guinea pig for a lot of them and some of them were pretty brutal as they were learning how to do it. I thought there's got to be a better way. So, I developed the Hand Cradle and the way the Hand Cradle started was I just built a model out of clay and the challenge was, okay, what are we measuring and how do we interpret the data? Because my background was EAV and I knew that forwards and backwards and up and down. I thought, well, the Hand Cradle is really just going to be the next evolution of EAV. So we're going to have things like an acute response, and a chronic response. We're going to have an indicator drop. We'll have all of those things we had with EAV. So I started to work on the Hand Cradle, and it didn't take me long to realize, no, we don't have any of that stuff. Now, let me tell you a little bit more about the Hand Cradle. It looks like a big mouse. It basically, when you look at it, that it's something you're supposed to put your hand on and it has at the palm, there's a conductive plate at the palm, that's the ground, and then there are five conductive plates that you put each of your five fingers on, and the computer then that runs the Hand Cradle, it runs an inquiry. So it'll measure the energy flow between the ground and your thumb and then the ground in your index finger, and then the ground in your middle finger, your ring finger, and your pinky. It does that over and over again, 50 times a second. What we're looking for is the relationship between each of those points. In other words, we're looking for the coherence that exists between them. When we take the measurement off of the Hand Cradle, we measure a baseline. So we say, okay, your baseline coherence is X. Then what we do is we introduced a stimulus, and the stimulus would be whatever you've selected to be in the circuit. So something out of the database in the computer. Then we measure the coherent state again, and that's called the response. Then we calculate, well did this stimulus make the baseline move to a more coherent or a less coherent position? If it moved to a more coherent position, we give it a plus. If it moved to a less coherent position, we give it a minus. Then we can also determine how plus or how minus.

So let's say that I'm in Bill Roberson's office again and he's using the Hand Cradle. Well he could say, okay, let's just load in all the plants and run a scan. Maybe he's got 300 plants. We run about two items a second. So in 150 seconds, he'll go through a list of 300 plants and he'll see the scores for all 300 plus, minus, and then how plus and how minus. He can say, all right, the ones that are the most minus, those are the ones that created the most decoherence when they were introduced into your energy field. So we're going to start with those. It may have been Oleander, it may have been Pyracantha that showed up, but it gives him now the information that he needs to begin me on a journey of healing using energy medicine techniques. So the measurement process, I mean it took about six months to figure out the algorithm that actually does what I just explained. When I got done, I realized that you cannot measure acute, you can't measure chronic, because we can't see an indicator drop. All we're getting is pluses or minuses on coherence. What we really have with that Hand Cradle is we have a very sophisticated automated kinesiology machine that tells you yes, no, and it tells you how yes and how no and it runs a comparison so you can see that you really like this, but you really like this better.

So the value of it is, there's really three values, I think. The first one was it cut the learning curve down to zero. I mean, you can learn how to run a software program in probably 30 minutes if you're comfortable with computers. You don't have to master point testing because the practitioner is not part of the circuit. That's the second advantage. The second advantage is no patient is going to be saying, you pushed harder because nobody's pushing. The last thing is it gives you more speed. I got pretty fast with EAV, but that's just because I did it a lot but I'm way faster with the new technology, with the Hand Cradle, because it runs at computer speed. It runs a lot faster than I do.

Ashley James (0:31:12.759)

So let's go through some examples. Let's say a woman has a hormone imbalance and she hasn't got any labs. She doesn't want to be put on drugs necessarily. She just wants to know how she could bring her body back into balance and maybe her cycle’s off or she's got PMS or she thinks she's going into pre-menopause but something's up. Is that too general? Not really knowing what the problem is or can someone use this technology sort of having a general idea of what the problem could be, but the root cause might not even be in hormones, it could just be something disrupting hormones like stress and then what's actually creating the stress. So you have to go upstream to find the root cause. How would you know what to plug into the ZYTO software for the Hand Cradle?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:32:06.123)

Well, there are two approaches. One approach is a practitioner will say, I don't want to know anything about the patient until we run the scan because I don't want my interpretation to be biased by what they're thinking. My approach is just the opposite. I want to know what the patient is thinking, what they're experiencing. Do you have a diagnosis from somebody else? What is it? I want to know those things because, when the results come in, I want to be able to relate the results I see to what they think in a way that makes it understandable and credible for them. Back to your question, a woman comes in and she's got hormonal issues, I do acupuncture on her. Acupuncture is really good for that kind of stuff, but there's lots of things that are good for it. I need to say Ashley, the technology is not approved and frankly it's not researched enough for me as a manufacturer to make a claim that it is diagnostic or curative. So yes, you can do what I'm going to tell you here in a minute, but let's say that a doctor ran a ZYTO scan and the woman was having these problems then something happened, she decided to sue the doctor and they went to court. the attorney said to the doctor, well, how did you come up with your diagnosis? He said, well, I ran the ZYTO scan and that's what it indicated. Well, that's not a legitimate defense because the ZYTO technology is not approved to diagnose any particular disease. The reason it's not is because we have not pursued approval because it would be too overwhelming. It's more valuable to a practitioner to have a tool that points you in the right direction than something that gives you the diagnosis. So if I run a scan on a patient and it shows certain things, I'm not going to say, this means you have this disease. It means, well, let's look here first and let's see if we can start to solve your problem by applying what we're seeing. Then if I have to go to court and they say, how did you establish your diagnosis? I would say, well, it was the intake process and it was the labs that I ran and it included the ZYTO, but I made the diagnosis. That's the proper answer there.

Ashley James (0:35:13.497)

Right. Yes, it guides you. Then you as a practitioner would want to follow up with labs to confirm your findings. You do have FDA, your FDA cleared as a wellness scanner. I know you kind of had the lawyers behind you whispering in your ear just now, you can't say this diagnosed treats, cures or whatever, but it guides and gives information in a really non-invasive way. then of course a practitioner would want to continue down the road of labs and discovery. Can you tell us a bit about the FDA clearance you do have?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:35:45.207)

Well, the Hand Cradle is registered with the FDA as a GSR device, Galvanic Skin Response. That's what it does. It just measures galvanic skin response.

That doesn't mean that we can make a diagnosis. It just means we can measure galvanic skin response. When I make the disclaimer, when I let you know that this is not diagnostic and it doesn't treat disease, that's not a tongue in cheek disclaimer. It's really true. A doctor cannot make a definitive diagnosis based on a ZYTO scan. It doesn't do that.

I'll tell you how it works in my practice. I run a scan and if I suspect something, then usually I just run a clinical trial. I don't necessarily back things up with more lab work. If I see something that I think is serious, I'll refer people to someone with more expertise in those areas than me. But most of the time, if you get an energetic profile of a patient with sufficient detail, you will have enough guidance to be able to build a clinical trial that will have a positive impact.

Let's go back to Bill Roberson and his scan and he made the remedy and he said, well, it's probably Oleander and Pyracantha and here's your remedy, let's give it a try. So he doesn't have to say you're allergic to Oleander and Pyracantha, he's just saying, this is what I'm seeing, let's see if this fixes the problem because if it does, that was probably the problem. So you can run a clinical trial without doing a ton of lab work as long as you're not doing something that is dangerous to the patient.

Most of the time, that's what I do. So I'll get a profile through the intake process, through a physical exam. You can know your patients pretty well, of course, with experience, you get better at it, but that's how it works. What we're getting with the ZYTO technology is we're getting an energetic picture of what we call biological preference. So it's not the same as diagnostic information. It's no, your biological preference is that you don't like this or you do like this. If it's a supplement and you do like it, well then let's try it and see if it helps you improve your health.

If a supplement shows up or a remedy or an herb or whatever, that's where the practitioner's knowledge comes in because if you see somebody who comes in and they're having terrible pain and they're having spasms and you test them and magnesium shows up, you go, well, that makes sense. So let's give you some magnesium. But if something weird shows up that you don't have any knowledge of, you might go and study it. See, and that's the cool part. You then study it and you go, I'll be darned. It does actually have an impact on that stuff. So now you're smarter. We're looking at biological preferences and that helps establish then the clinical trial that you might run with a patient.

Ashley James (0:40:04.617)

That's fascinating. Thinking about frequency and the kinesiology or like the body is able to communicate its biological preferences. I really would love some more magnesium, or I really would love some more leafy green vegetables and all the nutrients inside that, or my body does not like coffee or my body dislikes mold, it's having a strong reaction.

Years ago, I read the book, The Cancer Cure That Worked. That's a really tiny book. You can read it all in one session, but it'll blow your mind. How he had discovered that using frequency, he could explode cancer cells. For example, he figured out the frequency of that cancer, the specific cancer in a mouse, then using frequency nullifies it. He would do that with other illnesses. He'd figure out the frequency of that illness and then nullify it with the exact opposite frequency.

All of his research was taken from him by an unnamed government agency and destroyed. It's just wild when we see that so many times when we're onto something big like this, it's wiped out. I sincerely hope that you are protected, your technology is protected, that no unnamed government agency comes after you.

This isn’t new, this concept, the concept of frequency and even kinesiology is something we've actually been doing for quite a while. There's different ways that different practitioners have tapped into this. I've experienced that Nate type of acupressure and using the vials and frequency to retrain the body.

I didn't have a hundred percent positive experience with Nate and actually I don't know anyone who has, but I just still thought it was really interesting. I've had several practitioners use kinesiology on me and my family very accurately. You say, for example, hold up your arm and then you're going to hold this supplement and I can tell you what it is. Then my arms just cannot stay up. It just drops. I lose all the weakness. All the weakness returns to my arm. Then gives me a different remedy.

My arm's super strong. I've had that experience where the body is very clearly communicating what it wants and what it doesn't want. So you've created this in a way that's super easy for a patient and for the clinician to work together instead of having to hold the person's arm and push on the person's arm. Then that person thinks, well, you could just be pushing harder or using that device, or the early on the Voll, where you could just be pushing harder.

This takes all the guesswork, plus it's so quick that you can go through so many plans. I don't know if it was the exact same, and this is back in the 90s, and I sat there for three hours as this machine ran through. I had to wear these electrodes on my body and on my fingers. This was so long ago, it was the late 90s. It took the computer hours and hours and hours to process. Then it gave me this reading: Here's the foods you shouldn't eat and here's the foods you should eat and here's the supplements you should take. So it's been this concept of tapping into the body and the body's biofeedback is really cool. It gives it credibility. It's not new. That's always been inside the body and practitioners have been looking at different ways of tapping into it. You've tapped into it in a way that is very replicable. Now, when did the Cradle first come out? Because you've had it around for a while,

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:44:26.534)

Yes, I think I started working on it in about 2000 and I think we had it built and released in 2004. So we've had it out for 20 years.

Ashley James (0:44:42.670)

Yes, 20 years, nice. So in that time, you've evolved the software, you've gotten a lot of great feedback, obviously you as a practitioner as well. It's great that you so readily work with the technology that you've had a hand in creating. You've evolved this technology though recently, and I want to talk about its recent evolution into the app that I have had the experience with. Can we talk about that?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:45:13.771)

Yes, yes, we were always looking for better ways to accomplish the objective. The objective is to determine biological preferences so people can make smarter decisions on an individual basis.

When do we start this? It could have been seven years ago anyway. We started working on a new technology that allows us to create unique scans without hardware. The first thing we did was we developed a scanning algorithm. That's just a mathematical formula that says, okay, if you start here and go down this list, rank these things according to a response. But in order to make it unique, because if that's where we stopped, every time you run a scan, it would be exactly the same, because our mathematical formula is set, it doesn't change.

In order to make it unique, we had to have some real-time biometric input that would modify that algorithm in a way that for you it would be different than it is for me, and for you it would be different today than it would be yesterday, or is going to be tomorrow. So we looked for other feedback loops that we were familiar with, and I will tell you, we have one technology, it's called EVOX.

That's been around for 15, 16 years. We've got a lot of experience with it. So what it does is it, it does perception reframing and we use voice as the primary input and the primary feedback loop. It turns out that voice is topic specific and voice requires your entire anatomy to make.

If I'm going to say something, I have to think about it. Then I have to engage my thorax and my vocal mechanisms. Sometimes I move my hands and I might put some body language in there. But by the time you actually hear the voice when I'm expressing, all the information, all the perceptions, all the beliefs about that topic are carried in the energy of my voice. You may have had the experience of listening to somebody speak and you go, eh, this just doesn't sound quite right. There's something goofy here. When you have that experience, more often than not, what you're sensing is that the words you are hearing do not match the energy that you're feeling.

In other words, this person is probably either lying or they're hiding something. You can pick that up. Well, what happens with EVOX is that the most common clinical application is that every disease process has an emotional component.

Most of those emotional components exist because of a perception that we have. If we can reframe the perception, then it will release the emotional component to the health condition. So to give you an example, I remember a woman who came into my clinic, she had chronic low back pain and had it for 20 years at least. She had been all over the country. She spent thousands of dollars trying to get relief and nothing worked.

So when she came into the clinic, we put her on a program, we're going to do the right remedies, the right supplements. We're going to do some acupuncture massage and we're going to do EVOX. So we had a particular protocol we put her on for perception reframing.

It turns out that this woman, when she was a child, was born into an incredibly dysfunctional family. As a child, she took on the perception that it was her fault. So as the child who was the recipient of all this dysfunction, she felt responsible. I don't know if this is actually the case because this EVOX is not psychoanalysis. You don't get into people's heads. But based on my experience with this patient, I think that she was holding on to her low back pain because it was her subconscious way of punishing herself for the dysfunction that she experienced as a child.

As soon as that perception was reframed, all of our therapies started to work. In three weeks, frankly, in three weeks, this woman was out of pain. Well, why couldn't anybody else do this? Well, she probably went to some really smart places and they did some really incredible things. But the problem was she sabotaged everything that happened because she had to hold onto the pain as punishment. Well, that's what perception reframing does.

So we had a lot of experience with voice and we knew that voice was absolutely unique. so we built a technology that used voice as the primary biometric input that was then appended to our algorithm. So when you would run the scan, we would then prioritize the results in a way that was unique to you at that point in time. Then we took it a little bit further and we said, well, if we can do this with voice, we should be able to do this with other biometric inputs. Well, it turns out that your pulse rate is uniquely biometric, the variability in your heart rate is unique to you at any moment in time. Your blood pressure is unique. There's all kinds of things and all of these things, it turns out, can be read by pointing a camera on a phone at your face and the camera then records this information. It takes about 30 seconds.

We then take all of that information, we turn it into a mathematical attachment that then gets appended to our scanning algorithm, and boom, we run the scan that way. I think that's probably what you experienced. You pointed at your face and the little circle went around and said, hey, we got your reading and away you go.

Ashley James (0:52:43.324)

Going back to what you said about your patient with the chronic back pain, I had a similar experience about 16 years ago, I worked with a client who came in with absolute chronic back pain and they wanted to do some major surgery, fuse her back and I palpated her lower back and her quadratus lumborum on one side was hard as a rock and cold.

It was ischemic, there was no blood flow. It was just minimal blood flow. The other side was soft and pink and malleable.

I had recently dived into the world of Dr. John E. Sarno's book, Healing Back Pain, where he figured out that there's no anatomical reason why people should have back pain and even the surgeries were a failure, but they noted ischemia. They noted that there was an emotional component that was unconscious to the patient but when you get to the root cause and you, you said, you do the reframing and you get to resolve and release that negative emotion, the unconscious mind lets go of the muscle. The unconscious mind is holding on to, is creating the ischemia, is creating the chronic pain. So I did a whole breakthrough session with her, did emotional work.

I'm a master practitioner and trainer in NLP and timeline therapy.When we got to guilt and I noticed every time she talked about things that she felt guilty about, her pain would go up. because I'd always ask her, and what on a scale of one to 10, where's your pain? So when we got to releasing guilt, her pain went from an eight to a zero. I went, okay, can I feel your back? She stood up, lifted her shirt up so I could palpate the lumbar spine. I saw they would go from white to pink. I saw the blood flow come back in and I felt her back and both sides were warm.

That was the day she ended. Now she has been on Tylenol 3s for over 15 years daily. She no longer needed her pain meds and it was so cool. That was my first experience helping someone out of chronic pain from an emotional event.

When you say that by this technology that listens to your voice, that it could then help us pinpoint where the unconscious trauma and help reframe them. That is so beautiful because how many people are walking around on meds when their problem lies in the emotional mental body.

We have layers of our consciousness, layers of our healing, layers of our existence. We have an energetic body, spiritual body, we have a physical body, mental body, and emotional body, and yet most medicine is just in the physical body. But that's not necessarily where the root is and where the healing needs to be. So we should really not discredit the work we could be doing on the energetic level, emotional level, mental level and spiritual level. So many times healing takes place there. Then as a result, we have healing in the physical body.

I love that this technology is something that's readily available. Now, talking about the scan. So yes, Jennifer Saltzman at takeyoursupplements.com gave me access to the scan. If anyone listening wants to try it, please go to takeyoursupplements.com. You can talk to Jennifer for free, you can have a free consultation with her. She's wonderful. She makes using this technology affordable and she's just a pleasure to work with and all the other coaches there are as well.

She gave me access to this app and it was very easy to use. Then after 30 seconds of holding my phone, it has to be a newer phone. It can't be a 15 year old phone or whatever. It has to be a newer one. It has a better camera, but it then showed my pulse rate, my breath rate. It listed off all these things. It's reading those micro movements, even though I was being as still as possible. It was reading so many things about me, but there's more than just the metrics there that we can see.

It started telling me, where in my health I'm weaker and I could use some more support and where I'm doing well and it linked me to specific herbs, essential oils, supplements, and even therapies that would best serve me to come back into balance. It was very insightful. So can you tell me a bit about how a technology that's observing my face for 30 seconds could be so insightful?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (0:57:57.105)

Well, it's the same approach. What we're looking for is biological preference. So again, it's not diagnostic. When you look at that report, we're not saying, you've got a problem in your heart or you've got a digestive problem. What we're saying is your response to this item, we call it a library item, but as we scanned all of these items, you showed a less than optimum result.

In other words, your biological preference for digestion, let's say, that was your weakest link or that was your lowest response. Therefore, we're going to pay more attention to that because the answer is, why do you respond that way? Then we look for the opposite with supplements. Okay, what supplements are you showing a high biological preference for? Then we can match the two up where, well, if we put this supplement in the circuit with this digestive component or these digestive components, what kind of an effect does it have? If it has a normative effect, then you'll see that the biological preference goes up in the digestive side. We say, okay, well, that's a positive influence.

So, the recommendation is this supplement. Again, it's not saying, you have this disease and this cures it. It's just your biological preference indicates to us that you're weaker here and this supplement resolves that weakness.

Ashley James (0:59:42.517)

What's interesting about working with Jennifer Saltzman at takeyoursupplements.com, she had determined what she thought would be best for me. Then a lot of it was confirmed with, based on her, the questionnaire where we go through and we figure out, the symptoms of your body is a language. Your body is always speaking to us. Our body is always communicating. We just have to know how to hear it. So some of the things she already intuitively knew based on those metrics would be good and then it was confirmed in this scan. Then there were a few that surprised both of us, but made sense once we looked at it. It was, yes, that would actually be a really good therapy or supplement or herb or whatever it was listing off. But it was detailed and really interesting.

How often could someone get a scan? So let's say you get a scan and you integrate the top five supplements or herbs or essential oils, and then you go for some of the top holistic therapies that are listed as the most beneficial for you at the time. You're doing that on a regular basis. Would they rescan once a month, once a week, every day? How does that work to optimally guide us?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:01:06.503)

I would say you want to do it maybe every four to six weeks. Here's the reason. Your body moves energetically very quickly. Energy is the most yang component of your body, which means it's the fastest to move. Your tissue is the most yin. That means it's the slowest to move. When you introduce therapy into your being, you're going to move your energy very quickly. But it might take two weeks for your tissue to make the change.

So if you're scanning, and the scan is an energetic scan, we're taking energetic information and then converting it into this algorithm to make the scan. So if I scan today and I started a supplement regime, and then I scanned tomorrow and changed my supplement regime and then scanned the next day and made a change appropriately, I would actually make myself sick because my body would never catch up to my energetic position. So when a patient comes in, if I'm going to give them some supplements that are intended to last for four weeks, I don't want to do another scan on them until they've had a chance to take all those supplements because some people respond quickly, but most people, it can take up to two weeks for supplements to actually start doing their work. The other reason is I don't want patients to come in and if I scan and say, you need some new supplements and they haven't finished the ones I gave them, they're going to think, he's just trying to sell me a bunch of supplements. That's not the purpose. The purpose is to help you get better. Let's give your body time to use what's recommended before we look for a new recommendation. The short answer is every four to six weeks is enough.

Ashley James (1:03:18.325)

Yes, I thought it was really interesting. My son, the top five things were actually herbs and essential oils, nothing to do with supplements for him. That was really neat to see. My husband was a combination of herbs and essential oils. I had some supplements that I'd already been taking and then a few more plant extracts. So it's not always, here, you got to take your vitamins. , it's not for everyone. It's different, which I thought was just really neat because again, that skeptic in me is going, this 30 second camera scan on my face. What are you going to tell me? Surprisingly a lot. I want to understand a little bit more about this technology because I can grasp that if my hands are on a cradle and there's five finger pads on the ground, I can understand, okay, the computer is doing these frequencies into my hands and it's a galvanic skin response and it's testing my physiology against these frequencies of these different therapeutics. I can understand that, but I still don't 100% understand how the camera scanning my face is testing me against that. Can we go a bit deeper? Is this proprietary?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:04:43.950)

Well, no, we can go deeper. It's really a continuum. You mentioned it earlier, most of what medicine does is it just addresses the physical body. It doesn't look at any of these other things. But we all access all of those things all the time in our daily lives. I mean, your son may walk in and you look at him and say, wow, you don't look like you feel well.

He doesn't have to say, hey, I'm not feeling well. You can see it. You may know intuitively what you need to do to help him feel better because you have a connection with him and it comes through.

As a practitioner who uses energy medicine on a regular basis, I mentioned earlier, you get really intuitive. I don't have to touch a patient to tell you where the problem is. I can just run my hand half inch and inch above their body, and as I run it down, I'll tell you, that's a problem, that's a problem. That has come just from, I mean, it may be something I was born with, but it's come in a lot in just practice.

The subtle things are as meaningful as the grosser things. The emotional health is a telling indicator, just like the physical health is a telling indicator, the symptoms. Symptoms are just the body's best attempt at dealing with the current situation. So the reason when you get a cold is because you manifest the symptoms of a cold, which is your body's best attempt to deal with the cold.

Emotional symptoms are the same. Energetic symptoms are the same. So you can measure things at these more subtle levels. But remember, what we're looking for when we take that data that comes out of the camera, we take your pulse rate, we actually take your blood pressure, we take your heart rate variability, we take your respiration. All of those things are unique to you at that point in time.

That data then is appended to our scanning algorithm, which then runs the scan that determines your biological preferences. So we're taking the input that we get from the camera, and we're then applying it in a way that creates the scan.

Ashley James (1:07:24.361)

Is it scanning your eye at all, like your geology or is it scanning meridians or blood flow, micro blood flow to parts of the face? What is it reading when it's observing the face?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:07:43.368)

Well, there are multiple points on the face that it targets. Then it reads changes in things that occur at those points. Mostly it's blood flow. Mostly it's respiration. But there's a tremendous amount of information you can pick up from those inputs.

Ashley James (1:08:03.375)

So it's picking up information, but maybe you could explain. So it's different from the Hand Cradle because the Hand Cradle, my understanding is this is a bit of a biofeedback, It's giving a stimulus and then testing the response.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:08:17.765)

Right.

Ashley James (1:08:19.581)

In the face scan, is it doing the same thing or is this simply gathering information? How does it do that biofeedback where it goes, Ashley likes lavender essential oil or Ashley would really benefit from more magnesium. How does it read that? Because we're using our own smartphone to scan our face.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:08:41.625)

The difference is it's a different algorithm. The Hand Cradle uses an algorithm that is a stimulus response. The new technology, the link, uses the real-time unique biometric input to append an algorithm that will then run the scan in its completion, start to finish. Then the scan, because of the way the algorithm is built, then after the fact, we go back and run the comparative scan. So instead of doing it in real time, it's all done after the fact, if that makes sense.

Ashley James (1:09:23.762)

I mean, I understand the words that are coming out of your mouth, but how I understand kinesiology, I am not the expert in this. You're the expert. I just want to make sure all the listeners grasp it. So with kinesiology, you say, okay, body, do you like magnesium? The body goes, yes, I like magnesium. It's giving that response back, that biofeedback is happening. So you're saying that it's testing it after the fact?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:10:01.036)

Yes.

Ashley James (1:10:02.799)

I don't fully understand how that works, but I'm so eager to figure it out. If you could maybe break this down a bit so I could understand it.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:10:14.806)

It's kind of like Schrodinger's cat. We lean more and more as we continue to develop the technology. We lean more and more onto the quantum concepts and quantum applications. So it really is the experiment with the cat. If you open it, the cat dies, and if you don't, the cat lives. But you can run things in a way that time is, I'm trying to think of the right way to say this, time becomes less of a factor.

Ashley James (1:11:05.229)

Fascinating. The observation of the universe changes the outcome. That's what they see in quantum physics. So when it scans the face and then it runs the algorithm it doesn't matter about time so much because then it's seeing this is the response to these things, which blows my mind, but I believe in quantum physics. So I'm all for this.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:11:33.707)

Yes. The other cool thing about us is at a conscious level, we process about 200,000 pieces of information a second. At a subconscious level, we process over 400 million pieces a second. So we're at least 2,000 times smarter than we think. In other words, the smartest part of me is the part of me that I don't have any conscious connection to. Because we're tapping into quantum fields and making applications from those theories, we're not talking to you consciously. We're talking to you subconsciously. So you can give us information that may be timeless. We can create a scan that then warps time in a way that the scan comes out with information that's valuable, because we do show you your biological preference and to some degree cause and effect. Again, it's not diagnostic. We're not trying to tell you you have this disease and this is the cure. All we're saying is your biological preference indicates you're weak here, you like this, if we put the two together, this is what happens to your biological preference.

Ashley James (1:12:52.774)

Why is there a need for us for a re-scans if there's no need for time?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:13:02.018)

Well, we're not completely timeless, Ashley. Yes, and I think that as we evolve as humans, we might become more timeless in our concepts and applications. But I do find, as a person, I do find comfort in getting an update that I can see at a conscious level and making conscious decisions about. So I think it's all part and parcel the same.

Ashley James (1:13:39.825)

So I love that you thought, hey, how can we take this to the next level? Everyone has a smartphone in their hand. How can we make it really accessible? This is before the pandemic when everyone was doing telehealth. You started developing this. So this is something where you can work with a practitioner anywhere around the world. That's really neat. That makes it very, very accessible. Can you give some stories of success or recent experiences where this technology brought great insight and helped that person get closer to their true health.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:14:22.562)

I remember a young woman who was probably in her, I guess she was in her early 30s. She was very compromised, very weak. She had been to a lot of places and she got temporary help, but nothing seemed to work.

I ran a scan on her and it was obvious to me that she was so weak that it would be very easy to over-treat her. So what I ended up doing, I ended up scanning her acupoints. I took the acupoint that was showing the most positive response. In other words, this points to the one that she was really most interested in having treated.

Then I took my smallest needle and I put that needle in that point. About five minutes later, I took the needle out and said, okay, you're done for today. Come on back. Now see, I was treating this woman energetically. So the next day I had her come back in again. If I was treating her with supplements, I would not have done it this way. But I was concerned about over-treating her with any kind of supplements. So the next day I had her come back in. I did the same thing.

Then I moved into some homeopathic remedies, and then I moved into some supplements. Well, this woman, I'm trying to think how long it took us to get her turned around, maybe six, eight weeks.

I didn't see her every day. I did the next day and the day after that. But then I said, okay, come back in three days. So maybe twice a week I was seeing her. I was just spoon feeding her baby steps. We took her from a basket case to back to full functioning. She was actually suffering from chronic fatigue is what it amounted to. It was just a different approach to chronic fatigue.

Another woman, a young woman in her late 20s came into the clinic. We were doing a fair amount of EVOX work and she had heard about it. She came in because her marriage was on the rocks. So I did a scan on her and the supplements that showed up and the scan results made me suspicious that she was suffering from some kind of mood disorder, some depression. I said, have you had any depression? She said, yes. She said, I had my second child about six months ago and I've been suffering from postpartum depression ever since. I said, okay, well, these remedies make sense. We'll give you these.

Then we did an EVOX session. There's a particular protocol that's called transgenerational perception reframing. I won't tell you the whole protocol, but the bottom line is it turns out that her mother was the first person that we wanted to reframe. So she went through the process, reframed on her mother, and went on her way. She had the supplements, and I said, okay, I'll see you in a week. She came back a week later.

She looked better. She had more shin in her eyes. She had more light in her eyes and her complexion was brighter. I said, hey, you look better. How are you feeling? She said, I'm feeling better. But she said a funny thing happened last week. When I went home, my mom called. Then she stopped and she paused to see if I would react. I didn't react. Okay, your mom called. Then she said, and we talked for two hours. She stopped again and looked for my reaction. I didn't react because I've got four daughters and they can talk to their mom for two hours too. So what? She said, no, you don't understand. She said, my mom and I hate each other.

If she calls me on the phone, which never happens, in 30 seconds we're screaming at each other. So the fact that she called the day I went home was crazy. The fact that we could talk for two hours was a miracle. Well, that's what happens when you do perception reframing. It actually changes your energy posture, which then changes your field position in the zero point field and all kinds of amazing things happen.

But we got her past the depression. Her marriage hit solid ground and it was good. Her husband owned his own business and I think they were having some financial problems, but that was resolved. We got her past the postpartum stuff and she was a happy camper.

It's a lot of fun to do holistic medicine because you see changes in people's lives that are beyond just the symptoms. It's really gratifying. I love what I do.

Ashley James (1:19:56.697)

Could practitioners learn how to do EVOX and then do it virtually, not in person? Or do you have to be in person to do EVOX with them?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:20:10.164)

No, all of our technology can be used remotely, including EVOX. So with EVOX, I could be here in my clinic on my computer. You could be at your home, and we could run an EVOX session between the two of us.

Ashley James (1:20:30.368)

Oh my gosh. That's so neat. Years ago, and her name escapes me, I did an interview with this woman who was a PhD and she had figured out that she created a computer program that could listen to anyone's voice and the computer program would say, what's up with that person? So if someone's about to have a heart attack or someone has, for example, cancer or some sort of real major disruption in their body. It could pick that up in the voice. That's why I started to learn, there's so much we don't see, but that makes sense because you said, you can hear someone and get a gut feeling something's off or, I think it's 64, 68% of communications unconscious that we're observing micro changes in the face. There's blood flow changes as we talk, as emotions go through us. There's different blood flow will enter different parts of the face that micro muscles will tighten and relax. We don't do it consciously. But unconsciously we can perceive that in others and we can hear it in people's voices. So it's so interesting that we could tap into and listen to someone and get this deep information about what's going on in the unconscious in order to help them come to some major healing.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:22:03.372)

Yes, it turns out that words are probably the least significant aspect of voice. People who are listening to us, they know what part of the world you were born in because of your accent, and for me too. They know that you're a woman and I'm a man. I bet they could guess our age within five years. They know our general state of health and they know what kind of a mood we're in. They know if we're enjoying this conversation. All of those things, we don't have to express in words. That just comes through. It takes maybe three or four words, and you can know all those things. So the voice has an incredible amount of information.

Ashley James (1:22:47.646)

A few months ago, my husband's family, who is from Chile and speaks Spanish, came to visit for a few weeks. I don't speak Spanish. I know how to ask for where the bathroom is, but that's pretty much it. They were trying to be polite and speak English, when the family was talking amongst themselves, they were always talking Spanish. I couldn't believe how much I could understand based on body language, based on the tone of their voice, based on how they were looking at each other. I could really pick up on a lot of the communication. I played a game of guess what they're talking about. A few times I interjected and answered a question in English accurately, because the mom was asking the daughter or something like that. I would interject and be like they have this on the menu or the bathrooms over there or we're going to go do that after this activity and they'd look at me and then they'd scan me with their eyes up and down. Does she understand us? I had so much fun with that. It's really interesting how much you can pick up when I'm just going to see how much I can perceive. See how much my unconscious mind can let me know about this communication.

Then I also just didn't care if I got it wrong. I was just going to jump in and pretend. I knew what they were talking about and I couldn't believe how many times I got it right. So there is so much more to our supercomputer between our ears than we even understand. We're just scratching the surface and understanding. I love that you're tapping into this with people.

Where do you see this technology going? Where do you see the evolution of this taking us?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:24:46.457)

Well, hopefully to a healthier place. The goal really is to improve the quality of life for patients and practitioners, and that's the goal. If we can improve physical health, emotional health, mental health, that would make the world a better place.

Ashley James (1:25:09.194)

How accurate is the ZYTO app scan? Have you tested it against labs and been like well, is that person really deficient in this? Or is there a way that you have figured out the accuracy of it? Are there times it's wrong when it comes to like, it'll say, you have unresolved anger, resolve it. Well, I don't feel angry. I don't know why it would say that, or is that really unconscious and it's deep in there and it's letting me know that there's something I don't even know about myself. So I'm just wondering, through the years have you tested its accuracy?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:25:55.395)

Validation is primarily clinical. The challenge is that energy precedes everything else. You probably have said, I feel I'm coming down with something. Lo and behold, two days later, you got full on symptoms. Then you say, yes, I feel I've turned the corner. I feel better. then two days later, you're better.

Well, when you say I feel, that's because you're sensing your energy shift. There isn't a lab that can test an energy shift. There may be, but we haven't looked for one. But what we're doing is we're measuring energetic input. So the most valid evidence that we are accurate, within an acceptable degree is that clinically the data is validated. In other words, the person comes in with cramps, magnesium shows up, you give them magnesium and their cramps go away. That's clinical evidence that the information we got was accurate or had value. So what we tell people is, I can guarantee that the information is consistent because it's based on solid mathematical formulas that don't change. The thing that we don't claim is, again, to be diagnosing a disease or identifying a treatment for a disease. But we do get data that has value clinically because over the years we've been doing this, our customers and my own experience, it bears it out. It does have value. You get coincidental stuff, you mentioned with your son or your husband. You run the scan and you go, I'll be darned. This makes a lot of sense. I mean, you just see that. You see that kind of stuff.

Ashley James (1:28:09.532)

Yes, and there's no harm in it. There's no invasiveness whatsoever. Everything it's recommending is helpful. So you're either going to get positive results or no results, but at least, it's not taking a pharmaceutical and having negative results. We're moving in a positive direction with some good feedback. We're just looking for what's the body communicating? How can we listen to the body in a new way, in a deeper way and help it come back into balance? I love that you say, it's really picking up on that energetic field, which is where everything starts, and then we're helping the body come back into balance. We're also helping the energetic body come back into balance.

I've had that experience. I had a client, we just helped her energetic body come back into balance and all her physical symptoms went away within 24 hours. Boom! She had been suffering for six years and all it took was an energetic shift. That was just wild wild. The symptoms are late but the treatment wasn't physical, the treatment was energetic. So it's just really fascinating. A lot of people who don't understand that our body is an electrical being, it sounds like new age. For some people, it's anti-Christian. It's new age. This is what the Bible warns us against. I'm , I am all for making sure that what you're doing is in alignment with your religion. I happen to be a Christian. But I also understand Jesus lay hands and healed and he said, you are going to do this too. You will do greater things. It's like our birthright as Christians is to do healing. So we have to recognize that we're not just physical meat sacks, that we are these spiritual beings living in this beautiful body that was gifted to us by God, that's my belief.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:30:29.041)

Yes, me too.

Ashley James (1:30:31.578)

Know that you are more than this meat sack. You are so much more. If you've never had an experience with the energetic realm, if you've ever landed in a clinic or a hospital where they had to attach electrodes to you, guess what? They were measuring energy in your body. It's just amazing. We of course have energy in our body. They talk about how much electricity it takes to run our brain.

I can't remember how many batteries, but it was a handful of D cell batteries, what the body has to produce to run the nervous system. Of course we're electrical beings. So we have a physical body, but we have so much more than that. We are so much more than that. Just make sure that the medicine that you're using addresses not just your physical body, but it's bringing your whole being back into balance.

I love that this is another way to guide us, to listen to the body and guide us. Dr. Vaughn Cook, is there anything else you want to make sure that you convey that you share about the technology, the ZYTO, the EVO? So you've got the Hand Cradle. There's also this app. So those who are listening who are practitioners can plug into this and use this technology, either in person or virtually with their clients. Then for those who are not practitioners who want to experience this for themselves, please go to takeyoursupplements.com. They'll make it very affordable, very affordable for you to experience this and to be guided also by the practitioners and health coaches to help you determine what path to go on in terms of supplements and diet and lifestyle to support your body's ability to heal itself. Speak to those who are super interested. Is there anything else you wanted to make sure that you conveyed today?

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:32:40.590)

Wow, we had a fun time, Ashley. I think we've conveyed a lot of stuff. I guess it works. Maybe that's the final message. That's sometimes the most amazing thing about it, is that it actually makes a difference. It actually works in a clinical setting. For people who just want to have better health, it does make sense to listen to your body on an individual basis.

Ashley James (1:33:11.927)

Right. It's such a non -invasive approach, it's worth giving it a try. It's worth exploring. I love that. Just be willing to try new things and see what happens. So thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been such a pleasure. I'm very much looking forward to having you back when you come out with new technology that you want to come share with us. We would love to have you.

Dr. Vaughn Cook (1:33:42.333)

I'll make a note of that Ashley, it'll be fun to be back.

Outro:

These are the same supplements that I have been using myself personally, my family and my clients for the last twelve and a half years. This is the same supplement that helped me to overcome my chronic diseases. I used to have type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections, polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, and I don't have any of those things anymore infertility, and I don't have any of those things anymore. The holistic doctors that informed these supplements discovered that the root cause of disease is a lack of key nutrients. There are 90 essential nutrients the body needs and we're not getting them from our food anymore because of the farming practices of the last hundred years. So, no matter how healthy we eat, we're still missing what our body needs to create optimal health. Because you listen to this health podcast and you're looking for health solutions, you will love working with the team at takeyoursupplements.com. These are health coaches that overcame just like me, overcame their own health issues using, of course, eating healthy, healthy lifestyle. But the key, fundamental thing that they added were these supplements. These supplements encompass all 90 essential nutrients and when you talk to your health coach, they will help to customize a plan specifically to your needs and your health goals. You will start feeling amazing right away. Within the first month of taking these supplements, everyone notices better sleep, more mental clarity, better energy, overall sense of well-being that takes over their life, and they are so happy that they got on these supplements. I want you to give it a try. There's a money-back guarantee and there's amazing health coaches waiting to help you at takeyoursupplements.com and it's free to talk to them. So what are you waiting for? Go to takeyoursupplements.com right now. Sign up for a free consultation and in a month, you could be feeling on top of the world, just like I did.

I was so sick, I felt so horrible and I overcame that. I had to obviously make healthy choices around every area of my life. I had to change my diet, I had to change my lifestyle, but I needed to fill in those nutrient gaps, and that's where takeyoursupplements.com comes in. They help you to make sure that you're getting all 90 essential nutrients, so every cell in your body, all 37.2 trillion cells in your body, will be bathed in all the nutrients that they need so that you can live an optimal life full of health and vitality at any age. Go to takeyoursupplements.com and talk to one of them today. They can help you right now to begin to make that health transformation. That's takeyoursupplements.com.

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520 Jeremy Slate, Host of Create Your Own Life Podcast, Shares Keys For Holistic Media Success For Alternative Health Practitioners Navigating The MSM Suppression of the Natural Health Space 0

May 9, 2024

Get The Minerals Your Body Needs: TakeYourSupplements.com

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Check Out My Latest Book: Addicted To Wellness

https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

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Jeremy's website: https://commandyourbrand.com

520: Navigating Media: Jeremy Slate’s Guide for Alternative Health Practitioners

https://learntruehealth.com/navigating-media-jeremy-slates-guide-for-alternative-health-practitioners/

In this episode, Jeremy Slate, founder of Command Your Brand, shares his journey from wrestler to powerlifter and discusses the importance of supporting holistic health practitioners amid growing censorship and misinformation. He highlights how search engines are delisting holistic health websites and emphasizes achieving natural health without pharmaceuticals. Jeremy also offers insights on maintaining motivation, mental toughness, and the value of camaraderie in fitness. Additionally, he explores how holistic practitioners can effectively communicate their message using alternative platforms like Rumble despite challenges from censorship and pharmaceutical influence.

Highlights:

Supporting Holistic Health Practitioners and Wellness
Censorship of Alternative Health Information
Evolution of Podcasting Platforms
Censorship Concerns on YouTube
Importance of Personal Engagement in Media
Leveraging Media Opportunities for Growth
Improve Communication Skills Through Practice

Intro:

Are you tired of guessing your way through supplements, feeling each choice is just another shot in the dark? Unlock your health potential at takeyoursupplements.com. Here we don't just sell supplements, we customize wellness. Connect with a true health coach who tailors your nutritional path based on your unique health goals and challenges. From fatigue to vitality, from confusion to clarity. Start your transformation today. Visit takeyoursupplements.com and discover how feeling amazing is just one free consultation away. That's takeyoursupplements.com.

Ashley James (0:00:40.006)

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 520. I am so excited for today's guest. We have Jeremy Slate on the show. Him and I have become friends through the years. He has a company called Command your Brand. Before he got into helping people me and other holistic health practitioners to market themselves, he was a competitive powerlifter and at some point pulled a tank. We're going to talk about that. We're going to have some fun today talking about different concepts, but I think it's really important that we definitely discuss how to support holistic health practitioners and anyone in the holistic health space, because in the last few years, they have been under attack.

Now I don't know if you have gotten your tinfoil near you, but I'd like you to go ahead and fold your little tinfoil hat with me, because I know I always sound like a conspiracy theorist when I say this. But when you look deeper, you see that Google has delisted major health websites.

Dr. Mercola, do you remember him completely disappeared. He's still there, but Google just will not let you find him, he used to be the number one search for many years. He's an amazing database of health information and so many other holistic doctors in the last four or five years have been delisted and what has replaced it is mainstream media, pharmaceutical based medicine but the people you who are listening to the show you want to figure out how to get so healthy that your body doesn't need drugs, .

You want to get so healthy that you live to be 99 plus years old in the prime of your health even then, and I'm friends with people in their 80s who still downhill ski and run marathons and it's possible and you can do it. Jeremy Slate's going to be one of those people as well. Jeremy, it's so good to have you on the show.

Jeremy Slate (0:02:50.700)

Hey, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me and it's funny you talk about people in their 80s downhill skiing. You should see my six year old hit double black diamonds. She is incredible.

Ashley James (0:03:02.106)

That's so awesome. I love the idea that throughout life, no matter how old we are, we want to be able to just do whatever we want. You want to go skiing? Great. You want to go swim, you want to go bike, you want to go run a marathon. Part of health is not having limitations, not being limited, and wherever you are in your health journey, get up and start moving. I actually started 75 Hard. Have you heard of that, Jeremy?

Jeremy Slate (0:03:30.512)

My cousin just did that not long ago. He lost 50 something pounds. I'm really proud of him.

Ashley James (0:03:34.048)

Yes. People do lose weight and gain muscle, but that's not why I'm doing it. I'm doing it for the mental toughness which is the whole purpose of it. It's two 45-minute workouts a day, no matter what, and then there's a bunch of other rules and what's really interesting is do that voice that that says, oh, I don't know, I'm too tired or I'm too busy, and that goes out the window because it becomes your priority, no matter what, to schedule two 45-minute workouts, no matter what you got going on and it's been wild. I feel amazing. I feel absolutely amazing. My husband joined me in doing it and I can tell you that the freedom you get mentally when you commit to building your health and taking your health to the next level is so worth it. There's this personal, emotional, mental, physical and spiritual growth that comes from putting your health first.

Jeremy, at some point in your life you put your health first, you're a competitive powerlifter and you pulled a tank. Tell us some stories that came from that time in your life.

Jeremy Slate (0:04:44.871)

Well, I think it's important to understand how I got there . So I was a wrestler in school and I'm not a big guy. I'm 5'7 on a good day, usually probably 5'6 more realistically and I wrestled 119 until by the time I graduated I wrestled 140. But to keep a growing high school kid at that weight, what I was doing was not healthy. I was eating large quantities of food and then throwing up that food to stay on weight.

So I was not taking good care of myself. So by the time I graduated the thing I really wanted to do was take better care of myself. So I actually got into lifting because I want to take better care of myself. So eating better, working out better, and the thing I found was I'm more of an ecto mesomorph, so I'm actually really predisposed to build muscle but stay lean. So I found out, the more I did, the better I ate, the more muscle I gained. And by the time I was 20, 22, somewhere around 21, 22, I was 215 at 8% body fat. So I was a house.

It made going to theme parks really rough because, number one, I got really angry if I couldn't bring my little cooler to every place and number two, I had to wear Under Armour shorts because if my thighs rubbed it was a real pain in the butt. But for me, it was a really big part of my life. I had a lot of fun doing it. And you mentioned pulling the army tank. I pulled an 80,000-pound army tank on the back of an 18-wheeler to raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project. Again, I'm 165 now. I've upped my caloric intake a little bit because I'm trying to get back to about 180, because it's a healthier weight for me. So I'm not lifting weights now as I was then, though I'm still working out just as hard. At my top I was benching 455 on a single, squatting 705, and then deadlifting 635.

Ashley James (0:06:42.920)

I can't even fathom that. I have trouble lifting my son who feels I'm lifting a tank. He's nine years old. This kid's growing a bean, but it just gives you perspective that wherever you are, pick something up and lift it and then go, no matter how heavy this feels. In a year from now this is going to feel like a feather.

Jeremy Slate (0:07:10.836)

And I think that's a vital point, because when you're in good shape, people are like, what do you do? What do you bench? How do you get that? And the thing I always tell people is the number one way you get strong is first of all, eating , that's vital. If you're not putting enough fuel in your body, you're not going anywhere. But the other thing is it's simple, it's called linear progression. What does that mean? Two and a half pounds to five pounds a week for ten years in strength and you'll get strong. But it's going to take you three years, four years, five years, ten years to get strong. So if you're willing to put in the time, put in the effort and take care of yourself, you're going to do very well. But you progress forward in a straight line, improving a little bit every time.

Ashley James (0:07:52.584)

I love that and stick with it. Set a goal and stick with it, because it's so easy to get discouraged if you don't see results fast enough. I like to focus on results that have nothing to do at first with measuring something because if you think, oh, I'm going to gain a pound of muscle or I'm going to lose a pound of fat, and then you get on the scale and you haven't, and scales are so inaccurate, because what's it measuring? If you haven't taken an extra bowel movement today. That could be just poop weight. And those scales that have the little metal pads and then they tell you this is your percentage, those are so bogus.

Jeremy Slate (0:08:36.363)

The body fat percentage scales are worthless. The best way is a caliper. Calipers are actually effective, but the scales are worthless because a lot of them actually read the water content as your body fat. So if you drank too much water that day, it’s going to be stupid too.

Ashley James (0:08:52.771)

I know, I went through some really good workouts this week and I gained two pounds overnight. That could be anything, that could be water retention. But my app said, because I have one of those stupid scales, it was actually gifted to me by a company that wanted me to promote it and I have to test it first.

Jeremy Slate (0:09:14.026)

Oh, I'm one of those two. I don't promote anything I haven't used.

Ashley James (0:09:16.702)

I don't promote anything I haven't used, but I also definitely don't promote things that I don’t believe in and haven’t helped me. And this thing told me just this morning that I gained two pounds of fat overnight. I'm sorry. I meticulously measure what I eat, my input and my output, and I just laughed. And so, normally, if you go on a scale and you're exercising every day and you were gaining weight and gaining weight, you would give up, or you'd say this isn't working, or you'd try a different diet and you'd switch gears. But that input is incorrect, and so at first your body is going to go haywire and because you got inflammation, you've broken down some tissue, because you're doing new activities, you're sore. And the water in you has changed, you're drinking more water, you're releasing excess stagnant water, there's all kinds of changes, but a scale isn't a great measurement of your progression, at least in your first few weeks.

Jeremy Slate (0:10:15.853)

On the weight side, I've tried every app out there. I'm not a big fan of doing things on smartphones. I literally have a spiral notebook. I have a stack of spiral notebooks that I've used the last 20 years of my life, where I track what a workout was and I'm meticulous in the way of okay. So I got five reps of that, but, the fourth one, I had a spot. Or the fifth one I had a spot, or, I wasn't as strong today. So if I'm not as strong that day, but I know in order to go forward I have to get two extra reps, I'm going to do a rest pause, meaning I'm going to re-rack the weight, I'm going to wait 30 seconds and I'm going to do one rep, re-rack the weight, wait 30 seconds, another rep. So you have to figure out what are the things I’m doing to advance myself too. If you don’t know what you did, week after week which is one of the number one things people aren't tracking in fitness. They don't know what their workout was last week and the little things matter, was this hard? Were you not in the right slot for the exercise? And what I mean by that, most people bench press too high, where they're pushing everything with their front delts and you wonder why they blow out their shoulders. The slot is actually right below your pectorals where the bar should actually be hitting your chest. So these are all things that are important, because if you're not tracking these things, you can't improve.

Ashley James (0:11:29.149)

I love that. So it's good to track what you have done. How do you keep the motivation? I'm talking about the scale. Don't use the scale in the first few weeks of starting a new program because you don't know what it's measuring. Whether it's measuring water or your poop, or you changed your diet. There's so many things and you don't know if you're measuring added muscle or weight loss. But a woman, one time of her month could be five pounds heavier just from water retention, it ebbs and flows. So a scale is not a great thing to look at. What are really great metrics that help people stay motivated in the first few weeks of a new program?

Jeremy Slate (0:12:14.561)

That's tough because it's also my viewpoint on it as I've gotten older has changed a lot. When I was younger, I weighed everything and I checked every calorie and I was neurotic about it. I remember going on a date when I was seventeen and I freaked out that they put breading on my chicken and I was so embarrassed when the girl just got up and left. So, the way I've looked at food and the way I've looked at what I do has changed dramatically. And I've tried to take a look at, does what I'm doing work for me? I've looked at ratios of food I'm eating. What's my ratio of carbs, my ratio of proteins, my ratio of fats? Most people don't eat enough fats.

But when you're looking at how you're doing, the two things I'm looking at is I'm looking at body fat percentage check with a caliper. I'm not checking it weekly, because if you're checking it weekly or daily, it's going to fluctuate way too much. Check yourself every couple of weeks. I'm also looking at how am I looking in the mirror? Am I seeing my shape changing? I also think weight is a really, really bad indicator because, once again, as you mentioned, are you carrying more in your intestines that week? Are you carrying more water? Did you drink less water? Do you have too much salt that you're retaining water? Those things to me aren't a good indicator. I'm looking at how am I looking in the mirror and if I'm continuing to see physical changes. I'm also checking measurements.

What are my measurements looking like? My measurement around the chest, my measurement around the waist, my measurement around the hips. If you're checking those things, they're really good indicators to me of how you're doing.

Ashley James (0:13:38.883)

Yes. I like to go internal also. Check internally for how you are feeling emotionally. Also, remember, emotions aren't facts, so if you just woke up on the wrong side of bed, that doesn't mean your entire day is ruined. But just check in with yourself and go, do I need to do some deep breathing and just release this. Am I happy? Am I grounded? Am I content? Am I sore all over? Am I happy that I'm sore all over? Am I pissed off that I'm sore all over? Sore from your workouts?

If you're sore from not working out, then we definitely want to make some changes, because just waking up sore in the morning, if you didn't do anything for the last few days, that soreness is probably inflammation, it's probably stagnation and our body is just screaming out, begging for us to move in a way that brings joy back into our body. And it could just be pickleball. Find a bunch of friends to go play dodgeball or go play tennis. I went to Goodwill the other day and bought some tennis rackets for five dollars each and my son and I went and played tennis and now he's obsessed with tennis. It's so cool. It doesn't have to look like going to a gym. It just moves your body in a way that brings you joy and there's just so much inner peace that comes from that.

Jeremy Slate (0:15:01.225)

What I would say too, especially early on, camaraderie is important and it's really easy to quit something when you're on your own. As I mentioned, early on, and I know my fitness journey and his fitness journey changed a lot. One of my best friends went on to become an IFBB pro and he was a big little guy, he was 5’3, but he was 260. And I learned a lot about working out and we were also hyper competitive because when we started we were both around the same weight, so I had to beat him and he had to beat me. So I think that's also important to have somebody else. Number one is going to hold you accountable because if I don't show up, I'm letting somebody else down because he could need a spot that day, he could need help that day. He could need whatever it is. The other thing is you can get in a little bit of competition and competition is also going to push you to be better.

Ashley James (0:15:52.414)

Make sure you don’t push yourself (inaudible- 0:15:52.138) injury. That’s what happened when my dad got competitive and he blew out his ACL doing something stupid being competitive in the gym. He never recovered from that. It's so easy to be cocky, and do something beyond your limits. So when you get competitive, make sure you're still staying within the confines of your current.

Jeremy Slate (0:16:20.488)

Well, that's something I've learned after 30, frankly. As we're recording this, I'm going to be 37 next week and I learned after 30 to listen to my body a lot more, because there are certain days where when I was younger, things didn't feel exactly right that day. Maybe I was sore in a certain part of my body or maybe I had a stiff hip or whatever it is, and I went in and beat through it.

If I don't have it that day and I'm not saying it from like, I'm trying to find a reason not to go but if I don't physically have it that day, what effects can I cause? What other injury can happen? And that's how I tore my UCL because I went in on a bad day, I've had other injuries because I went on a bad day.

You have to also really get in tune with how your body's doing, because you can if you're not doing well that day, and once I once again I said not from like, oh, I'm tired and I don't want to go to the gym, but it's a no, if there's something physically that doesn't feel right, it's a good reason to go fight the next day.

Ashley James (0:17:23.128)

I like to check in with my body and go what does my body need? Do I need to do more stretching? Should I swim? Should I walk? What is it? And when I say walk I mean like power walking where you're getting your heart rate up and you're finding a hill to walk up. But sometimes it's just put on some headphones and just wander through some trails, check out local parks, local trails and get back into nature or get on a bicycle. Go buy a bicycle on Facebook Marketplace if you don't have one anymore. Remember what it was being a kid? I feel like I want to go get rollerblades again. I just remember in the early 90s I lived in my rollerblades. So there's all kinds of ways you can move your body. It doesn't have to be always in the gym or always in an exercise class, or always just sitting in your cubicle or sitting at your desk.

Jeremy Slate (0:18:19.190)

It's also making it a group thing too. I have two kids. I have a third on the way. We're actually closing into my wife's eight months pregnant, so we're getting pretty close to number three coming. One of the things that we've always done, we do family bike rides together. I have a trailer that goes behind my bicycle. The five-year-old has to ride her own bike now, but I tow the kids behind me and stuff that. So also making it a group activity, I think is really helpful too, because once again you don't have to be beating yourself up and going up and down hills, but a bike ride is a great family activity where you're doing something together.

Ashley James (0:18:55.529)

Love it.

Are you tired of guessing your way through supplements, feeling like each choice is just another shot in the dark? Unlock your health potential at takeyoursupplements.com. Here we don't just sell supplements, we customize wellness.

Connect with a true health coach who tailors your nutritional path based on your unique health goals and challenges. From fatigue to vitality, from confusion to clarity. Start your transformation today. Visit takeyoursupplements.com and discover how feeling amazing is just one free consultation away. That's takeyoursupplements.com.

You wanted to come on the show today because there was some stuff you wanted to share for those who are in the holistic health space, and I think you have a unique perspective because you help people like myself and other holistic health practitioners. You help them with your company, Command Your Brand. You also have a podcast of your own. Tell us a bit about your company, what it does, and your podcast. Create Your Own Life Podcast. I'd love to talk a bit about what I was getting into, about how we've been delisted. So many holistic health practitioners have been delisted and what can we do to combat that?

Jeremy Slate (0:20:16.751)

So, Command your Brand, we're a PR firm for the podcast space. We help people to get their stories down and help them find the right shows and run them on a campaign over a year. We help them get out there and get their message out there. I'm a big believer in the man who created podcasting and what he has to say about it, and that's Adam Curry, and he says podcasting is the last bastion of free speech.

And I think it's a place where we can still say what needs to be said and still do it in a long form. You can't handle a lot of the conversations we have to have in two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, these are long form conversations. That's how we actually get to a solution at things because iron sharpens iron. A good argument forces another argument to be better and get us to a better place, hopefully. Or good information hopefully forces us to get better information.

But when we're told you can't talk about a certain method or you can't talk about a certain way of doing things, well, how are we going to improve people's health if we can't talk about certain options? We just go to a medico that says the allopathic school I went to says you do these five injections and this and whatever, and you're done and for some reason you're not better. And you wonder why we need to be able to talk about these different things. Because, number one, there's different ways to treat people. Number two, bodies are very, very different. I've struggled with ear infections my whole life, so I've had a lot of stuff that I've had to do that a lot of people haven't had to do with how I handle my nasal cavities and everything else. So bodies are different. We need to be able to talk about how we can help them, and being told in traditional media your viewpoint isn't acceptable here and what you have to say isn't acceptable here isn't okay with me. And that's one of the number one reasons that, after this whole experience of the last couple of years, the pandemic and everything else I started talking about a lot more health topics that mattered to me and a lot more edgy subjects.

I have a bunch of episodes that we've done, I had Del Bigtree on, I had Peter McCullough on. I had a lot of these episodes on. They're on my Rumble channel. We don't put them on YouTube.

So I think it's important to understand number one, it's a great place for free speech, but it's also understanding what are the platforms out there, how to utilize them, and how do you get the most out of them. Because I have a lot of friends that say I went on YouTube and they did XYZ to me and now I can't talk on YouTube, and I think you don't have to agree with the rules and you don't have to like them. But I think to go hard charging and just say I was and YouTube banned me is also not the way to do it either. I think you have to understand what they'll allow you to say there. Use it for the abilities to grow and then find other places, your audio show and rumble and things like that, where you give people the full story. But I think to cut your communication lines is also a bad idea.

Ashley James (0:22:58.365)

And I have so many holistic health friends who had their lines cut and I learned, I adapted. I came very close to it. I definitely interviewed some people who were saying and here's how you treat C-19 and I know you don't want to say it like, blank, fill in the space.

If I say capital C, everyone thinks cancer. But I have a ton of interviews with holistic health doctors who help their patients cure cancer. Not once did YouTube give me a red flag and I thought that was interesting. But the moment you have a doctor saying I have published a study with 500 of my patients where we were able to cure C-19, and that episode gets banned and then, and it was sick.

Jeremy Slate (0:24:04.313)

Even the interesting thing about it too, actually, is they're going backwards and they're removing things from years ago. So, I interviewed a doctor. I don't know if you put this on YouTube or not, so I won't say the name of his therapy, but it's a specific type of cancer therapy. Because I know the key. If you say the word, the word is actually banned. You can't say it. They went back and deleted my episode from three years ago. And one of the number one ways he promoted it was YouTube. So you do have to figure out, we don't have to like the rules.

Ashley James (0:24:31.612)

We have to know. Can you hint at who he is or hint at the therapy?

Jeremy Slate (0:24:37.424)

Oh, I can say his name, it's Dr Patrick Vickers, but I can't say the name. Ok, , say the name.

Ashley James (0:24:40.782)

Okay, I know I've had him on my show too.

Jeremy Slate (0:24:44.309)

The actual word that starts with the “g”.

Ashley James (0:24:45.921)

Starts with the “g”. Yes, exactly, it's just weird, it's. In the history of the modern medical system, it's not weird because that's how they designed it and protect their interests. But here we are wanting to get our health back, wanting to find the truth, the truth in what we can do to support our body's ability to heal itself. And if you don't know that Google will delist information legit information that helps you heal your body and that's only in the last few years and you don't know that, then you're guided. When you Google things, you're guided to misinformation. Isn't that Orwellian?

They are banning information and they're labeling it misinformation. So that's what we have to deal with as people who are with a platform. I have a platform because I was so sick for so many years and then I used natural medicine to heal, to reverse all my diseases, and I woke up saying, wait, a second, people need to know this. So I started this podcast to interview holistic health practitioners so that people who are suffering, no longer suffer. Can learn from the people who are spreading the true information. But this information is not taught in medical schools and is definitely not now appreciated by Google. Google owns YouTube, so we need to learn how to work within each system like you talked about. Rumble's a good platform is it?

Jeremy Slate (0:26:31.989)

Definitely harder. So it's harder to grow as a creator. That's one thing I will say, and that's why I said, don't cut your nose to spite your face and say I'm going to go say things on YouTube that I know are going to get me banned.

You don't have to like it, you don't have to agree with that. We can hope it changes in the future, but YouTube is really important and where you should put your more vanilla content so that you can use it to attract an audience and grow, and that's virtually valuable. Rumble, they've done a very great job protecting free speech. It's a great place to have these conversations, but at the moment, discoverability as a creator is very difficult. So you want to be there. You need to be there to back yourself up. Odyssey is another great platform out there as well. And that's the real piece of advice I want to give people out there that are creating their own content, if you're a host and not a guest is to have your different places you publish. You should be on YouTube, you should be on Rumble, you should be on Odyssey, but understand, your much more vanilla content is what's going to be on YouTube so that people can find you. Give people an opportunity to find you and then give them your great advice in these other places.

And if you're concerned about the audio, going back to Adam Curry, he's come out with a new system for podcasting called Podcasting 2.0. And it's actually podcasting built on the blockchain and it's very cool because, number one, it's uncancellable because the audio is built on the blockchain. So there's some really great apps out there for it. So just Google Podcasting 2.0. And I think it's newpodcastapps.com or something that is the website he has. But anyway, just Google it and Google Adam Curry. But it's cool as well because it also allows you to support creators. They actually get money for the amount of time you're listening or you can send them tips or stuff like that. So you want to look at different ways you can protect yourself and the content you're creating.

Don't become platform dependent. Because I have a lot of friends that know what you can and can't say on YouTube. But they've gone hard charging out and say, well, I'm just going to be right, well, how right are you now that you can't talk at all? So you have to use it for acquiring audiences. But just understand what you can say where and when my audience sees that I've skipped an episode, they know it's on my Rumble feed, or they know it's on my Odyssey feed or whatever. So I think it's just really important to understand that, because use the system for what it is, but get your message out. You have to heal people. That's why people do this.

Ashley James (0:28:49.182)

Yes, I have not seen iTunes, the Apple podcasting app. I have not seen them censor. I personally haven't seen people in my space. This was maybe six, six or seven years ago. At the time, 95 or more percent of my downloads of the podcast were coming from iTunes and I thought that was interesting. I posted it to as many places as I could, but it was primarily iTunes. And now the latest statistics is that Spotify is about half. It's like 50-50, give or take. So Spotify is quickly coming up to compete.

But about six, seven years ago, iTunes said we're going to transcribe everything but keep it in house so that our search engine is more robust. And I love that and I definitely noticed an uptick in my downloads because someone could type in muscular dystrophy or asthma or whatever they're typing in, and if I haven't, if my guest mentioned it or talked about it, but we didn't put it in the title, that episode could still come up for them to listen. So I thought that was cool. But now with AI, every company has AI, so they're all probably doing that. I'm just wondering have you seen any censorship around the bigger podcast directories like Spotify or iTunes.

Jeremy Slate (0:30:32.398)

I haven't, and I guess the one thing I'm excited about is with Spotify putting so much money in Joe Rogan and understanding what that means for them. To me, it also means they're investing in free speech, so I think people are dying to get it and I think the audio platforms really get it. It's YouTube, I think the major problem with them is they have this new partnership with the WHO, so it's affected. Health it's affected. Are you aware of this or no?

Ashley James (0:30:58.216)

Okay, back up. Let's just pretend that I'm not aware of this. Okay, cool. For all the listeners who just gasped with me, wait a sec. You mean the World Health Organization as part of the UN, which wants to create one world government, has made a deal with YouTube?

Jeremy Slate (0:31:21.304)

YouTube did and I don't remember exactly when, so I would encourage people to go look this up. They can probably find the press release. They did a partnership with the WHO where information that's not approved by the WHO will be removed from YouTube for misinformation.

So to me, that’s a little bit concerning, because number one, you have to look at what the WHO wants and what pharma companies and everything else fund it. So I think that's a major concern. So health providers especially have really gotten hammered on YouTube and that's why I said, it's a place that you want to use it for what it's worth, but you really got to be careful what you're talking about, in there.

So to me, that's where I've seen the biggest censorship. I've also seen people censored in search specifically because if you're concerned about search censorship, search for what you want to search for and then search for it in either incognito browser or the Brave browser and you'll get a good idea if they're actually altering your search results a lot of times. So there's search and YouTube are the two major places we're seeing it and the WHO partnership is very concerning. So I would definitely encourage people to go look that up.

You mentioned Dr Mercola has really gotten hammered. What's the name of the other doctor I'm thinking of? He does a lot of keto stuff. It's suddenly jumping out of my head, but anyway, there's a lot of doctors that if you can see large accounts and you go to their account and you look at their average views per episode for the last six months, you can typically see when things changed and when YouTube started suppressing more because you can see their numbers drop dramatically. So to me you want to be there for discoverability, but audio is where you're safest now.

Ashley James (0:33:06.277)

Do you know about Codex Elementarius?

Jeremy Slate (0:33:08.946)

I do not but I'm interested. Tell me. I love Latin words, so you got me.

Ashley James (0:33:16.453)

You definitely want to go down this rabbit hole. When my mentor in 2005 taught me what Codex Elementarius was, Dr. Rima Laibo and, if you can find her, I think it was back in 2005. She gave a talk. So it's in the smallest format, videos from the early 2000s or mid 2000s. They're very small because they're not in high resolution, and she gives a good 45-minute talk on what Codex Elementarius is. It stands for food code and it sounds wonderful at first. It's a 15,000-page book, or maybe it's 1,500. It's thick enough. It's a giant book but the first hundred or thousand pages or whatever, it's just a giant book. I've never physically held it, obviously because I can't remember how many pages it is, but it's huge.

The first few chapters seem really good. And what it is? It's part of the UN and World Health Organization. They want to get every single country in the world to agree to this codex, to take it on as law. And at first, as you read it, hot dogs should be kept at this temperature and eggs should be kept at this temperature, and chicken. And so you're reading through it, going oh, we're standardizing for the health of the world, so no one has these foodborne diseases. That's great.

But when you get through it it's basically outlawing any natural medicine. Over-the-counter vitamins gone, in any dose other than negligible. So Australia signed it years ago and overnight high dose vitamins became something a class one felony drug. I lost touch with him but I was friends with a man who owned a supplement company and he said it was a SWAT team practically came down from the ceiling to shut him down and he lost his business overnight, and that's why one of the companies I work with for my clients in Australia we have to have the supplements shipped in from New Zealand, it's weird.

So certain countries have already signed it and America was resisting it. But how they get the countries to sign it is through treaties, and so they're trying to do it through NAFTA forever. If it does come to America and I believe Biden has been one step closer to having us basically be under Codex Elementarius, which it will then make homeopathy outlawed it will then make homeopathy outlawed, things acupuncture and anything holistic that isn't basically done from a doctor outlawed. So look into Codex Elementarius. And the reason why I have zero trust for the World Health Organization is this has been their number one mission for years. I believe it started after World War II, but it is. It's part of getting every country under the same umbrella of control and as someone who is now, I feel I have the American spirit within me. I moved to America from Canada and I'm never going back. I am an American. I'm throwing the tea in the harbor. I am saying no, I want my freedom.

Jeremy Slate (0:36:54.638)

See, I don't understand why somebody didn't go get themselves a straw and drink the tea in that harbor, that would have been the amazing part that nobody thought of, anyway.

Ashley James (0:37:02.840)

Well, that was very salty tea. You got there, which means something else now.

Jeremy Slate (0:37:08.716)

The doctor I was thinking of before I forgot was Dr Eric Berg, if you look at his traffic. It's been cut not even in half, but into a third and his subscriber numbers are huge, but anyway, continue

Ashley James (0:37:19.331)

That should be part of his marketing campaign.

Jeremy Slate (0:37:21.350)

It is right now. He just did a whole campaign, but he did it on Rumble.

Ashley James (0:37:24.712)

Of course. They have banned me. Look at my numbers going down. It's not because I suck.

Anyway, these are one of the things. That's why I said at the beginning, put on your tinfoil hat, because I know to the people who haven't woken up to this I sound like a crazy person. They're probably still not listening.

So those who are still listening, congratulations. Were doing this little matrix thing, but when I learned about it in 2005, my mind was blown. Are you kidding me? And that's around the same time, I started to learn how bad fluoride is. If you understand 1984 George Orwell and how he wrote it, everything they say is one thing is actually another and it's this inverse war.

This inverse war and languaging, because I was studying neuro-linguistic programming and part of me studying it was to understand the languaging. Listen to the news and politicians, but listen through the lens of understanding that they talk in constant presuppositions and linguistic fallacies and when you gain that level of clarity to hear the lies through their teeth, you start to see how much every single thing, food companies, drug companies they don't have our best interests at heart and we need to be very discerning. We need to be very discerning when it comes to taking any advice, even from me. Be discerning.

Some people hear the World Health Organization, they get all warm and fuzzy because they think this organization loves me, loves the world, and just wants good for us. They're wanting to take over so that they can protect me. And this is how people feel about government agencies. There's many of them out there that are unelected. You didn't elect them. You didn't elect these people who are making decisions, which of your freedoms they can take away.

Jeremy Slate (0:39:43.608)

That's why I think it's also important as a practitioner and as somebody that's actually helping somebody, because, let's face it, a lot of these pharma companies aren't. It's important to understand what platforms to be on, but I think it's actually a viewpoint that's really important to change, but first and foremost, to all of us. And that's realizing, I'm going to be ultimately successful or ultimately responsible for my success or failure. Because I think a lot of times people don't understand the media cycle . The media cycle stuff's happening all the time, 24 hours a day. They're not out there looking for good stories. They want to tell you the next thing in your house that can kill you at 10. They want to tell you what to be scared of, what to be afraid of. They'll talk about you if you do something that's illegal or perceived to be illegal.

So what you need to understand is I'm going to take full responsibility for getting my story out there, understanding this environment we're currently in. So you have to get out there. Understand the platforms and what to say and where, but also, you need to promote yourself. You need to get your story out there. You need to find other places to speak, other people to speak to. You need to be the one to do it. Whether it's a live on X, whether it's something on Rumble, whether it's a (inaudible- 0:40:54.966) you're doing with someone. You need to take 100% responsibility for getting your media message out there and not relying on them to find you, because, number one, they're trying to silence you and number two, they're not looking for you.

Ashley James (0:41:10.667)

I love that. I have some holistic health practitioner friends who gave up, when they got silenced or when they got delisted, and they are in victim mode about it.

Jeremy Slate (0:41:20.613)

I was talking to a very cool chiropractor a couple of years ago and he's like, you guys do good work, but I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing until they acknowledge me for what I'm doing. I'm dude. It doesn't work that way, that's not how media works and it has the power to catapult you.

Ashley James (0:41:36.815)

So talk to the holistic health practitioner, the health coaches. There's so many health coaches that listen to this show, naturopathic doctors, acupuncturists and I've worked with many naturopathic doctors. They're amazing at what they do. Most of them are not great at business. They're not great at promoting themselves and a lot of health coaches actually are really uncomfortable with promoting themselves. So talk to those people who are just starting out. What actual steps could they take that would help them to be heard, to be seen, especially in this climate where there's so much censorship?

Jeremy Slate (0:42:13.621)

I think number one, you just got to get over that, and you got to be like, okay, if I’m going to do this, if I’ve got one big mission I’m going to be okay with getting heard and getting seen. I think that’s one part of it.

But also to communicate more because you're going to get better at it. So, whether that's going to Toastmasters, whether that's finding small groups you can speak at, whether it's just talking to more people, if that's the gradient you need to work on, start communicating more and getting more comfortable with it, because to make this work, you have to communicate. But I would say the other thing that is a major thing people are cutting out and it's something I've been talking about this for years actually, and it's actually for me how I started getting notoriety 10 years ago and it still works today is called the small pond strategy. Everybody's a big fish in a small pond somewhere. What does that mean?

I grew up in a small town, five-eighths of a mile in size, nothing happens there. Babe Ruth used to play golf there. That's about it. We don't have a grocery store, we have a regional high school. We don't even have a high school, so nothing happens there, but that's a huge benefit. Why? Because there's a small newspaper that goes to every house in that town and every house in the county. So I know if I write a press release on a Tuesday, they're most likely going to pick it up and run with it on Thursday because there's not a lot of news to talk about. So as long as I'm writing releases and sending to them, it's going to end up in there.

Now, a lot of these small newspapers because they're newspapers. They still appear in things Google News so you can get a backlink to your story online as well as in a written form. Definitely, take pictures of the written form, post it on all your socials, tell people about it and talk about it.

Now, the purpose of a press release is what I don't think a lot of people understand. A lot of people think because they've had somebody cold email and be for $1,000, I'll get you on Yahoo News. That's not a real press release and it's not a real piece of media.

The purpose of a press release is to tell the media about what you have to say, so they reach back into you and want to do something with you. So that's how I got one of my first television spots. We had a producer for a television network here in New Jersey, read a press release that was printed in the newspaper and say, oh, podcasting. I don't know a lot about that. Let's interview this guy and learn about it. So that's how I got on television the first time.

So if you understand that power and start to take a look at what are the small ponds I'm a part of it could be your rotary group. Maybe they have a magazine. It could be. I used to live in a lake community so they had this really cool color magazine that went to every house in the community so they ran a piece about me. It could be your university, it could be the other small newspapers or things in there. But find these small ponds you're a big fish in or can be a big fish in, because they're much more obtainable. And once you start to build those media pieces number one you're going to have more confidence because you have some media pieces. Number two you're going to get clearer on your story because you've been communicating. But you can also use those pieces as credibility. So when you approach other media, you appear much more credible and I think that's a great place to start. That a lot of people are missing. Everybody cuts out local, but it's the most attainable thing early in your career.

Ashley James (0:45:15.764)

And the fact that it’s physical, the pendulum is swinging back. We’re wanting to hold something. Digital is just white noise at this point. I have a friend, she's actually a really close friend of mine, my midwife. She purchased a 35 year old magazine called Midwifery Today. So now she runs it. She runs Midwifery today.

Back in 2019 they stopped publishing physical copies and went to just purely digital. This is actually a global magazine. Midwives around the world would subscribe to it. It's really been missed. It's a quarterly magazine and the subscribers are saying, bring back the physical. We don't, we don't want to sit on our phone or our computer and read articles. We want to physically hold this publication.

I love that idea, find publications that are your little pond and get published. It's a wonderful sense of accomplishment and great backlinks, like you said, because oftentimes there's a digital version. Anytime you can get someone else to link to your website, that is great. That's good SEO, off-page SEO, and then what else? Give us some other first steps.

Jeremy Slate (0:46:46.825)

Well, I think one of the major things too that's really important as well. If you're looking at podcasts, if you're looking at other media, they want to see you've done media and I think that's the really important thing to getting some of these early pieces. So you should have a media page on your website Mine's jeremyryanslate.com/media, if you guys want to see an example, and you can go over there and see all the different places I've been in media, all the different things I've written, all the different people that have talked about me, because it shows your credibility.

So, number one, you're giving somebody the chance that if they do stumble on your website, they're going to possibly reach out to you if you show them you're credible. But number two, when you're doing outbound pitching to the media whether that's podcasts or TV or radio or print or whatever it may be they want to see you're credible. That's one of the number one things and it's great to see you saying things about yourself. But third-party credibility is what shows actual credibility.

So it's really vital to have those things on your website to show people you're credible, because I will tell you could have some great hit rates out of the box if you're reaching out to podcasts and things like that. But for most shows and whatever they want to see, you've done it. They want to see you're legit because they get a lot of inbound. And I think something that's important as well is differentiation. A lot of people are communicating the exact same thing. You need to communicate how what you're doing is different from others in your space, because there's a really great book out there. It's called Positioning the Battle for your Mind. It's written in the 80s by Al Reese and Jack Trout, and when we're in branding, positioning is using yourself or your brand as for something or against something. So, the Pepsi Coke thing, they compare themselves to each other. Or the one I hate the most but they say it all the time is, our business is the Uber of blank. They're taking something people are familiar with and they're comparing themselves to it. So you have to find your differentiator and you have to get yourself the positioning, because if you don't have those things, your brand just slips through and people don't quite understand you. So get some media credibility, start establishing your positioning, but also find what is your differentiator, what makes you different?

What is particular about your method or your way of doing things? Is there a certain approach you have in testing? I know there's some practitioners that do heavy blood testing before they'll ever work with you. Or there's other practitioners that might do muscle testing. It's something my mother-in-law does a lot. She does a lot of muscle testing for deciding what people need vitamins-wise. So what is it that makes you different that people can really buy into and see as legit?

Ashley James (0:49:16.390)

What does your mother-in-law do?

Jeremy Slate (0:49:17.757)

She’s a chiropractor. My wife worked for her mom for years before she started this company with me. So we have two, two beautifully unvaccinated children, and we're very into taking care of our family.

Ashley James (0:49:32.032)

Love it. Do you know what kind of chiropractic she practices?

Jeremy Slate (0:49:36.981)

I don't know the exact method she does, but she does extremities and stuff too, which I know a lot of them don't. So I used to have a lot of hip problems because she adjusts me one to two times a week. A lot of hip problems, a lot of sciatica problems. I haven't had sciatica problems in ten years, so she's a great chiropractor.

Ashley James (0:50:00.529)

A great chiropractor is worth their weight in gold. Amazing. I have been to so many chiropractors. If you don't like the results you're getting after a while, find a new one. Not all chiropractors are created equal. Certainly not.

Jeremy Slate (0:50:17.531)

I know she's not cranial sacral, but I don't know what her exact method is.

Ashley James (0:50:22.492)

There's many kinds, and almost no one knows what they are, unless they're into chiropractic.

Jeremy Slate (0:50:29.898)

You could ask my wife. She knows everything there is to know about chiropractic.

Ashley James (0:50:33.834)

Well, I'm a groupie, I'm a holistic practitioner's biggest fan. I love naturopathy. That's why.

Jeremy Slate (0:50:41.055)

That’s why I'm so passionate about it, because I've been with my wife for over 15 years, so it's always been something that's been really important to me, and I was into chiropractic before we even met.

Ashley James (0:50:49.680)

So great. I love your advice. This is wonderful. So we talked about some things people do when they're first starting out. Let's talk to the listeners. Now for the listeners who aren't holistic practitioners and you're still here, fantastic, by the way you want to be sharing this episode with your holistic practitioners you love, because I always do this. I'm so into marketing, because marketing is how we can help people. So there's people who are, oh, money is the root of all evil and marketing sales is bad.

Jeremy Slate (0:51:34.656)

I would tell them to read Atlas Shrugged, and there is a wonderful quote by the character, Francisco de Ancona, where he said it is not, it is not money, it is love of money. So anyway,

Ashley James (0:51:44.192)

Perfect. My point is that people who despise marketing and sales. It's a skill and you have to use sales to convince, for example, convince your children to not do drugs. We use sales all the time and it's about sharing an idea. And for me, sales is actually about how I learn. You're selling me an idea, you're selling me a belief, you're selling me a system. It's how we communicate. It's a skill in communication to open people's minds and beliefs up to new ideas or new ways of being or a new belief system, and then motivating them to want to try that.

If you have diabetes, whether you're going to pay me money or not, I'm selling you a concept that you can be free of diabetes, type 2, that you can heal your insulin resistance, that you can have insulin sensitivity and be healthy and balanced. And we can do that within a matter of months. Now, when I say, sell this, isn't you handing me money I want you to take on this belief system. So when I learned that marketing and sales is how I am going to help people, the masses out there who are sick and suffering. That's my avenue to get to them so that I can help them no longer be in pain.

It's an amazing tool and, just like any amazing tool, it can be used to hurt people and it can be used to manipulate or it can be used to help people. So it's a tool. Don't be angry at the tool, just just know that the more you learn the tool of marketing, the more you can use it for good and you can use it to help people, because every holistic practitioner who is listening wants to help people and they have a way, they have their own system for helping people and they need to get that out there, need to to sell and market it so that people can go oh, I want to try this. I understand the that there's a benefit to me and I want to try this.

So it's just that concept. So, for those who have a well-established practice, they have an established practice, but maybe they're stuck in their ways or maybe dipping their toe a few times, maybe had some failures, they tried a YouTube show or they tried a podcast and they had a few failures, or they had an email list and everything just flopped, and so 99% of their time they're really just focusing on doing their business the way they know how, but they don't know how to expand, they don't know how to help the masses. So what would you tell them? What are some actual steps they can take to start to gain success and gain momentum?

Jeremy Slate (0:54:44.954)

I think the first thing is you've had some failures, and I get that. I've been there. I've had some failures. I got kicked out of iTunes for a little bit because I changed my title to something but then they brought me back. So I would say, first and foremost, you have to just acknowledge those failures, what they are. Yes, it happened. Now you say what can I learn from this? What can I learn from this? What can I learn from what happened here? And then you have to take a look at your purpose. Is your purpose bigger than this failure? And I'm guessing it mostly is, or you wouldn't be doing what you're doing.

So once you have that out of the way, I would say one of the number one reasons that I see failure and it's whether you're doing it internally or whether you are working with a company to do media, is people aren't involved enough in their own media research or outreach and brand growth.

Be a personality on social media. Connect with people. I have had so much success connecting with people on X and direct messaging people on X, where maybe my PR team has gotten me in front of the producer, but then I get in touch with the host and we're able to do it together. So I think a lot of times you have people running a company that will have a hands-off viewpoint, and we have to really have a hands-on viewpoint because this is becoming such a persona-driven online world and, frankly, you have to understand, especially with big podcasts, they get so much inflow and they get so much inflow from a lot of weird people. So just by getting out there communicating and showing people that you're not weird and that you're intelligent and you want to help people, you can actually help yourself get a foot in the door. So I would say, you have to be a part of your own media outreach, even if you have somebody doing outreach for you, and start building those relationships, start taking any relation, anything you can get.

I had somebody reach out to me yesterday and say, oh my gosh, I would love to do a live stream with you. Can you do it tomorrow? And I looked at my calendar and I'm yes, I can, absolutely. So you want to take every opportunity that you can get and you need to be a big part of that. Be willing to hustle, be willing to move, because if you create a little bit of uncomfortableness now, number one, it's hopefully so you don't have to be uncomfortable again. But number two, you have to realize nothing stays exactly the same forever. You're either growing or you're dying. And if they're going to start censoring, well, you have to auto create that. You have to figure out how I am going to do that and don't get hit by the loss. Figure out how you're going to create more. Does that feel too much a coaching session or are you getting where I'm going with that?

Ashley James (0:57:04.716)

No, I get it. I love it because I think it's really important that we should spread out to as many different platforms as possible so you're not dependent, like you said, dependent on one platform.

End of 2010, my husband and I moved to Seattle from Las Vegas and he had a job lined up. He was a foreman union carpenter for 20 years. He had a job totally lined up, so we were cool with moving and then we got here and the company went belly up and we're sitting here. It's December and we have enough money for one month. Because we expected to roll into our roll into the next thing we're doing and what we had just done for all of 2010 is build a house. We were guided. It was divine guidance. It was the weirdest thing. We were guided to build bat houses and sell them on eBay and that's what we lived on. We built and sold 350 amazing bat houses. It’s beautiful.

I was totally into bat conservation. It was 115 degrees during the day. We turned our garage into a wood shop and we got all these different machines to make these bat houses from Craigslist and we just had a blast. I mean, this is back when we weren't parents yet, so it was just the two of us. And then all of a sudden, we're sitting here, it's December and we don't have the job that we had lined up, which was 100% lined up, totally disappears. We could either go get jobs or we could keep doing that thing where we sell stuff on eBay. And we figured out that this was again more divine guidance, but we were just divinely guided to figure out that we could buy jeans for a dollar and sell them for between $15 and $25. So we would go to the thrift stores and get dollar jeans and we would look for quality, and these jeans were worn four times, if anything, people would pay more because they're broken a little. And we washed them, measured them, pictured them and posted them on eBay and we got to the point where we had 1800 pairs of jeans in our apartment and we would post a hundred a day. Some months we sold upwards of 10 grand.

We worked seven days a week and we had a blast. We did that for about three years, living off of eBay, and that was our only source of income. Back then eBay and PayPal were one and that's the only way you could get paid. Now they've split off and there's other ways you can take payments, but at the time you could only take payments through PayPal. So if PayPal had a disagreement with you, they could shut you down. If eBay had a disagreement, they can shut you down. There’s a few of those but-clenching moments we could not make an income very quickly if eBay decided to shut our store down.

I had this very intense realization that we've entered into a moment in our society where we become so dependent on technology. It's a faceless technology. There's no safety net and your life is dependent on it. I mean, let's say there's a solar flare. The power goes out, you can't access your money, you can't cook food, you can't drive your car. Yes, we are so dependent on electric run machines, but when you have your marketing, for example, only TikTok or only YouTube, or you run your marketing only on social media or only on one platform, I'm talking about one platform. That platform when it delists you and Google goes, we don't like what you're saying, we're going to make sure people can't find you, even though you have a website, we're going to make sure people can't find you. Overnight, you lose a significant amount of traffic, income or even a way to gain income.

So that's why diversity and the whole, don't put all your eggs in one basket, that's what I learned. More and more, our lives are dependent on technology, but we often will trust that again, it's like blindly trusting our parents. I love this platform and this platform loves me and wants to take care of me. No, they don't. This platform does not care about you and they could destroy your life if they cut you off, basically, just like a parent would cut a teenager off. So we have to be really resourceful and that idea of that small pond. Coming back to the small pond, what can you build? What roots? What marketing roots can you grow so that, if one platform shuts down, your business doesn't dry up?

Jeremy Slate (1:02:34.440)

Can I add one more thing to that too?

Ashley James (1:02:36.846)

Yes, please.

Jeremy Slate (1:02:38.052)

Just for me personally right now I'm on the biggest PR push, you and I have talked about this a little bit offline but I'm in the biggest PR push I've ever had in my entire business career and I've been on some of the biggest podcasts I've ever been on. We have some even bigger ones coming, and the thing that happened was my master's degree is in the Roman Empire, something that no one cared about a few years ago and then suddenly this trend picked up on TikTok and we ran with it. And I think that's what's really important is, when you look at PR and when you look at media opportunities, you have to be agile, and when you see an opening, you got to run as hard at it as you can, because right now these opportunities are popping up and it's been great. This is going to dry up at some point. So you have to make hay while the sun is shining, so you have to be constantly looking for media opportunities. If you see something, commit as fast as you can, run at it as fast as you can, because media opportunities and the media cycle go fast, that's what's happening now. For me, this has been a long media cycle. This doesn't typically happen. At some point it's going to dry up. But you have to find those opportunities for yourself and when you're getting them, grab them, go for it, make it happen.

Media opportunities and knowing what is the pulse in my industry, what is the pulse in what's happening, are other media starting to talk about my industry. Maybe they don't understand my industry. I don't even have to be the smartest one in my industry. I'm not. As I mentioned, I don't even have a PhD. I have an MA, so I know enough about it, but I'm one of the few people that's able to communicate it to regular people, so I've been able to run with it. So it doesn't even have to be your industry. It could be other people talking about your industry. When you find the PR opportunity, double down and go fast.

I find right now looking at trends on X is really good. I constantly have people on my team looking at TikTok. Also, we want to register for helpareporter.com. There's a free version, there's a paid version, but there's people looking for media opportunities because you could find the right one for you where you can start using media opportunities to get others. I've been able to approach certain podcasts and I was on this, this and this one. They're like, oh, wow, okay cool, let's talk to you when they wouldn't talk to me before. So when you find your media opportunity, run fast, find that opening and use those opportunities to get your future opportunities.

Ashley James (1:04:57.777)

I love it, and all of this is for the greater good. All of this is to help people. Making money is a direct reflection of how many people we can help, how many people we can take out of suffering. And there's people who are suffering, who are thirsty. They're thirsty for this knowledge and they want to know how they can turn their health around.

I remember being in my 20s, suffering every day, crying myself to sleep, feeling I was dying. I'd have these adrenaline dumps and I would feel I was dying. In my 20s, when you're supposed to be out, partying, having fun, living life, just like that. You think of your 20s. That's when you're supposed to be, just having the time of your life.

I was trapped, a prisoner in my body, sick, so sick Type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections, polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility and I would have these just horrific adrenaline dumps and I would lie there with my heart pounding and I'm like, this is it? I'm leaving my body, this is my life, I'm no longer going to be here. And then there were moments, several times a day, where I would be so hungry. Even though I just ate that and it was actually hunger for minerals. I didn't even know that that was pica or cribbing, I was just starving for nutrition, but it would drive me crazy and I was so hungry for this knowledge and I went to doctor after doctor and they had nothing for me. They had poison and I can't tell you how many of my clients come to me and their doctors have them on poison when their body is starving for nutrition.

Jeremy Slate (1:06:44.457)

You need to learn to read a label too, because even with our kids, food dyes just drive them insane, it's just so vital, that type of thing.

Ashley James (1:06:52.123)

Food is very sick. My mom was really strict around, which I'm so thankful for now because I gained the tool really early. We weren't allowed to have sugary crap in the house. Once a year, on my birthday, I could eat whatever I wanted, and so I ate the sugary cereal, had pizza and popcorn and all the gross stuff. Popcorn's not bad, but microwave popcorn or whatever. Whatever I wanted, it was just going nuts, one day a year and other than that we didn't have anything processed or sugar in the house. It was really strict and I grew up in a health food store. If I had cereal, it was just rice puff, no sugar added, and going down the cereal aisle. It is very hard for me to find a healthy cereal. We don't eat cereal in the house all the time, but for my son who wants one, good luck finding one that isn't that. For me it's gluten-free. He's allergic to gluten and oats and I wouldn't feed that to anyone anyway. But find an organic cereal that doesn't have sugar in it. There's only one I can find. It does not have any sugar. It is very difficult and then anytime I do find a different brand, it's quickly removed from the shelves. It's so weird. It's even Whole Foods won't sell it anymore. They'll sell the same brand. But this one brand has a Cheerio alternative and it's made of lima beans or something I don't know, lentils. There's no sugar. And then they have the strawberry and the second ingredient sugar, and chocolate and the second ingredient, sugar.

And some of these, most of these cereals, the first ingredient is sugar. What are we feeding our kids? And all the dyes that cause cancer, that cause the brain to be hyperreactive. You and I and I'm a little older than you, so my listeners might be a little older than you. We grew up in the 80s where we trusted these brands. We saw all the commercials that made us very comfortable to trust these brands. The brands have changed, the ingredients have changed. They are not the same as they were in 1980. They are not. So we have to remember, you get your reading glasses out. If you need reading glasses, turn over the freaking box and it drives my husband nuts. I'm a food detective. I will spend 90 minutes grocery store shopping If I have to go down the aisles. I will turn over the box and I will read every label and I've gotten really fast at it now because I just scan it and if you can't pronounce, if there's multiple syllables that you can't pronounce, or if it's fortified, just put it back because it's fortified with artificial. Oh, b vitamins. Oh look, it has B vitamins. It must be so healthy. These are artificial vitamins and a lot of times they actually block your ability to detox and block your ability to uptake actual B vitamins. I've done interviews on that. So I'm just looking for a real food, a real ingredient, nothing added, nothing taken away, and it's very, very, very difficult. I went on a sugar fast a few years ago and I was looking for hot sauce. It was almost impossible. I couldn't believe it. Everything I picked up off the shelf has sugar. The sugar, there's 25 different words for sugar, so you have to know what they are, so you have to google them and look for them and cross-reference them.

Jeremy Slate (1:10:16.022)

Even a lot of the artificial ones too. They may have quote-unquote zero calories, but they still stimulate your blood sugar in the same way that a sugar would too.

Ashley James (1:10:23.499)

Yes. What we're being sold out there, everything, literally everything in the grocery stores, on TV, in the media, is designed to make you unhealthy and to get you hooked on drugs because we're cattle on a conveyor belt of sickness on a conveyor belt of sickness and we are actually trapped, the entire country, the entire world, trapped inside an unhealthy farm.

If you imagine a chicken on a conveyor belt this is what we are in, and to break free from it, you have to be diligent, you have to think for yourself and you have to completely go against the grain, and I love to say this, the statistics. Look at the statistics in your country, United States, for example. Look at the statistics of cancer, heart disease, diabetes. Look at the statistics of the disease and what people die of and when they die and even younger. Look at the statistics. One in three people are getting cancer and heart disease. One in three people have diabetes or prediabetes. You're in a room with two other people. One of you is sick, and it's growing. 70% of adult Americans are on at least one prescription medication. That means that 70% of people wake up feeling crap and they take artificial, man-made chemicals, petroleum-based chemicals, to alter their body because they are so sick they need to do that, or they think they need to do that.

Jeremy Slate (1:12:09.457)

Voices need to be loud too, because, I was looking at yesterday, what really surprised me Ashley, one third of the Fortune 500 companies are medical and pharma companies. How shocking is that one third of the Fortune 500.

Ashley James (1:12:23.543)

And that's because we've allowed it to happen. We stayed on the conveyor belt. We've let them feed us poison every single day of our lives, through the media and through the food they serve us, and we just gobble it up, because they're hiding our dopamine receptors. I’m one of those people that question everything. It must have been really difficult raising me and my parents, they're both in heaven, but I tip my hat off to them because now I have a defiant child, and defiant in a good way. Why is it this way? Why do we have to do it this way? Because it's the way we do it. No. question everything. Don't let them force feed you garbage through your ears, through your eyes and through your mouth. Don't let them force feed you garbage. So when you question everything, we're fed garbage and we have to break through, when I say we, I mean holistic practitioners. We have to break through this wall of constant garbage that people are intaking into their minds and bodies. We need to break through and say, hey, if you're sick of suffering, come over here. There's another way we got to break through. It's your job as a holistic practitioner to help heal this world and for those who are listening who aren't holistic health practitioners, I'm handing you the mantle. It's your job to get, to help, to support, to inspire and uplift your holistic health practitioners, your chiropractor, your naturopath, your friends, anyone in the holistic health space, me included. Please share my podcast. We are getting this information out so that we can break through the system of constant, disgusting, toxic mind control. I feel like I'm sounding like Alex Jones at this point, but we have to break through from this. I love what you're doing. I love what you're doing with your company. You have some amazing holistic practitioners that you help promote. Is it commandyourbrand.com or commandyourbrandmedia.com?

Jeremy Slate (1:14:50.859)

We have both. So because originally when we started this company way back, we bought the (dot)media because somebody was sitting on the (dot)com for 12 grand and then eventually , we kept growing and whatever and we negotiated to actually eventually buy the URL at less than 12 grand but still at a higher price. Yes, it is (dot)media or (dot)com.

Ashley James (1:15:08.489)

Very cool. Do you want to let us know what it looks like to work with you? I’d say if you’re established, if you have the money to invest in a company that is going to help you with your marketing Jeremy is very ethical. I haven't ever hired him, but I have interviewed so many of his doctors and we've been working together for years. I've been on his show, he's now on mine and I've interviewed a lot of his doctors so we have a lot of communication. I’ve gotten to know Jeremy and I feel his heart is in the right place. I trust that my listeners, if they hired you, you would take care of them. So tell us a little bit about what it looks like to work with you, and do you have any case studies you want to share, maybe clients we would know?

Jeremy Slate (1:16:06.619)

I know you know Dr. Mike Haley that was on your show. I think he's actually in your top 10 episodes list that you have in your site somewhere. But Dr. Mike Haley was a great client. But the way things typically work with us is number one, we are working with people that are a little bit more established. So if you are brand new, we have some awesome training courses. We get such incredibly good feedback about our training courses and I want to help you, no matter what level you're at. So we also have our team help a lot if you have questions on those. So if you're brand new, if you want to get started, if you need help, we have some great courses. So commandyourbrand.com/courses can help you with that.

If you're looking to work with us as an agency, we really are working with people that have a team. They are established, they're doing well, but they need to get that message out more to the right people. So our clients typically work with us over a year and we have a bunch of clients that have been with us for years. I think we just had somebody sign for their fifth year in a row, which has been awesome, but that's typically what we do and we're different than a lot of PR agencies that you pay them a monthly retainer and you may or may not get something.

We do work on a fixed number of podcasts and what we found is we found that 24 is a good number to do in a 12 month span, because any more than that, you get burnt out and you're also looking at, well, are these even the shows for me? And then I think any less isn't really the critical mass and the reason we do a year is we used to do six months and what we found is PR it's slow. So initially you're not going to see the impact that you're looking for in months one, two, three, four.

But, you start to hit critical mass around five, six, seven months, and that's why we want to be able to continue to build off of that. So that's what it looks like to work with us. We're trying to make a great impact. Dr. Haley, you mentioned you work with. I don't know if your audience has heard of Dr. Anna Cabeca, but we've worked with her for years.

Ashley James (1:17:58.560)

Yes.I've had her on the show a few times. She's awesome.

Jeremy Slate (1:18:00.967)

Dr. Taz we've worked with. We've had some really, really cool holistic doctors.

Ashley James (1:18:05.127)

Love it, love it. And when you say 24, you mean?

Jeremy Slate (1:18:12.488)

We guarantee 24 placements and typically what we find is the effort that it takes to get 24 different podcasts usually yields more than that, because we want to exchange in abundance, we want to give people more than what they paid for, but we do guarantee the number of placements that we're going to do because, my wife comes from PR world, I come from a health and fitness world and I was also a high school teacher for a bit.

So we don't like how the typical PR world works if you pay a retainer and you may or may not get something, but you paid for my time and isn't that great. We want you to pay for the actual product you're getting and that's why we're trying to change how PR works. But we're also trying to help this podcast world grow and that's why, we also have a lot of courses to help podcasters too. I think this space is the direction the media is going. I think it is really the last bastion of free speech, like I said earlier, and we need to support it and we need to push it.

Ashley James (1:19:01.022)

How can people do your courses?

Jeremy Slate (1:19:04.959)

So if you head over to commandyourbrand.com/courses or if you shoot an email over to josh@commandyourbrand.com, you can have a conversation with Josh and he can find out exactly what you're looking for help with and then help you decide what's the best course for you. And also Josh and our team will help you if you have any questions as you're going through your course journey.

Ashley James (1:19:26.763)

Okay, cool, and these are courses we pay for.

Jeremy Slate (1:19:29.370)

They are paid courses. We have a lot of great free training too. If you want to go over to our YouTube channel, I literally dump my entire brain over there. The amount of stuff I'm giving out for free really isn't fair, but if you want to go and check it out, there's some. I have a video on how to automate your podcast over there using AI. So if you want to go do it, please go check out our YouTube channel, because I really do want to educate people.

Ashley James (1:19:48.644)

That's awesome. We're going to make sure the links to everything that Jeremy Slate does is in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. You have given us so many cool things to think about and some great actionable steps. Tell us about bestpodcastbook.com.

Jeremy Slate (1:20:06.781)

As we talked about today, I think the number one way to get yourself out there is through your voice, and I put together a really awesome book called Command your Brand: Grow your Income, Impact and Influence in a New Media Landscape, and I go through exactly what you need to do to outline a PR campaign using podcasts and to make a really big impact. So, bestpodcastbook.com, it's not 100% free. We do ask you to pay for shipping, but the book itself is free. And if you're like me and you to actually have a physical book I don't do eBooks, I just can't do it so, bestpodcastbook.com, just pay shipping, we'll ship you the book free of cost other than shipping, and it will help you to really start to build a campaign for yourself, really get some motion going. And I want you to get your voice out there. You have a duty to get your voice out there and help people.

Ashley James (1:20:55.047)

I love it. It's funny, I think, about the Bible stories, Jonah. My son loves the Jonah story and when I was a kid, I was like, it's not fair. But it's so funny now as a parent because I'm telling my son, go do this, like go get dressed. And then he comes five minutes later and he's still naked. I'm like, why aren't you dressed? Go get dressed. He's, oh, I forgot, ok. And then he runs back to his room and five minutes later, why aren't you dressed? And it's just so funny how, he's not resisting me but he's just being a kid.

But the Jonah story, if you don't know it, God asks Jonah to go to this place where we're very uncomfortable, for him to speak. And speak to these people and try to get them to not be completely depraved like, hey, it'd be really great if you stop sacrificing children and sleeping with each other in a wedlock and murdering and stealing and God really wants us to love each other and not do all these bad things. And he's like I would rather run away and hide from God. And of course, you can't do that because God is omnipresent and omnipotent. And it's just really funny the story how he eventually goes okay, fine, I'll do it. And this is sort of when you run away from your life purpose. So it's like here you are, you're a holistic practitioner. Your heart is overflowing with this passion to help people. God put you on this planet to help people. And then he's like okay, now you need to go and speak to the masses. And you're like I'm afraid of that. So I'm going to hide. How's that working for you? You're not going to get swallowed by a whale, but how's that working for you? It's not. You need to go do something uncomfortable and speak to the masses. When I wrote my book. I'm uncomfortable. I'm going to put this book out because I'm speaking to the masses in a different way.

I am being Jonah, finally saying, okay, fine, I'll go speak to the masses, even though it's going to be really uncomfortable because I'm going to have to convince them that all the horrible things they're doing are not great and that's not what God wants. And I mean it worked out in the end. But this is a metaphor for how much we resist our own life purpose when you have to go out and do something uncomfortable in order to get your life purpose out there, in order to connect with people and help people, and that's where we are. So be Jonah after the whale, spat him out and go, okay, fine, I'll be uncomfortable and go talk to people and get on other people's podcasts, like Jeremy talks about. Write articles. Go talk to local groups. I've given talks at churches. Go get yourself out there.

Jeremy Slate (1:23:52.186)

So much easier to do that than to go to Nineveh. I have to say that. Jonah was doing a big thing, we just want you to go to your Rotary group and talk to somebody.

Ashley James (1:24:04.111)

But public speaking feels like death to some people. I've seen some studies where people are more afraid of public speaking than death and the thing is we have this idea. This is something I learned from Landmark Education. They have their second major course. They teach an advanced course and in it you learn that you've been afraid of groups of people, they have this hive mind, when actually everyone is terrified of you. Everyone's walking around terrified of everyone else and it's hilarious.

So if you can’t get over that, when you're speaking to the public, when you're speaking to a group of people, or if you're speaking into a mic and you're thinking thousands of people are listening, they're just individuals who are just as worried about you judging them as you are worried that they're judging you. And also remember it's none of your business what other people think of you and that is truly freeing. But you have a purpose in life to go help people and I love that, Jeremy, you're helping get their voice out there, get it heard, especially in the very tumultuous times we're in. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything you want to share to wrap up today's interview?

Jeremy Slate (1:25:19.258)

No, I would just go back to something I said earlier, and I think it's to take 100% responsibility for your own success and failure. And that means get involved in your own media campaign, get your attention out there, promote to people, look for any opportunity you can. If you do that, you can make a change. I'm going to be honest with you, as we mentioned, since you're helping people with the truth. What's going to happen? You're going to get some blowback. That's fine. Keep pushing.

You're going to have people in your life that maybe even love you and care about you to say oh man, why are you doing this? You're going to find, the longer you go, the longer you push, eventually that pushback will turn into admiration, but it doesn't, if you stop. So you have to keep going. You have to keep pushing. Have more conversation, create more media opportunities, talk more, because if you communicate more, you're going to get more comfortable with it. You're going to get better at it. People always ask me how do you get to be a better interviewer? Do a thousand interviews, you'll get better at interviewing, just communicate a lot, it's really, really important.

Ashley James (1:26:20.614)

Go back and listen to episode one, episode two and three of my podcast. Go back and listen to my first 20 episodes. I was shaking in my boots and I know I've gotten better. I'm very comfortable with it now versus 500 episodes ago.

But I love that. Go listen to my first few episodes and you don't have to be perfect to start, just start. You will grow the muscle along the way. Thank you so much, Jeremy, for coming on the show. It's been such a pleasure. bestpodcastbook.com go check out the book. Just pay for shipping and commandyourbrand.com/courses also. If you want to check out the courses, email josh@commandyourbrand.com. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. Keep sending me the really good holistic doctors. Everyone you sent me has been gold. This has been great.

Jeremy Slate (1:27:27.155)

That's amazing. I'm just really excited too. I know I was just talking to somebody else about and we may have to connect them with you, but they're talking about food dyes. I'm just excited.

Ashley James (1:27:35.899)

Let's do it. Let's do it. It sounds great, awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show, it's been wonderful.

Jeremy Slate (1:27:43.547)

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Ashley James (1:27:45.865)

These are the same supplements that I have been using myself personally, my family and my clients for the last twelve and a half years. This is the same supplement that helped me to overcome my chronic diseases. I used to have type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, chronic infections, polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, and I don't have any of those things anymore infertility, and I don't have any of those things anymore. The holistic doctors that informed these supplements discovered that the root cause of disease is a lack of key nutrients. There are 90 essential nutrients the body needs and we're not getting them from our food anymore because of the farming practices of the last hundred years. So, no matter how healthy we eat, we're still missing what our body needs to create optimal health. Because you listen to this health podcast and you're looking for health solutions, you will love working with the team at takeyoursupplements.com. These are health coaches that overcame just like me, overcame their own health issues using, of course, eating healthy, healthy lifestyle. But the key, fundamental thing that they added were these supplements. These supplements encompass all 90 essential nutrients and when you talk to your health coach, they will help to customize a plan specifically to your needs and your health goals. You will start feeling amazing right away. Within the first month of taking these supplements, everyone notices better sleep, more mental clarity, better energy, overall sense of well-being that takes over their life, and they are so happy that they got on these supplements. I want you to give it a try. There's a money-back guarantee and there's amazing health coaches waiting to help you at takeyoursupplements.com and it's free to talk to them. So what are you waiting for? Go to takeyoursupplements.com right now. Sign up for a free consultation and in a month, you could be feeling on top of the world, just like I did.

I was so sick, I felt so horrible and I overcame that. I had to obviously make healthy choices around every area of my life. I had to change my diet, I had to change my lifestyle, but I needed to fill in those nutrient gaps, and that's where takeyoursupplements.com comes in. They help you to make sure that you're getting all 90 essential nutrients, so every cell in your body, all 37.2 trillion cells in your body, will be bathed in all the nutrients that they need so that you can live an optimal life full of health and vitality at any age. Go to takeyoursupplements.com and talk to one of them today. They can help you right now to begin to make that health transformation. That's takeyoursupplements.com.

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519 Is It My Genes? Functional Medicine Dr. Laurie Marti On Working With Your Gene Expressions To Reverse Disease, MTHFR, Fibromyalgia, ADHD, Detox 0

Apr 25, 2024

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Dr. Laurie Marti's Website: www.lauriemartimd.com

519: Understanding Disease Reversal Through Gene Expressions

https://learntruehealth.com/understanding-disease-reversal-through-gene-expressions/

In this episode of the Learn True Health podcast, we delve into the complex world of genetics and health, focusing on the vital connection between gene enzymes like MTHFR and overall wellness. Our expert guest unpacks the role of supportive genes and explains why some people experience heightened anxiety, sleeplessness, and racing thoughts after taking high doses of B vitamins.

We also explore the powerful impact of diet on both brain and gut health, revealing how certain foods and synthetic supplements could be exacerbating underlying genetic issues. Plus, we discuss the importance of listening to your body's signals and how genetic testing can provide actionable insights to improve your health. This is a must-listen for anyone looking to optimize their well-being through a deeper understanding of their genetic makeup.

Highlights:

Listening to body signals
Genetics vs. Epigenetics
Addressing leaky gut and health
Gut health’s role in overall wellness
Actionable insights from genetic testing
Nutritional strategies for genetic issues
Self-checks for body symptoms
MTHFR prevalence and symptoms
Methylation’s role in DNA repair
Potential issues with synthetic folic acid
Diet affects brain and gut health
ADHD diagnoses may relate to diet
Foody dyes exacerbate behavioral issues
Focus in nutrition and root causes

Intro:

Are you tired of guessing your way through supplements, feeling like each choice is just another shot in the dark? Unlock your health potential at takeyoursupplements.com. Here we don't just sell supplements, we customize wellness. Connect with a true health coach who tailors your nutritional path based on your unique health goals and challenges. From fatigue to vitality, from confusion to clarity. Start your transformation today. Visit takeyoursupplements.com and discover how feeling amazing is just one free consultation away. That's takeyoursupplements.com.

Ashley James (0:00:41.012)

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 519.

I am so excited for today's guest. We get to dive into such an interesting topic today with Dr. Dr. Laurie Marti. Welcome to the show,

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:01:00.283)

Thank you.

Ashley James (0:01:02.689)

So we have a mutual friend, and that's how I discovered you, an amazing woman near and dear to my heart. Jessica does mental health counseling, but she looks at the body as a whole, very holistic mental health counseling, helping her clients to overcome addiction around anything you're addicted to. A lot of substance abuse, though. People who want to overcome substance abuse and alcohol come to her, but what I love is that she looks at the body as a whole and helps her clients as a whole, and that's, I'm sure, why she finds this topic so fascinating and why she told me that I really needed to interview you. Because, although you come from a traditional medical doctor, allopathic background, you discovered that holistic medicine, functional holistic medicine, there's this whole world, amazing world of science-based ways of doing things that isn't just waiting for someone to get sick and giving them a drug, and I love that.

I love it when MDs they see the light and they're like, wait a second. This system is incomplete without seeing this whole other side of things. I definitely want to dive into all the fun stuff we're going to talk about today, but first I want to know can you tell us, was there an aha moment as a medical doctor when you went, wait a second, have I been lied to? Was I lied to my entire time in university? Why is this whole other piece missing? Did you have an aha moment?

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:02:41.395)

I think I've had a few of them. There's never just one. So I graduated in a family practice and started doing that for my first few years of my career. I was actually home with my first child and on maternity leave.

I don't even know if I'd been practicing for three years at that time. I just said, I almost don't want to go back, but I have all this student loan debt, so I know I have to go back, but I'm not really happy in what I'm doing. One of the things that really bothered me was just within the medical practice that I had three partners and I was obviously the new young partner.

I always got the most difficult patients because that's where they end up going, is to the new person in the practice. I would order a lot of blood work on them because I'm like, I don't know how to help you if I don't know what's really going on with you. I would actually get chastised by my partners by ordering so many tests. How am I supposed to figure out what's going on with them?

Well, fast forward to me on maternity leave, and there was a company that was looking for a practitioner that wanted to specialize in fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and it was this moment where I was like, wow, that's an interest I've had since my residency, because my residency senior project was on a fibromyalgia patient.

During that time off, I interviewed with them and during that process, they introduced me to working with more holistic therapy because they had found that treating patients with fibromyalgia, which is a chronic pain condition, really was amenable to a more holistic approach. I had never been introduced to any of that. it just opened up this whole new world to me. Long story short, I ended up quitting my practice in family medicine and working for that for a couple of years, and then, just wanted to go out on my own and start my own practice and it really expounded from there because I didn't want to be restricted to just working with those types of patients. I had known about naturopathic doctors but I didn't really understand what they did and so it was just by being able to incorporate all of that into the allopathic realm and having this all encompassing view of every patient was just an amazing experience. so I opened up my own practice, it was 2007, and I have not looked back. I've just learned more and more as I've gone along.

Ashley James (0:06:07.085)

Oh, 16 years. So you've been diving into the holistic space. How does an MD learn all the holistic stuff? Obviously you do your own reading, but do you go through functional medicine? Do you take those courses or do you pick the brains of naturopaths? How do you get this training? For those who are listening who are medical doctors I just want to know more. I want to dive deeper. I've interviewed so many MDs who've become holistic but the medical doctor training is designed to make you see people through the lens of medicine of reductionism. So you're looking to reduce people into their parts, that's part of MD medicine. Being a diagnostician, MDs are amazing. The problem is then the tools they're given are like, here's all these drugs. So it's just an incomplete view of the body. So many MDs that have come on my show said that they thought their education was complete because of the way their education has been presented to them and how much money and time they had to invest in their education, that what they had been taught was the most important aspects. Everything else was kind of just secondary. That functional stuff over there is not as important or poo-pooed. If you graduated from Harvard, I had interviewed a woman graduated from Harvard Medical. She said they made us believe that we were taught the most important things. So we are trained to poo-poo everything else. Then, MD drug based medicine had no answers for her when she fell ill and she had to turn to holistic medicine, which then gave her life back. It was like being pulled out of the matrix. She had this massive wake up and she's like, oh my gosh, there's this whole other aspect. So in realizing as an MD being pulled out of the MD matrix and realizing there's this whole other world you want to plug into, unless you went back to college and got a naturopathic degree. How do you navigate in the world to piece together all the information you need so that you can really help clients on a holistic level? So how do you do that?

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:08:43.375)

That's a great question. There's a whole industry built around that now, one of them is called A4M. It's basically a regenerative medical group, which they have members, because it's a membership organization. But they actually put on seminars where you pay a fee and you just go and you do classes from experts in different areas of different fields and you can learn as much as you want. I did that at the beginning because I had obviously so much to learn. but I tended to focus on hormonal therapy.

You can tailor your practice to what interests you. I think I always had an interest in hormonal medicine, and then obviously these chronic conditions where they were very underserved in the allopathic community. I really felt like there was something lacking for patients that had been diagnosed with these conditions that were considered when nothing else was found to be wrong with them, it had to be in their head, it had to be psychological, and that probably bothered me the most.

Yes, I just spent a lot of hours doing formal training. You can get advanced degrees in that, but it really isn't necessary because it's really just about the knowledge. It's not like you absolutely have to have those certificates on your wall. You just have to have an interest in it and you have to put the time in to learn it because that's the most important aspect is understanding that there's different roads in any field and how you get there is you can make that your own and so you just need the background information.

But yes, it's good to know that there's this growing interest in MDs learning this other side of medicine. I was surrounded by plenty of other MDs who were in my similar space. So it's a lot different than it was back in 2007. This is definitely a growing area. I think the more that we have pandemics and things like that, you're just going to see this grow more and more.

For example, long COVID, it's almost chronic fatigue syndrome that I've been dealing with for years. But when you have these things come to the forefront in allopathic medicine, it's nice having that background because you realize that it's the same underlying processes are there. so you can take that knowledge that you've learned, even though it's something new that you might be exposed to, all that baseline information is there.

Ashley James (0:11:57.856)

What's really interesting is part of this movement was ignited by Dr. Oz. I think that's so funny, like looking back, cause I can think back to like Oprah and how she would bring things to the table to discuss like menopause. Before she had that first episode talking about menopause as she was going through it herself, you didn't talk about it. It was a hidden backdoor conversation with your doctor. It was almost shameful to bring up and she brought it into the light and brought Dr. Oz on. Then he had his own show. As they explored, just tip of the iceberg conversations about things that were outside of the allopathic realm, little holistic nuggets here and there.

Their patients would go to their doctors saying, oh, I want you to run this test, I want you to look for this. The doctors didn't have any training in that. In America you can choose your doctors, you can shop for your doctor. In socialized medicine, it's a little harder, but here you can go shop for your doctor and so you can fire your doctor. If they don't have the extra training, you can fire them and go get a new one. So all of a sudden there was this need for medical doctors to go get additional training. Go get some functional medicine training. Start to understand what's going on because it's now in the mainstream. It was now being talked about. So I just loved watching that movement take off. We still have a long way to go. I'd like to see functional medicine be taught in medical school, but then that would be helping the patient get so healthy where they would need drugs and that would cut the profits of big pharma.

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:13:48.363)

Yes, there is definitely a strong push with the pharmaceutical industry and training. So yes, I don't think that's something that's going to be introduced anytime soon.

Ashley James (0:14:02.170)

Which is a telltale sign that we need to think critically when we choose the companies we buy food from, the companies we buy medicine from, the companies we buy supplements from, and the doctors we choose to see.

We need to not just blindly trust authority. We can't walk around in fear either. We need to take a step back and make sure that we're choosing the people who have the best training and also the companies who have our best interests at heart and not just profits. So I love that allopathic drug-based emergency medicine is available for us to save our lives should we need it, God forbid. It's like taking your car to a plumber. If you take a chronic disease to an MD who only has training in drug-based medicine because they don’t have the training to see how we can help the body heal itself.

So that's my soap box. I say it every day, but you live it every day as an allopathically trained MD who now specializes in functional medicine, which is so exciting.

So let's talk more about the work you do. You started out, like you talked about fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and , there's like Lyme disease and that whole rigmarole of where you say we've been underserved. So true.

Then of course, the hormones, but it comes down to if we chunk down and we look at cellular health and we look at brain health, there's stuff going on. We look at liver health, there's genetics and epigenetics.

When you look at all of these different syndromes and the diagnoses and you look at the body and how the body's functioning, what's going on that's disrupting the function of the body so it presents these symptoms?

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:15:57.854)

Well, that's a big question because there are so many things that can cause dysfunction in the body and it's not always really clear from the initial assessment of an individual. But that's where my biggest mantra is, each person is an individual and what makes us unique is our DNA.

So at the very core of us, we have a genetic makeup that gives us strengths and weaknesses. then from that, we have our life experiences and our exposures, whether that be toxic exposures. I think most of us would agree that probably in the last few decades, we've been exposed to more toxins than ever before in the things that we eat and the things that we breathe.

Thank goodness more and more people are starting to read labels and starting to think critically about the things they put in their body. But our DNA puts us at that part of us that we don't know what our weaknesses and strengths are. So that's really where it begins.

Then based upon your exposures in life, stresses, the things that just happen because of life, as we get older we become less resilient. So I think as you go through your decades of life there are different things that become apparent as problematic. Whether that be hormonal things or pain or fatigue, these things can happen at any age. But then obviously as we get older, then there's these different facets of just our life with our hormone changes and things like that make us more vulnerable to the deficits that we may have that we don't even know about.

Health is a journey. We don't really think about our health until it's not working. Then, we try to ask someone to help us figure it out. I think that sets a person into looking if they are satisfied with the answers that they have or do they feel like they have more questions. That's when people will seek out a more thorough investigation. I think that more and more people are becoming aware that there's other practitioners out there that can help figure out what's going to give them their healthiest experience. I think it's just an all encompassing world, when you think about what happens in our life in terms of what we consider good health and bad health and disease and pathology.

I think people have to get to a point where they feel like they need to ask for help. I think that that's really the start is when do you start asking help or asking those questions?

Ashley James (0:19:31.531)

Yes. That's such a good point, because, what popped into my mind is my mom who she was like the epitome of health to me. She worked out seven days a week. She took her supplements. She was meticulous with her diet. She'd cheat once in a while. Like she'd eat red jujubes and she knew red dye wasn't good for her, but it wasn't like she overdid it anyway. She'd have like three red jujubes and that was her little guilty pleasure. She had some alcohol, like one or two servings, a few times a week kind of thing. So she had a little guilty pleasure, but she felt like she made up for it by how strict she was with her diet. Like she followed the diet plan that her naturopath gave her just meticulously and had the discipline to exercise but she ignored these little symptoms that came up. She ignored this whole little digestive feeling here, a little tired there, a little kind of funny feeling near her liver, she chalked it up to the fact that she had moved to Naples, Florida. They'd gone through the stress of moving. She was acclimating to a new climate, eating different food, meeting, making new friends, doing different activities. She just kind of pushed it off to the side until she was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer. A few months later she died. She ignored the symptoms because she was healthier than most. So those symptoms weren't maybe if she was not healthy, maybe she was eating junk food every day and just really didn't take care of herself. She would have noticed sooner but she ignored those symptoms. So, at what point are you a hypochondriac? At what point are you making a smart move by getting checked out because you feel the symptoms? So for her, it wasn't a big deal until all of a sudden it was.

My dad, on the other hand, largely ignored major red flags for heart disease and died suddenly of heart failure. So, that’s blatant. I'm going to ignore major, major red flags. But then sometimes the body is speaking in whispers. So at what point do you go what? This isn't optimal health. I should probably look into how I could optimize this. So is it that I'm a little tired in the morning? Is it a little bit of brain fog? Is it like I notice I can't do as well in the gym?

I had a friend, we were part of a coaching program. He was an amazing coach. He‘s been a chronic smoker his whole life. Then he quit and did Iron Man's and his coach noticed that his times on his running were getting worse. That’s the only symptom he had of lung cancer. He ended up overcoming lung cancer. Lived for many, many years. Died very, very elderly. I don't remember if he was in his eighties. He lived a full life. That was his only symptom. So luckily he caught it early enough.

When do we listen and go, I want to optimize that. On the other hand, we've been told our whole life, oh, you have that because you're a woman, you have that because your mom had that, you had that because you're in your 40s or 50s or 60s, you have that because you're black or you're white or what. We're just told these ridiculous things, these lies by our doctor that, oh, you're fat because your family was fat, or you have diabetes because your family has diabetes, or you have glaucoma just because that's what happens when you're 70. Like they're blatant lies.

This is why, again, I kind of get on my soapbox with MDs that tell their patients, you're just going to have to be sick because this is how it is. It's not true at all. Your genetics don't dictate your future. They help educate us on where it might go but it has to accompany your lifestyle.

So we look at the patient who has been told there’s a certain way their whole life, or maybe they just believe it because their mom or their grandma said, this is just how it is. Even the mainstream media, everyone, all women have period cramps, like these lies. If you were in absolute perfect health, you would notice no difference. You would just all of a sudden be like, oh, I got my period today. There would be no PMS. PMS is a sign that things are out of balance and we should be listening. So I'd love for you to share, what symptoms do you want people to listen to and take seriously and know that they can optimize those at any age?

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:24:23.603)

Well, I think that is absolutely critical. Unfortunately, the exposures that we have in our medical community is that you don't really ask those questions. So when you're a teenager, you may go in for a sports physical. You're not really encouraged to expound on anything. It's a form you check off. What child is going to admit anything's wrong. That's where we have to change the paradigm, even if it's only not going to the doctor, even if it's among the population, our health is something that should be a topic of conversation.

I think it's never too early to say, you know maybe I should do a comprehensive stool test to figure out how my digestion is because who doesn't have a bloated belly every now and then, or react in some funky way to something they ate, and I'm not talking about food poisoning, I'm just talking about, gosh, that did not agree with me, and it's something I've eaten before. Just having that awareness that if something happens that is not a completely random event, but it keeps happening. That's when you have to do something about it.

For example, normally most of my patients are adults, but I will end up seeing their teenagers or their children only because maybe they've kind of had some random things happen and maybe it's not right. Most of the time we blow off young people's symptoms because they're young and they should be healthy. Come to find out a lot of things that teenagers suffer with acne, just food sensitivities, those things are not normal. However, we've begun to normalize that. The problem is that when you start normalizing those kinds of symptoms or signs, things that you see and experience, that's when you have to start saying, this is not normal. Maybe there is something I should look deeper into.

So it doesn't have to be I'm passing out or I have some real severe symptoms or something like that. It can be just what we consider normal everyday teenager issues or things in our life that we just think are normal for our age. If you just have something that is just happening over and over, maybe don't just consider it normal. Maybe it is something underneath.

I've done testing on over a thousand patients and I can tell you that nobody's normal. Nobody has completely normal tests. I've checked my own tests and they're not normal. So, it's all in how you just take that next step and say, I'm not going to accept this is the way that I exist. If I can improve upon anything, maybe it gives me a longer life or maybe I'll have more energy or so it's just about not normalizing everything and having those conversations with your friends and family and your connections.

Ashley James (0:28:15.421)

One of my naturopathic mentors told me about his favorite movie of all time, King of Hearts, 1966, in which during the war, this whole town is emptied out and the psychiatric patients in this asylum escape and they flee down into the town and they take over the town. All the people are, for a lack of a better term, crazy. They're having a lot of fun. They takeover the bakery, the restaurant, the inn and everything.

Then a soldier comes in and can you imagine you walk in and everyone feels as if they're normal because they're all there, but they're acting as if they've taken on these roles. He walks into this world thinking that they're all townspeople. He described the reason why this is favorite movie, because he goes, this is what it's like to be a patient in the MD medical system.

Everyone's in agreement. They're all crazy and they're all in agreement with each other. So you have to get like we were the outsider coming into this world and we've been told this is just how it is like acting and children are normal. It's not, it is not. First of all, we got to look at blood sugar. We've got to look at the gut biome. We got this list of things we got to look at, like food sensitivities but go even beyond why is there a food sensitivity? What's going on? Is there a leaky gut? Like go deeper. So we have taken a population, got them incredibly sick and then said, because so many people have sickness, it's normal. The very first step in healing is to shift our mindset and pull ourselves out of the matrix of the brainwashed way we've been taught to think.

We have absolutely been taught to think this way. I hate acting like a conspiracy person with my tin foil hat, but I'm making tinfoil hats for everyone. So passing them out right now. When you look at the history of the modern medical system, it was completely 100% orchestrated and influenced those who sold pharmaceuticals at the time over 100 years ago. It has since been not a days gone by that the pharmaceutical industry has not had control over the education of medical doctors and the number one sponsor of all media are the pharmaceutical industry which is petroleum-based. That's a whole fun rabbit hole to go down of true history not a perceived conspiracy, but a real conspiracy. A real conspiracy is when someone or a group of people get together to conspire to do illicit things or to do things that aren't ethical or aren't right. This is absolutely not right because they control the media that you've been bringing into your brain since you were born. Also your parents. But your grandparents or great grandparents. They were before this and they might have had a garden with herbs. They had animals. They did a regular deworming of the animals and then they took the same herbs as well. This is something that's been lost, but it was 100 years ago plus we had a lot of things that we knew to do. Now we also did a lot of really weird stuff, like eat things with lead in it. Paint our body with arsenic or whatever, we had weird things we had. So at least we've gotten rid of the not so healthy things. But if we go back, we see that our ancestors incorporated nature into their medicine.

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:32:11.885)

Well, there was less of a dependence on a system. Again, there's probably multiple theories on what's behind it, but the idea is that we become more inclined to be part of this dependency of people taking care of us. Like we don't take care of ourselves anymore.

But I think that's starting to change. See, I really do feel there are more and more people asking questions, which is where it starts. It starts by being inquisitive because I think we have been told to obey and don't ask questions and just do what you're told but I think people are starting to say, we can follow the rules, but maybe we ask questions along the way. I think it goes beyond even health in that realm but it's about people just using these really big brains that we have and not accepting status quo's because as we become a society that's sicker, we dig ourselves into deeper holes.

I think people are finally starting to wake up and say, maybe there is an alternative way, maybe that we start being more self-sustaining, that we don't ask for help, or depend on organizations to help us. Use those resources when you need them, but also realize that we have a responsibility to ourselves and our families to make sure that we're in the best health possible. In doing that, it does require some work. It requires you to do some research to think outside the box because you're not going to get that if you just go to your doctor's office, you're not going to get that. So it's about people having a different mindset and saying, I'm just going to start asking different people different questions and maybe I start learning some new things and some ways that I can help myself and meet the right practitioners that are going to help me in this journey of empowering myself. That process is really powerful. It really teaches you not only how to take care of yourself better, but how to take care of others better and just a community spirit in that, because I think our health is about community too. We need to heal ourselves, but in the process of just eating better and sourcing out better foods and things like that, we are making those connections that can all help us be healthier.

Ashley James (0:35:22.225)

It does matter the environment because I've had clients before where they're the only one eating healthy and everyone else is going to Sonic's or going to Starbucks and Sonic's and Jack in the Box and McDonald's and they're all kind of laughing at her wanting to go to bed early and get up early to go for her walks or make her smoothies and all the changes she's making versus the clients have had where the whole family is doing it with her or 100% on board or their husband's like, yes, make me a smoothie too.

It’s so much easier when the people around you are on the journey with you, or at least supportive of your journey and not questioning you or putting you down. I can't tell you how many clients have had with that choose to cut out dairy. Then someone in the family is like, you need dairy and you're going to hurt yourself if you don't. They get really indignant and angry at them because they think that they're going to die if they don't eat dairy. Then they literally, on the same day, go through the drive through and eat fried food. That's okay, but how dare you not drink the mammalian excretions of another animal?

We need to respect and honor our friends and family when they're trying to make health choices. But what I explained to my clients is that when people get upset, especially those who are close to you, when they get upset about your changing, it's just holding a mirror up to themselves and they don't want to change.

People with addiction also get very angry because they don't want to give up their sugar and alcohol or whatever they're addicted to. So, if you choose to give those things up, if they don't want to make changes, they get angry at you for making changes because they don't want to feel threatened.

It's really interesting to make a health change and declare it to your friends and family and then just watch and see who's supportive and then who isn't and I get that it's their stuff, but we have to kind of set ourselves up and make sure we have our healthy boundaries in place because it's really interesting who comes out of the woodwork to sabotage us. It's their stuff, but still we need to protect ourselves.

Earlier, you talked about how nutrient deficiency and toxic exposures are largely on the rise, that's something we've seen in the last 40 years create chronic illness. Then there's this whole aspect of genetics, which you love to get into. I'm really, really interested to talk about MTHFR, which is just one of the many genetic things that we could talk about, but I'd love for you to explain, from your standpoint as a physician working with a patient or client, what is the difference between someone's genetics and someone's epigenetics when it comes to helping them support their body's ability to heal itself and create optimal health.

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:38:30.620)

The very first thing I do with any person that first comes to see me is I get an assessment of their environment because you can find out all you want about their genetics. But if their environment is in a negative space you will find that their genetics aren't even if they have strong points they are not necessarily going to work for their benefit. So that concept of epigenetics is that you have certain genes and gene mutations that we're born with, but these exposures, and either good or bad, will affect the expression of those genes.

So that's what's really amazing about this whole idea is that people have for so long said, well I have this genetic problem or that's this genetic predisposition. So I guess I'm going to die of this or, or it's my parents had this and now I'm getting it. So, there's nothing I can really do to change it. Well, we've realized that's not the case, that there are factors that can improve upon these weak areas in our genetics and we can make them function better. In that process, people learn that they aren't subject to the outcomes that gene or that group of genes might cause for them disease-wise, if they pay attention and they take care of their nutrition in a way that optimizes those. So the way that a lot of these genes work is even if you have a mutation in an enzyme, you can take nutritional cofactors that can improve upon the function of that enzyme. if you do that, then you reduce the risk of the potential outcomes of that mutation.

So you had mentioned MTHFR, that's actually the gene that got me interested in genetics because I had read this research paper about fibromyalgia and how this chronic pain condition was affected by this gene, which I know I had heard about in medical school, but it was nothing that was a big topic of discussion. So it was something that I was familiar with, but didn't really know anything about and that definitely led me down the rabbit hole of just understanding that particular gene but then of course, there's a whole host of others that can affect it. so, just in this process of learning how we can understand what our genetic makeup is, but we can improve upon it based upon different factors that we can support. I think there's just a huge educational piece in this because people are learning this stuff or hearing about it for the first time. It's pretty science-oriented, you can really get into the weeds in it. Part of my job is to bring it down to a level that I think people can utilize that information and apply it in their own lives, take that information and do something positive with it.

Then,what I do is I support that with blood work and looking to see, to show people that they're making a difference. The choices that they're making both with their lifestyle and with their choices in what they eat and the supplements that they take, they can see in black and white how these things are changing within their body from their blood work and that really encourages people.

Ashley James (0:42:40.355)

Can you give us some examples?

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:42:42.361)

Are you talking about a specific blood test?

Ashley James (0:42:45.697)

When you've worked with a specific client, obviously don't mention their name, you saw these genetic things and you saw how their gene expressions were expressing epigenetically, and then you supported them with the right cofactors and then they themselves felt results and you could also see those results on labs and also in their demeanor.

Dr. Laurie Marti (0:43:13.535)

Yes, so I wouldn't even say a specific one, but I would say, in general, I will see patients that don't sleep very well, or maybe they have mood issues, depression or anxiety. I will identify that they have certain gene mutations like MTHFR.

One of the things that we do is you want to promote the use of certain vitamins that are specific for supporting those enzymes. What people start seeing is that, wow, I'm sleeping better. Then there are biomarkers, there's blood markers that you can check that actually start out abnormal when they haven't taken those supplements. Then they'll see over the course of three to six to nine months that those numbers are coming down. They're also seeing that maybe not as anxious, they're getting more energy, just their mood seems more stable. A lot of people do these genetic tests now. We talked to several people who have done them, and they'll find out they have a gene mutation, and there's plenty of information on the internet out there about them. Oh, take these B vitamins because they're going to help you. What happens is, they don't know the dosing or, they haven't really been instructed on how to take those things. So they end up being very anxious and this was the worst thing I ever did was take these B vitamins and I was supposed to take them because I have this gene mutation.

Well, obviously, these gene enzymes do not exist in a bubble, theere's other genes that affect, for example, MTHFR. So it's important to understand the supportive genes in that particular realm because some people, if they start taking B vitamins in a very high quantity, and I mean, some of the dosages out there are quite high, and all of a sudden they aren't just really, really anxious. That's usually the biggest thing. They're not getting any sleep and their mind is racing. It's just because they don't know that there's other genes that are malfunctioning, that you've revved up a system that hasn't been very active, and now you've over activated it. So there is a process with this where you don't want to just go at this without guidance. It's very, very important to understand how these genes influence each other and that you have to really personalize it. That's what I do is I work with people to personalize their supplements, their treatments so that they don't make those mistakes of feeling their mental health has really taken a nosedive because they started taking vitamins. So this is the educational piece that I was talking about because, like I said, there's lots of testing that people can do without a doctor ordering it for them. But it's important to know the ramifications of taking certain treatments and supplements when you have these gene mutations.

Ashley James (0:46:58.058)

I have MTHFR. I know there's different ones that I don't remember the name of the one I have but it's interesting because I have had liver problems that I have figured out certain things exacerbate my liver and certain things really, really help. When I take high levels of B vitamins, and this happens to my husband too, we both get very irritable and argumentative. So we typically dole out our supplements and take them together. This was years ago, we were hitting the upper limits of B vitamin dosages and the days that we did we’re at each other, we’ll playfully bicker in a very loving way, but we were just really irritable. I was, I don't like how I feel. I feel uncomfortable and irritable. When I take very, very high doses of B vitamins, which I don't anymore. Back then they weren't methylated. That makes a big difference for me also.

You can't just go to Trader Joe's and buy B vitamins or whatever. You can't just buy whatever's off the shelf. It's not going to be the highest quality, the most bio available. It's not going to be in the right ratios and it's definitely not going to be methylated. So there's just so many things.

I remember way back in the day, 15 years ago, going to Trader Joe's and buying all my supplements because I believed in vitamins. I thought, oh, this is good for me. It did not have a negative effect. So people will often try to save money. They'll hunt around like, oh, these vitamins over here at Walmart are cheaper. I'm like, well, you're actually wasting money and not only are you wasting money, there's like a net negative because now they're actually hurting you. Whereas I really do believe in quality supplements and diet and looking at everything as a whole. But when we go to take our supplements, we really have to make sure. I think even less is more.

Start at a slow, low dose and slowly work your way up and find where you feel best because I did that and I was, wow, my dose was like a hundred pound dose, instead of, doing like the full body weight dose and some people, they just excel, or even a child's dose, I know a woman who does like doses almost the amount that an infant would be given and she can't do anymore and she's like, I feel amazing when I just do this much. This is what her body needs. Just this little extra booster of the cofactors.

This is why when it comes to buying your supplements, I highly recommend going to takeyoursupplements.com getting a free consultation with one of our true health coaches because the supplements that we use in our protocols are all methylated and they’re grouped together in complexes in the way that all the ratios are in balance and they’re all designed to support your liver, support your detox pathways, and support optimal health and nutrition for every single cell and because they’re dosed by body weight you can begin slow and slowly increase and increase until you find the perfect dose for you and the coach that you are assigned to will show you how to do that will show you how to take the supplements that are best for you and that support your body’s ability to heal itself and support your liver to detoxify and your methylation pathways. It is a huge game changer. It’s life-changing. So go to takeyoursupplements.com. Sign up for the free consultation and give it a try. They will also show you how to get free shipping. They will show you how to fit it within your budget if you have a budget. For example, if you are in such a tight space with your money that you’ve less than $50, there is a plant derived, trace mineral supplement, it’s a liquid, it’s about $25 then there’s tax and shipping on that and it is life-changing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people just on that one trace mineral supplement. They see a huge shift in their health because we are so depleted in minerals. Of course if you can afford more they have an amazing complex that is all vitamins and trace minerals, and extract nutrients from plants and antioxidants, and it’s all methylated, all the minerals are plant derived so plants have already digested the minerals so the body can absorb them. I haven’t found supplements like in any other company. I’ve been working with them for over 12 years, with my clients and with my family and myself getting great results. They also have a money back guarantee so there’s nothing to lose. There’s everything to gain. Go to takeyoursupplements.com.

I want the listeners to have a strong grasp on this concept of epigenetics, because with genetics, we all know you're born with your eye color. That's it. We can't change your eye color. You have freckles, she doesn’t have freckles. This is what we're born with. That's genetics that's baked into the cake.

And then there's this epigenetics, which is like super fascinating and this world where things can be turned on and off. For example, exposures to toxins can negatively impact our epigenetic expressions to turn on cancer. We don't want that. Plastics, there's so many environmental things that can turn on the genetic expressions for several generations.

The mouse studies found five generations after BPA exposure took five generations to correct itself and the mice that were exposed to it even though they ate the same food, became obese. These are called obesogens. That's so frustrating because so many people are walking around like, I'm doing the best I can. I'm eating super well. Why am I struggling? Well, do you eat out of plastic? Let's start with looking at the parabens and the best phenol A and all that, all those obesogens, the cumulative exposure. So clean up, clean up the toxicity in your life, in your kitchen, in your cupboards, even drinking out of Starbucks cups, the little plastic thing on top, just because it says BPA free doesn't mean the chemicals are not in it. It just means one type of chemical. There's still like nine others that could be in there? It leeches into our food, especially when the food or beverage is hot. So you have these negative epigenetic expressions we can turn on. Then you have these wonderful, healthy gene expressions we can turn on by the right nutrition and bringing down toxicity. Can you educate us about that for those who this is such a new concept for?

Dr. Laurie Marti (54:38.754)

I think we're starting to really understand how our offspring is an adaptive process. We can see that just if you look at human height and different things like that, there's different aspects that things will change over generations depending on your exposure. So it's not that we haven't seen that in action. People could point to different things within cultures where things just get passed down. So there's this idea that we have this really amazing adaptive response in our bodies. For example, there might be a time when we won't be able to eat gluten anymore.

So this was really not anything up to probably 30 years ago. I mean, I grew up eating gluten. It wasn't a problem, but my own kids have problems with gluten. You look at these different things, whether it be the chemicals in the environment, herbicides, pesticides, and you look and it's like,

I don't think I gave them a bad gene, but just that whole idea that they may pass on to their own offspring the inability to eat gluten. It's not anything that I would have given them. So there is this idea that things in our environment can change our genes good or bad, so that our offspring then take on that gene expression. So that's kind of the idea of what some people call biohacking or where you say, okay, I've identified these genes and if I support them in an optimal way, maybe my offspring and generations to follow, it will not be as much of a problem. But the other aspect to this is that we have seen certain genes will adapt because of certain environmental factors. We've seen that in sickle cell disease the people that have sickle cell are more resilient to malaria. For example, so we know that those type of things can also be passed on based on those environmental exposures but the idea that we now, because the genome has been mapped, and that we can identify these different genes, if we intervene on a certain level, well, we may change the dynamics of health to come. So what we do now, the choices that we make now, the different advances that we can make in our health now, and like you said, getting rid of fragrances and things that so many of the chemicals that actually, like you said turn off some of these genes. If we can eliminate some of those things in our lives that actually promote those deleterious effects on our genes, then maybe in the future, we have a much healthier population.

Ashley James (0:57:50.695)

So are you saying that continuous exposures to certain things over generations, the body adapts as a theory? Did the bodies adapt based on their malaria exposure by developing sickle cell? Is that a theory?

Amazing. In the last 100 years, and this is even before genetically modified food, in the last 100 years, they changed wheat and modified it the way they did the agriculture. The way they harvested it and pollinated and cross-pollinated. They grew wheat that contained more and more and more gluten. So food in the last just three to four generations has a tremendous, measurably huge amount more gluten. I don't remember the exact number, but it was something crazy. It was some crazy number that it has increased.

We've always eaten ancient grains. We've always had some very small amount of gluten in our diet, but now it's this very strong exposure, just like we've always had arsenic. Arsenic's been in our food, but in very, very trace amounts. If you concentrate it, it will kill you. if you concentrate it, but not to the point where it kills you, it will poison you and it will be heavy metal poisoning. You can live with it your whole life, live a shorter life, be chronically sick, and it is not be great. So at some point, gluten, it tipped the scales, and it's a net negative. So small, tiny amounts for thousands of years was fine. Then they concentrated the amount of gluten that the plant makes.

Now, it's interesting, in certain European countries, they eat the bread just fine. They come to the States, they eat the bread, they get incredibly sick. That's because the amount of gluten changes, some people can concentrate gluten, like vegetarians or vegans and in China, they'll take gluten and make a meat-like substance out of it. So some people eat just like concentrated gluten and they're fine. Whereas other people, like your children, like my whole family, we don't respond well to it. So are you saying that over time, because of the exposure, our epigenetics will adapt so that we can't eat it anymore?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:00:30.722)

Yes, I believe that's the case. Right now we see it really prominent in young people. I'm 51, so I kind of miss that because I think some of the major herbicides and things like that, the genetically modified stuff really, I think I missed some of that in my youth. My kids generation, they're being exposed to it on every level of different foods, even well-made foods, not just processed foods. I think what's happening is, yes, we were going to end up having their offspring might not be able to eat any form of gluten. I think that that's something that is starting to happen, but which is a real tragedy because wheat has been around for millennia and it's actually full of really healthy B vitamins. It's a real tragedy that we're getting to a point where we're allergic to wheat because of the gluten content. But what's really interesting is you can find forms of wheat that are non-hybridized like the ancient forms of wheat. But people who are gluten sensitive can't even have those. Which yes, so we've gotten to the point where even if they eat the stuff that's been around for millennia, they can't eat it anymore because their gut has no ability to process it. even if you take digestive enzymes, it still doesn't fix it because the inflammatory process has already set in.

Ashley James (1:02:24.953)

Oh man, I interviewed a guy, Dr. John Doulliard, and he wrote a book called Eat Wheat. when I saw that, I was, oh no, I'm doing an interview with a guy who's selling everyone to eat wheat. I was, okay, let me dig a little deeper. I'm not going to like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It turned out it was brilliant. It was a brilliant title. This was back in Episode 505, this whole book actually is not just go eat wheat and that's the healthy thing for you. He's saying to use food almost like a diagnostic tool. There's ways to measure your health and then go eat wheat, see how you feel. Like cut wheat out for 30 days or 60 days and then eat some, for example but using food to measure your health. If you eat wheat for that day after cutting it out for a while and you feel horrible, you don't sleep well or you're inflamed or your joints are achy, it doesn't have to be digestive, it could be brain fog, then we need to look deeper because there's more stuff going on. But I just thought that it was really interesting that we could use certain foods as a way of measuring our own health and lack thereof and where we can strengthen our health. So, their genetics don't change like eye color, hair color, that kind of thing that you're born with. But then there's this entire beautiful world of epigenetics, which we can influence. So that gives you a bit of power. We can influence. So, back when I was a kid, they were talking about genetics as a standpoint. Nope. Well, but heart disease might be genetic. So, you might be passed down and that's it. Your grandpa had it. You're going to have it. Your dad had it. You're going to have it. That kind of thing.

First of all, lifestyle is absolutely a hundred percent if you have a really, really healthy lifestyle, it doesn't matter what your genetics are because you can intervene. But it's good to know where the weak links are in our body and our health. Then there's epigenetics that’s something we can influence and turn on or turn off in our lifetime. That's the empowering thing. That's where we come to you and we go, okay, what can we do? So when someone comes to you and says, I don't want to feel sick anymore, do you do epigenetic testing? How does that work?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:05:01.901)

So usually what I'll do is I lay it out for people what options that they have for testing. Some people just are not comfortable doing genetic tests, and I understand that. I mean, to each their own. I usually tell them that having some information about genetics is a key aspect to what I do, because I use it like a roadmap to figure out what other testing might be most useful for that person. So I really try to assess right away what their comfort level is. Then some people just want to do everything and that's great. They like data, because data is a huge part of what I do, it's like collecting data.

There's a lot of people who understand that and they want to take advantage of that. Other people are just a little bit scared of, not necessarily what they might find, but just that maybe they shouldn't be looking in those areas and I don't know how to explain it, but everybody has their comfort level. So what I try to do is really look at their family history and from the things that their grandparents, their parents, aunts and uncles may have dealt with, that gives me a clue because there are obviously some hereditary aspects to general health. Then once I have that, then I can point them in the direction of where they may want to go. I think when people were first doing these tests, a lot of people were using the commercially available ones, the more hereditary family ancestry and things like that. Everybody has their own take on doing genetic testing. Personally, I like ones that are actionable. So it's not just enough to find out that you don't have a rare condition because most people don't have those rare conditions.

Mostly genetics to me is something that needs to be actionable. How can I use this information to better myself and better my future? Is there something that I can clean up in my life that I should clean up because of my genetics? For example, just myself, I have really high cholesterol and I figured out that I have genetics that I don't process saturated fats well.
Well, I was eating a lot of dairy and cheese. So those were all things that I had to change because if I didn't, I would end up with probably type two diabetes, which is what my grandmother had and both of my grandmothers. It was something that I did not want to become my grandparents. So I was, hey, I have this information. I'm going to do something about it. So I just started working on differences in my diet. So that's where I will utilize, and I recommend genetic testing where you can understand the nutritional aspect of your genetics because I think that's the single most, the simplest way to really make a difference right away, as well as your long-term outcomes. So those are what I tend to recommend. Like I said, some people want to do it, some people don't, and if they don't, I say okay. So what we'll do is we will just do blood testing. I can do comprehensive stool testing. I love looking at the gut. I think outside of genetics. This is really interesting because even mainstream medicine is really picking up on this. I will never forget my allopathic side. I get email blasts and things like this from the big medical societies and things like that. I want to know what they're promoting and one thing that I heard about and I think it was just this week, it was a trivia question. Where is most serotonin made?

Ashley James (1:09:30.646)

I know the answer.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:09:32.782)

Yes, I bet you do. I already knew it was in the gut, but that was the answer. 90% of it is made in our gut, serotonin, and 10% is made in the brain. Yet how do we address people that have mental health? Well, we try to manipulate their neurochemistry. Shouldn't we be manipulating our gut chemistry? That's mainstream medicine is finally picking up that our gut is an area that's really, really important. So really, I would probably say I try to get 100% of my patients to collect a stool sample. I know people probably raise their eyebrows and good thing I do telemedicine because sometimes I don't see that. But it is definitely like some people are kind of go, well, that seems weird. But oh my goodness, I have learned so much through just understanding people's general health through the function of their gut. That's just something that people are really receptive to it. Once they see that, they're like, oh my gosh, I'm like that.

Obviously I'm reacting to gluten. I have a gluten antibody response. Those are things you wouldn't believe how powerful that is to get people to stop eating gluten at least temporarily at least until you can clean up the leaky gut. The fact that we have biomarkers to check for leaky gut, these were things we didn't even know we could test for. In fact, the problem is the allopathic medical community doesn't even know some of these tests exist.

Ashley James (1:11:19.121)

They don't even believe in a leaky gut. They're still going around poo-pooing it.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:11:25.193)

So the thing is, and this is just a process, the more that I think patients become aware of these things and are doing these things. Their regular doctors are going to be exposed to this, whether they like it or not, because the patients are going to say, hey, I did this test, and so I think even the patients enlighten the doctors a lot.

Even with me, I listen to my patients so much and I let them guide quite a bit of what they do. I obviously give them information, but it's a two-way street. I think that allopathic medicine has been very paternalistic, it's a one-sided thing, and you chastise the patient if they haven't been doing what they needed to be doing for the last year or when you're not happy with their blood work. That's not the right approach. The right approach is to make it a two-way street and say, hey, here's the education, here's what's going on with you, consider this like a baseline. The choices you make are going to influence. I keep patients accountable by redoing some of these tests. So that they can see, because I can only guide them. I can't be with them every day to coach them and say, you got to do this or don't do that. Give them the tools and then they're going to make much better choices about things if they just understand the education or if they have that educational piece and they understand the consequences of not doing those things or the benefits of doing the things that they should be doing.

Ashley James (1:13:08.979)

Well, they're motivated because they paid you and they went through the process of paying for these labs. Also they came to you for a reason. They're not feeling well and they want to get better. So many people are walking around not even believing they can get better. That's why I love doing my podcast because my listeners are getting on a visceral level, oh, my body can heal itself. My body was designed to constantly see homeostasis. I'm going to help it get there. Imagine we're climbing. I say there's no Mount Everest of health. I have this joke because I have overcome so many things in my past. So many illnesses in my past, and yet I'm still on a health journey and I'm never going to be done. I'm never going to reach the top and put my flag on the top of Mount Everest of health and say, I'm done. There is no getting done, but there's these peaks and valleys. There's these plateaus. When I say plateau, I mean, in a good way, You're standing there, yay, I got to this part of the mountain and you can look out and observe your new level of health and then look back down the mountain, wow I used to be down there I'm here now and then you go up the mountain a bit and all of a sudden now you dip down a bit. This is not where I want to be. I got to keep going up

So for me doing a self check, checking in with myself and listening to the symptoms of my body, listening to my body say, these are my energy levels. This is my brain function. This is my sleep. Just checking in and I keep track of my monthly cycles and anything that would accompany that, keep track of bowel movements and just anything out of the ordinary, anything, just listening to my body, just tuning in, listening. Again, not from the fear standpoint. But from the thank your body, this is the language that you speak. Now I've been trained to listen to those symptoms and help just like you have and help them guide us and for someone who has not no training in what these symptoms might mean, you want to go to someone who's been trained, but just listen to them. The best thing to do is do a mood food journal. When I say journal, I don't mean like you're writing paragraphs about what you did that day, just very quick, write down, like score your sleep, score your energy level, score your mental health. I'm feeling great today, or I'm feeling super motivated or I'm feeling miserable, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling down on myself, I have tender breasts, or I'm constipated, or I have a headache because I didn't drink enough water yesterday. Jot these little bullet points, and write down things you put in your mouth. You don't have to measure it, but just be like, today I ate strawberries and yogurt, and I had waffles, or whatever. Today I went to McDonald's and ate junk food. You write it down.

Look at it and go, wow, every day, oh, I have a headache because everyday I drink wine the night before. You can look at the obvious ones but there's some not so obvious where I figured out that I couldn't eat eggs anymore. Eggs cause heart palpitations for me. It was the weirdest thing. I ended up doing a Viome test, in which I had the CEO of Viome and one of their top scientists in a separate interview talking about how they test. They also collect stool samples. It's a home kit. So it's easy. You're not scaring my audience. My listeners are like, they'll be fine. They'll go do the stool sample, it'll be fine. It's actually not that hard to do. It's pretty simple. They make it super easy. They do over 100,000 gene expressions of your microbiome. So they're not testing your genetics. They're testing the genetics of the bacteria that live in your gut. I cannot believe what I learned. I am blown away by how cool just that test alone. I can imagine like the stool tests that you do and the looking deeper into your genetic expressions based on what you eat or what you don't eat and how that's going to shift your body and shift your genetic expressions and looking for what kind of co-factors we can support and like making sure that you don't have leaky brain. There's all kinds of cool stuff that we can look at. I love that we can take someone and help them to find what kind of diet they need. When you work with people, and you're doing the stool testing, what's the most important thing you make sure you look at? I know everyone's different. For me, I want to make sure you're drinking enough water because so many people walk around chronically dehydrated and yet everyone knows they should drink enough water, but no one drinks enough water unless you carry a water bottle and I don't mean a plastic one with you all the time, you are not fully hydrated and or make sure they get enough sleep. There are these foundations of health that the majority of people don't take seriously, but are critical to our health. Are there some major foundational things you make sure to check with everyone?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:18:25.811)

Well, I mentioned the stool test, and I think within that, leaky gut has got to be one of my favorites. If I find it, if it's abnormal, there's a whole lot that's going to be corrected if you can correct that. Because what we understand about inflammation, once inflammation is in the gut, if it's self-contained, you may have just gut symptoms.

Once that inflammation starts leaving the confines of the intestinal system, that's when you start seeing all these other things that we wouldn't even necessarily associate with our gut. So you might see skin problems, you might see like we call it brain fog, just not thinking clearly because once these inflammatory compounds start entering, crossing the blood brain barrier and start entering into our brain we start having a lot of mental cognitive issues.

Then mood issues and of course that affects sleep. Then if you start affecting sleep you start affecting cortisol and our adrenal health. So there's a cascade of things that can happen if you have a leaky gut. You could also look at like MTHFR being a foundational thing too, but there's something very dynamic about the way that our gut has this barrier function, and when that barrier function breaks down, our bodies really become out of sync, whether it be hormonally or we think that almost all chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmunity is all built upon this idea that these inflammatory compounds are leaching into the rest of our body. That's why I ask all my patients to do a stool test, a functional stool test, and like I said, one more, I can test the leaky gut function because if that's present, then that needs to be healed.

Typically, there's a protocol, with some food eliminations and different healing factors and things like that, that can help, but it's then you start assessing, okay, what are you eating that is contributing to this? What are you doing that we can modify? What can we do to start this healing process and then stop this outflow? If you can stop that process from leaching out into the rest of the body, that's going to make a huge difference on so many other areas, like I said, that may not even feel like it's a gut problem.

I've actually found skin conditions are some of my favorites to deal with because when you're talking about things that fluctuate mood and things like that, they're all happening internally. When you have something external and you start seeing it get better and that you can actually see, oh, I ate the wrong things. I started eating gluten again. There goes my acne. When things are on the outside, you pay attention to them a lot more. So again, people can be self-accountable, especially when they see those things. But yes, that leaky gut concept, I've been doing this a long time, seeing patients and working with chronic illnesses. I think the prominence of gut health and this permeability issue that we call leaky gut, that is becoming one of my go to prominent factors. If that can be fixed, a lot of other things can be fixed.

Ashley James (1:22:27.890)

So that's one of your foundation things. So water, sleep, those are for me. I could give you supplements up the wazoo. That’s one thing if you choose to go to bed at 9.30 at night and you have poor sleep, but if you choose to go to bed at one in the morning, then you've got to choose to go to bed on time. So these are foundation things. So many people just disregard it because it's like, ah, whatever, I want to stay up and Netflix and chill or whatever. I don't like drinking water. Whatever their excuse is, there's no amount of drugs or supplements or natural remedies that are going to get you to optimal health because the body doesn't function on poor sleep and dehydration.

So once we cover those foundation things, and there's a few others, definitely a few other foundation things. It’s like, I don't care if your car is a million dollars. A million dollar car or a $30,000 car, there's no gas in it, it's not going. Same with your body. So there's foundational stuff.

Then that next level is foundational, like functional testing. We got to check everyone for this because it's so prevalent. I know that they say almost 50% of the population just depending on ancestry has MTHFR to some degree. That's something that everyone really should know about themselves. We're in this day and age, we can get the testing. It makes such a huge difference. Can you explain what MTHFR is? What is this process of methylation and why should we know if we have, if our body has trouble with methylating and what that all means?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:24:19.719)

Yes, so now you even mentioned it, you've heard it's about half the population. I've even heard it might be even up to 80 percent, but again that might be epigenetics. Our genetics may actually be getting worse over time where more and more people are having mutations in this gene. But what it really is MTHFR, a gene as an enzyme is a protein and it utilizes certain nutritional cofactors to basically do this methylation function in our body, and has many different categories of what it's involved in. So it's involved in DNA repair. We can actually repair our DNA. When it doesn't repair, that's when things break down and people get cancers. So we have this ability through methylation to actually repair our DNA so that we keep things like cancer away.

So mutations and methylation would facilitate a problem in trying to do that repair. It's also important in detoxification. So through our liver, our kidneys, elsewhere in our body, and that's because one of the end products of methylation is called glutathione. Glutathione is one of our most important antioxidants in the body. If you don't have enough of that, you're going to have problems getting rid of toxins in your body. Like you said, there's a whole host of environmental toxins that we're exposed to, whether it's in the foods or the air or even like molds, for example, these are things that we utilize methylation to eliminate. We have great resilience in our bodies up to a point. The more that there's a problem with this methylation, the more that this is going to be impaired. It also is important in turning on and off other genes. So we have a checks and balances system in our body using methylation so that we don't let things go unchecked. So we have different pathways that we have to be able to control. Methylation is one of the ways we do that, it is just that whole checks and balances. It also is involved in neurotransmitter synthesis. So making things like dopamine and norepinephrine and epinephrine and serotonin. We use methylation and these compounds to make these very important neurotransmitters that run most of our cognitive processes, but also functions in controlling our blood pressure, for example. So that is all part of methylation as well. It's also an important part of our immune system. It might be from making different immune types of cells, but also with that antioxidant glutathione, that's a big part of our immunity and being able to eliminate different pathogens and things. So really, that's why it is considered a foundational part because it just involves so many of these different aspects. I didn't even mention hormones. It's not that it's involved in hormone synthesis, but it can affect it, for example, your liver's not working really well because maybe it's got a lot of toxins and you're not eliminating. Well, you also break down your estrogens there. So what we find is that if your methylation process is impaired in your liver, you will find that you'll become estrogen dominant, which is not just a problem with women. Men also have problems with estrogen dominance, especially now with plastics because they are estrogen mimickers. You get this buildup within the liver of these estrogenic compounds and you're not eliminating them properly. then that leads to a whole host of other types of problems.

Some women, it might be PMS, it might be different types of cancers, breast cancer, ovarian cancer. We know it can put strains on other hormone systems. So for example, the adrenals and the thyroid. So there's this massive interplay that happens because of what's happening at the core process that we call methylation.

Ashley James (1:29:13.384)

Methylation. Can you explain it? So I understand that there's an amino acid that we eat, methionine. Our body makes some assisting from that as well. Then our body grabs those molecules and adds that to the serotonin then it becomes melatonin. So the body is converting serotonin to melatonin. Melatonin isn’t just for sleep it actually only but 10% is used for sleep the rest is used as a cellular detoxifier while we sleep. So it’s really important not to disrupt melatonin production where sleep hygiene comes in, but also go to the gut and make sure we’re not disrupting serotonin production. So again, come back to the gut. We've got to go back to the foundations of our health, if you're not sleeping, well, could it be in the gut? Could it be in our methylation? It could just be the fact that you're staying up too late, staring at screens and drinking coffee late at night. It could be an absolute 100% lifestyle, but we could geek out on your labs and see what's going on.

So could you explain, so we understand this idea of methylation, like it grabs this molecule and attaches it, and that's methylation. Then people with MTHFR have a problem with that, so everything kind of gets backed up in the system. I want everyone to understand this more and why it's such an important thing, or one of the many things that we could have tested just so we know more about ourselves, and then we could take information from you to help us understand how we could eat and not eat and the nutrition we should take in and maybe limit to best support our ability to methylate and detoxify.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:31:13.035)

So one of the most important things that I try to teach patients, and this is if they know their MTHFR status, okay, because it depends on whether they want to know that gene or not, but once you know that you have an abnormality in that gene, it's important the type of B vitamins that you get.

So methylation is a process, it's methyl donations. So you have a methyl group that is a carbon atom attached to three hydrogen atoms, okay? Certain compounds become what we call methyl donors. So they donate this methyl group to another compound and it turns into something else. This process of putting on the methyl group, taking off the methyl group. That's methylation at its very bringing down that science to that level. One of the most important methyl donors, we think of, well, methylfolate. So we think of this, the folic acid in the body is a B vitamin, and that is very important for the process of this methionine, homocysteine, I think of it like a cycle in order to have a balance in this cycle you have to have the presence of methylated folate. What happens is if you have a mutation in MTHFR you can't methylate folic acid. Now if you have a diet full of green leafy vegetables you are getting natural folate. Okay you've already that natural folate is already in that methylated useful version. But say for example you eat a slice of bread and that bread is fortified with B vitamins. Now fortified grains, they put folic acid in it. Synthetic folic acid is not methylated. So if you're eating foods that are fortified and they have fortified a lot of different things now it's not just wheat, okay?

So if you eat folic acid, it is so strong that it is more strongly bound to our receptors because when we eat these things, then we absorb it and then our, it goes to find a cell and that method, that folic acid needs to enter the cell. Well, folic acid can block the receptor, because it's stronger than the natural folate. So even if you eat a lot of green leafy vegetables, it'll be blocked out if you had, so if you had a sandwich, for example, and it had folic acid in it, and even if you had lettuce on it, or some green leafy lettuce, and you had natural folate, you're going to be blocked. You're not going to absorb the natural folate. So that's why one of the paramount things that I tell people to do is get rid of folic acid and that's in a lot of supplements too. So that's why it's really important to know what supplements you're taking in because you may actually be harming yourself by blocking out by basically that folic acid, which is so strong, that synthetic version, so strong that it's going to block the absorption of the natural folate. Then you get these problems with DNA repair because you're not getting the folate. The diet and supplements are really critical once you understand what MTHFR does and why you have to be careful about putting certain compounds into your body that are going to negate the effects of other good things that you're doing.

Ashley James (1:35:10.601)

What about cobalamin versus methylcobalamin? So B12, getting a methylated version of B12 versus, I don't know, what's the difference between cobalamin? Does cobalamin exist in nature? Is that, again, just like folic acid, a synthetic thing?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:35:28.543)

Yes, cobalamin, it refers to the basic core compound chemical, and there's different forms of cobalamin. So the most common form that you would see when you pick up a B12 supplement is cyanocobalamin, which as the name, it's cyanide. It's a cyanide molecule. The small amounts probably don't help people unless you can't detoxify very well. Now, that form of cobalamin is not in its methylated version. So the idea is if you get methylated vitamins, you bypass the methylation process so that you don't then depend on these faulty genes. You're automatically already getting the form of those vitamins that your body can't do.

If you didn't have an MTHFR mutation and you took cyanocobalamin, you would be able to get methyl groups donated to that. You would be able to utilize that B12. Obviously there's an argument about the other components of that cyanocobalamin that are not good, but you could do it. There are other forms of cobalamin. There's one called hydroxylated cobalamin and there's an adenosyl cobalamin and they all have slightly different functions like the adenosylcobalamin is often used for like mitochondrial support, which is the energy producers of our cells so you can really tailor the different types of b12, but the methylated cobalamin is going to be your powerhouse B12 option because again that's already got the methyl group on it. So it's already going to be able to do its function in the body.

So that's the real core important part about the MTHFR is being able to methylate these compounds, folic acid, B12, but if you have a dysfunctional gene, you really need to take that in those already methylated versions.

Ashley James (1:37:42.394)

In my mind, I'm seeing like IKEA furniture coming into the body every day. If you're taking the cheaper supplements or the ones that aren't methylated or the synthetic ones, your body has to then do a process that has to build something. So it's like the IKEA furniture comes in and you have to, now you have to build the table. Here's the building blocks. So your body has to take a donated methyl group added to it to build it. Now it has the table. Whereas when we don't have MTHFR, it's as if we've been giving IKEA furniture, but we don't, we're missing a piece.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:38:26.218)

Yes, I mean that's a very good analogy because it's basically making it easier for your body to utilize those nutrients without having to go through all these steps in order to be able to utilize those nutrients. But that also it's a two-edged sword because if you have a lot of toxins build up in your system and all of a sudden you start taking these methylated B vitamins you’re going to start mobilizing those toxins that's why there's a start low, go slow type of thing, because people don't know how toxic they are. We're all carrying around a certain burden of toxins, some more than others, but once you start mobilizing those toxins, it can make you feel sicker. So in the early phases of this, it's really important to use lower dosages and to be gentle with it because not everybody has the best outlet of their detoxification process. That's why the gut is such an important part of this because that's a big area of waste elimination. So in order for you to eliminate toxins, you need to have a healthy gut where you have that ability to eliminate. So that's why sometimes people they want to focus on MTFHR but if you don't have a healthy gut system, you're going to mobilize these toxins and you're going to feel very, very sick if you do not have a way to eliminate, especially like people who are constipated. Oh my goodness. Those folks have a really, really rough time taking the methylated B vitamins because they're mobilizing these toxins. They become like toxic overloaded and it begins to make them feel very, very sick. So depending of course, upon each individual and how sick they are to begin with, especially if someone comes in and they're pretty sick to begin with, those are people you have to be very gentle.

Ashley James (1:40:35.545)

Yes. Exactly. Start slow. Also the testing upfront really helps because then you know how their body is going to process stuff or not process stuff. So you talked a bit about these artificial things, if we took supplements that were like lower quality and that's something that can block methylation or that it just kind of gums up the works because our body cannot methylate these things.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:41:03.567)

It will definitely block the absorption of the necessary active vitamins. You won't be able to take up these compounds. It would literally block those cellular receptors.

Ashley James (1:41:18.843)

So, this is incredible because taking folic acid, which is what all mothers are told while they're pregnant to take to prevent neuro tube defects. We all think there are two defects like where the spinal cord is sticking out of the back, god forbid, the spine is not made properly in utero, and now part of the spine is bulging. That's major. Then there's minor ones like cleft lip. Then we can go even further now because so many people having MTHFR and so many prenatals have the artificial synthetic folic acid, which what you just shared, for people with MTHFR blocks the ability to absorb and uptake and utilize folate, which we know it causes if you don't, if you have a folate deficiency, your baby is not being built properly. What we see is now a huge uprise in tongue ties and lip ties that is believed to be part of the folic acid blocking folate, we’re like, oh, no big deal, let's just go clip their tongue tie, clip their lip but that's something on the outside, but what happened on the inside? There could be other things going on the inside, just like you talked about. Skin conditions are so fun to help people heal. But if you've got rashes on the outside and scaly skin and itchy and flamed and you've got this stuff on the outside, we have skin on the inside of our body. Think about all the other parts of our body on the inside where there's the same kind of tissue. If you are on fire on the outside, imagine what's going on the inside.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:43:15.076)

Oh yes, if you see it externalized, there's a war going on inside, for sure.

Ashley James (1:43:21.812)

So we have this really huge juggernaut of a problem where the supplements that women are being given to prevent problems actually can contribute to causing them because a large majority of our population has MTHFR issues and then we've got on top of these synthetic supplements. Now some of my listeners I'm sure are saying, well, I'm just not going to take supplements then I can avoid this problem. Is that the answer?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:43:52.126)

Do not take supplements? No, because again, it depends on your diet, a big part of that, especially if you're eating fortified grains, you're going to be getting that folic acid, like you're taking supplements and you didn't even know it. That's part of the inherent problem. Fortification wasn't, we didn't always have that. That's also kind of newer and relatively. So it's important for people to realize that, yes, if you do have these deficits, depending on what your diet is. I would say most people probably don't get a healthy amount of greens in their diet. There's complications with that too. Some people get kidney stones. They can't have high oxalate foods, for example, so they do have to limit some of their green leafy vegetables.

Sometimes supplements just become a necessity because you've eliminated so many things out of your diet. For example, if we were talking about wheat. How taking wheat out of people's diet actually eliminated a lot of the B vitamins that were in it. So you have to supplement those B vitamins or if you're vegetarian, it's very hard to get adequate amounts of vitamin B12. So, the diet is very critical in determining how many supplements you need, but that's where the blood work helps. One of the biomarkers you had mentioned earlier with the methylation process is homocysteine. Homocysteine as well as glutathione, even methionine, all these things can be measured. But homocysteine ends up being a great biomarker in the blood for determining your methylation status.

Essentially with folks that have higher home assisting levels, they're going to need more supplements in the form of these methylated B vitamins. The amount of supplements that you need really needs to be tailored. That's where the testing can help determine what those needs are. So the answer is not giving up all your supplements, but the answer is doing smart supplementation. We've gotten to a point where there's no excuse for not having smart supplementation because we have so many tests that can help guide that.

Ashley James (1:46:28.365)

Also it's not just about your genetics, it can be about the genetics of your gut talking about the high oxalates, it's really interesting that you can help support your gut health and build up a healthy microbiome. There are certain microbiome bacteria that actually help our body process the greens in such a way that we don't develop kidney stones.

I'm so proud of myself because I can eat 12 pounds of spinach a day and I will never ever get kidney stones because I am one of those people that have absolutely no problem with processing it but it's not my genetics it's my gut microbiome. So the cool thing is the more you work on your gut health the more little rewards you. If you've ever played video games. It's like getting these little achievements comes up and pops up. For me, when you build your gut health, it's like you're achieving, because you populate, you grow a robust microbiome. So let's say now you only have a thousand different types of bacteria in your gut, but as you build a healthy microbiome and focus on your gut health, you could build it to 10,000, or you could have a variety that's really robust, and then you get all these little achievements, because the new healthy bacteria come in, they’ll help you digest your food, and make compounds for you. So just imagine all these little achievements popping up like, oh, you got the gut bacteria that makes it so that you're skinny.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:48:06.211)

Well, that's the beauty of the testing. It's amazing the research that they've done to make the tests so that we can identify these areas. So one of my favorite tests is called the GI Map Test. That's the functional GI evaluation stool test. They measure what they call commensal bacteria. Commensals are your keystone, your foundational bacteria. The science has gotten so good in this area where we can actually identify if you don't have enough of certain bacteria, the commensal bacteria, it will set you up for things like leaky gut. So we are really getting to the point where you can take supplements of certain targeted probiotics. It's so funny because people go and they'll buy any probiotic, acidophilus, I heard that's a good one? Well, some people have plenty of lactobacillus, which is in the acidophilus, lactobacillus family. They don't need that. But what they are lacking are some of these other lesser known commensals, which some of them provide the mucin layer which is really critical as a barrier for preventing leaky gut. There's other ones that produce short-chain fatty acids. It takes the carbohydrates, the vegetables and fruits that we eat, and these bacteria convert these compounds into making these other compounds called short-chain fatty acids, which are real key for keeping our colonicides basically are intestinal cells like tight and not leaky and creating this healthy barrier with a healthy immune system and so we've gotten to the point where we can actually target these very specific areas and it makes a profound difference in all the things down the way and the fact that we have access to that now. I think it lends itself to a whole new future of what we consider health and preventative medicine and restoring function that we've lost or that we've damaged through. So even though we can't necessarily control the toxins or, I mean, we can control to some degree, but some things we just can't. If we can make ourselves more resilient through optimization of our microbiome and taking tailored appropriate supplements, we become much less vulnerable to these things that we cannot control.

Ashley James (1:51:16.069)

I love it. We could talk all day. We could keep going and chat all day because I'm so fascinated to learn more and more and more about it. MTHFR is just the beginning. There's so many other epigenetic factors to dive into, but because it's so popular, like you said, it could be 80 percent of the population. It's definitely over 50 percent. It's so common and it’s becoming more common. We need to look at, which is so interesting how we've changed our food because when I was a kid, the cereal aisle looked a lot different than it does now. Let's just put it that way. Like we have in one generation changed our food so much. We're eating most of our food from factories. I had a doctor talking about how over 80% of a child's diet is processed food. over 80%. There's some children who don't eat any actual food. It's 100% from go-gurt and chicken nuggets and craft dinner or whatever. Children are being fed so much of this which is processed and fortified with substandard, the lowest quality, synthetic B vitamins. Then, we see MTHFR on the rise and we're wondering, gee, could it be because we have messed with nature? We've messed with our diet so severely, we made it so manmade, so artificial? In one generation, it's just pretty bizarre. Now our bodies are adapting and revolting in a sense. But this affects every area of our life. This affects the brain health, affects our gut health, affects, like you've even said, our skin. It can affect hormones, everything. We see children who are eating this way, and then they have developmental issues, and they're put on like Ritalin or something, and they're diagnosed. I have seen children who appear as if they are on a spectrum, let's say ADHD or Autism, they're on some spectrum, and then they're given very clean, healthy food, the right supplements through holistic medicine. A few months later, they are no longer displaying any of those symptoms. So my question is, was that diagnosis correct? Are they actually someone who has ADHD or is autistic? Or is it that humans will express different symptoms when their body is pushed into this toxic way?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:54:03.067)

Well, I think that was a perfect example. Because I actually talked to a lot of parents of children who have been diagnosed with ADHD. I'm like, they should probably have some genetic testing done. Because my guess is they might have an MTHFR gene mutation and they're eating processed foods, and they're eating folic acid, and that's probably creating imbalance within the neurotransmitter synthesis system.

So they're getting the erratic, just like you were talking about, irritability when you took too many B vitamins. Well, the same process can happen in kids whether it be dyes, yellow dyes or whatever, these things all promote this aberrant, imbalanced methylation process and so they end up diagnosed with these mental conditions that are actually brought on by the fact that they are being bombarded with these chemicals including what they would think of as synthetic vitamins that are okay to take but they're not in some people they're very sensitive and yes that's why I still can't believe we still put food dyes in things. There are genetics that you can analyze that actually where some people, I actually have that. I have a sensitivity to yellow food dye and ADHD diagnoses are much higher in people with yellow food dye sensitivities. So when you're eating things like a Cheeto, it's no wonder that you are not getting any real nutrition out of that, but you're bombarding yourself with food dyes as well as synthetic folic acid.

Ashley James (1:56:05.799)

Yes, and excitotoxins, it's not healthy for the brain. It's absolutely not healthy for the brain. But we feed children junk, and then put them on a drug. It's so sad. The whole mainstream says this is okay. There's known carcinogens that are acceptable on our shelves, in food, in our grocery stores, in America.

So really, we need to stop trusting. My first step is to stop trusting because as children, we watch Kellogg's, for example. Oh, Tony the Tiger or whatever. We saw Fruit Loops, we saw this cute little cartoon. We have McDonald's, oh, Ronald McDonald. Oh, look at him, I love him so much. I'm a kid. Being brought up with all these commercials. They were smart. They knew what they were doing because they had programmed children to build such a deep inherent trust of their General Mills of whatever company Nestle was.

Then you're 20 years old, walking through the aisles of your grocery store, buying your own food. you look up and you're anchored into these good emotions for Tony the tiger and General Mills and all these companies that do not have your best interests at heart. They are beholden to the shareholders and the profits and they need to buy the cheapest ingredients. Absolutely possible.

Then they need to figure out how to make it be so addictive that you'll keep eating it. It's not for our best interest, but we have been programmed to trust and love these companies. So any time you buy something from a box, it comes from a factory. We need to question what's in it. Understand reading labels. Understand what's in it. So fascinating that what's put in our food is blocking our ability to detoxify and also blocking nutrients from coming in and making us further nutrient deficient.

We could talk for hours. It's been so great having you on the show I want to make sure listeners know that they can go to your website. You do telemedicine consultations so you work with people all around the world? How does that work with you?

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:58:30.902)

There are regulations within the license. I'm only licensed in the states of California and Washington. So, I have to restrict my appointments. I use Zoom or FaceTime for video when people would like video with the audio. I wish I could expand to other states. It was nice during the covid pandemic because they kind of opened up, loosened a lot of the restrictions and telemedicine really grew during that time. But unfortunately that's ended. So patients have to be physically within the state. If you were to travel to Washington State or California, I could have an appointment. So it's a really weird thing.

Ashley James (1:59:28.378)

Can someone hire you in a different capacity? Instead of a patient doctor relationship could they hire you to consult them and to just answer your questions, but not as a doctor? Not as their doctor, I should say.

Dr. Laurie Marti (1:59:41.984)

Yes. I haven't really explored that. That has been something I've been looking into because obviously once you establish a doctor-patient relationship, then you really are under the confines of the licensure status. But yes, I'm exploring different things like that. Also many states actually, if you have a practitioner, even a chiropractor or anybody that is willing or able, because a lot of states are allowing even alternative practitioners to order testing and things like that, not just naturopaths, but other providers as well. So if you have a provider in a state that is not Washington or California, I can work with them, guide them, so that's an option for a lot of people in other states. If they just have a practitioner that's willing to work with me. So I wouldn't be able to order the testing per se, but I could help with the interpretation of it.

Ashley James (2:00:49.860)

Got it. So if they're working with a chiropractor or osteopath or naturopath or any kind of doctor that ordered the labs, could they bring the labs to you and you could talk to them about it or would you have to go between as their practitioner?

Dr. Laurie Marti (2:01:04.618)

I think the practitioner might have to be present on some level, whether they were at the office or something with them. But yes, I think that's the restriction because the states all have their own laws around those things. There has to be them present. But like I said, I'm trying to explore other things.

The licensing process is very, very daunting. To get licensed in all 50 states is just impossible. It would be very expensive too. A lot of the states are allowing a limited license so that you could practice telemedicine in that state without having to get a full license. So those are things that I'm also exploring because I've had to turn away a number of people that would love to just get this testing done. They just don't have anybody that can interpret it for them. So, I am doing that process. But like I said, in the meantime, people can take a trip to California or Washington and as long as they're physically in the States, then I can do the appointment.

Ashley James (2:02:24.502)

Got it. Regardless where someone is, they should reach out to you anyway, just in case, because by the time they've heard this, maybe you have discovered a different avenue of how you can best support people. I just wonder if there's a way, maybe look into this, if there's a way that you can not as their doctor, but it's just as a consultant to answer general questions around something or help someone like point them in the right direction, help them at least decide what labs that they should go do with their chiropractor or whatever, but someone who's like, they're stuck. They're like, I'm stuck. I've done, I've gone this far. I kind of had a loss and maybe like, you could be hired as a consultant to do like little detective work with them. I wonder if that's a possibility because I've seen so many doctors that do, and maybe they're just breaking the rules or I don't know.

Dr. Laurie Marti (2:03:15.513)

Well, and I think that there is probably a lot of that. It's very hard to really police a lot of that, but exactly, no way. Like I said, I am exploring other things because I just feel there's a real deficit. There's a hunger for this knowledge. People really are interested in knowing about it and like what direction to go. I want to be able to provide that in whatever way makes sense for everybody involved. So, I am exploring that.

Ashley James (2:04:00.303)

Cool, well then listeners should check your website out. I'm going to have the link in the show notes, it's with today's podcast at learntruehealth.com so they can go to it and here's the link. It is your name md dot com, so, it’s lauriemartimd.com. Just want to make sure that in case someone's listening and they're driving or something, just go to learntruehealth.com where the show notes are and check out all the information there.

Dr. Lori, it's been so great having you on the show and having this conversation. I think it's really important first of all, our mindset and then knowing that there's a path, knowing there's a way that people who have fibromyalgia no longer have to have it. For some people they've been told you're just going to have it your whole life. You can get to the point where you're no longer in chronic pain. Like Lyme, I know people who've completely, 100% reversed all symptoms of Lyme and no longer have those co-infections and they're feeling amazing. They went from like being bedridden to like just running marathons. We can overcome. The body can overcome. The cool thing is that there's stuff that Dr. Laurie does able to help us with. We figure it out, get to the root cause, look at our epigenetics, uncover what's going on, make sure we're giving ourselves the nutrition, that there's a game plan. We got to make sure we're taking ourselves to the doctor and always always believe your body wants to heal itself and can heal itself. We just have to learn what to give our body to help our body heal itself and that's why functional medicine doctors are so important because they're here to help us figure that out and I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for everything you do and is there anything you want to say to wrap up today's interview? I know you've said so much but is there anything that we left unsaid or you want to make sure that you say before we wrap up today's interview?

Dr. Laurie Marti (2:05:59.783)

Well, I did want to reiterate, I don't want to discourage people that aren't in California or Washington. I do have a contact. Contact me on my website. Send me an email. If you're not in Washington or California, just send me an email, explain your situation. I will look into what options that might be possible. I'll look into it. So just don't be discouraged if you're not from one of those states because I'm really working on trying to expand to help as many people as I feasibly can, because we're under a lot of assault in our world and we need to be more resilient. I think just understanding having some education in this space is so empowering to every individual. If you're interested in exploring those things, I will do my best to try to help.

Ashley James (2:07:11.119)

Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I feel like it's so empowering and enlightening for those to know that there are these avenues. There's these pathways. It's worth diving in and exploring because it can be for so many people life changing.

Dr. Laurie Marti (2:07:28.055)

Yes, I agree. Thank you again for having me.

Ashley James (2:07:32.467)

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518 Neural Therapy and The Five Levels of Healing, Chronic Pain Gone Through ANS Reset, Dr. Jeff Harris, NAANT President 0

Mar 19, 2024

The North American Academy of Neural Therapy

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https://jeffharrisnd.com

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518: Neural Therapy and The Five Levels of Healing with Dr. Jeff Harris

https://learntruehealth.com/neural-therapy-and-the-five-levels-of-healing-with-dr-jeff-harris/

What if your chronic pain could be alleviated by targeting an old scar you never thought twice about? Join us as we welcome Dr. Jeff Harris, a leading expert in neural therapy and renowned naturopathic physician, who shares groundbreaking insights on this cutting-edge treatment.

Highlights:

Nerve Block Injections for Healing
Procaine's Anti-Aging Superpower
Neural Therapy Protocol for Body Reset
Unlocking Inner Peace Through Conversation
Eligibility for North American Academy of Neural Therapy Conference
Neural Therapy Tool Set Spread Awareness
Healer's Journey and Empathy
Alternative Treatment Success Story

Intro:

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. This is going to be an amazing one. Dr. Jeff Harris, naturopathic physician and one of the world's leading experts in neuraltherapy, is here with us today. You can go to naant.org, that's North American Academy of Neural Therapy and check out the conference that's coming up April 4th through 7th. Every practitioner needs to know about this, as you're about to hear in this interview, and I just wanted to make a quick shout out also that my book I published it last month In case you didn't know, you got to grab your copy. The reviews are just so beautiful.

I spent a lot of time very intentionally designing this book, using everything I learned from my over 500 interviews with holistic experts, as well as my over 12 years of experience working with clients to help them achieve their health goals and their goals around joy, fulfillment and leading an overall better, happier life, more satisfied life. I made it very simple to use. It's a workbook, so you use it 10 to 15 minutes in the morning, 10 to 15 minutes at night for 12 weeks and you will build foundations of health, no matter where your health is right now, whether you're just starting on your health journey, you're frustrated, you want to take your health to the next level, or whether you're like me, you're a health nut and you're always looking to improve. There's always room for improvement. No matter how old you are, there's always room to become even healthier, right, and no matter how young you are, there's always room, no matter how busy you are. If you say you don't have enough time. That is exactly why you need my book, Addicted to Wellness. It will help you get the wins, collect the W's every day. You'll stack win upon win upon win in very quick ways.

That'll motivate you and a lot of us kind of get stuck sometimes or we say, fall off the bandwagon. Oh, I hear this so often from clients. I used to drink more water, I used to exercise, especially when I'm hearing, the feedback I'm getting, it’s the pandemic. We're all kind of like coming out of our caves right from the last four years, and so many people have told me that they they felt like they were on track with their health prior to 2020 and we had so many disruptions that a lot of good health habits disappeared and some unhealthy habits, new habits got created or exacerbated.

So with my book, Addicted to Wellness, I will guide you and teach you and you will learn. But not cerebral, it's not so like head knowledge, it's where rubber hits the road kind of knowledge, the experiential kind of knowledge, where you'll start tapping into yourself and it raises more self-awareness, and so you'll feel more and more motivated and excited because you're going to go, oh wow, I did this little change, this one little health habit today, this one little thing, and I got more energy, I got more mental clarity, I had better sleep, I had more stamina, I had more joy, I felt better in my body, I had less pain or no pain. I can teach you these little habits that you implement and you track. And it's so simple. You could do it anytime. If the busiest person in the world can do this book, so you can do it.

So if you want to take your health to the next level, you raise your hand. Who wants to take their health to the next level? If you want to take health to the next level, get my book. It's fun, it's simple and it is the foundations of health that everyone is missing.

You're going to find there's some things in this book. You're like, hey, I already do that, cool, and you'll learn a little bit more about the benefits of the activities you already do. And you're like, hey, that's so great, ok, keep doing that, and you're going to find that there are foundations of health and health habits maybe you didn't even know existed or you thought were too complicated or you didn't know how to implement.

And I make it super simple. I take something profound and meaningful for your health and I make it simple so that you can do it each and every day to build yourself up. And the feedback that my readers are giving me they've already started the health challenges. They're already seeing big wins, huge gains. So I want you to get my book because I want you to achieve those health gains too, and I do it too. This was part of my health journey as well that using the concept of these small, doable but profound weekly challenges, to start to build moment. So you're going to find that you get great moment and it's a wonderful gift as well to give to a friend who's suffering, because the book matches wherever you are, whether you're, like I said, a health nut, or whether you're just starting out, it's going to match where you are and it's going to help take your health to the next level.

You can go to learntruehealth.com and click in the Menu. It says book Addicted to Wellness. Just click there, grab it off Amazon. Come join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. I'd love to see you there. I'd love to hear from you. If you have any questions, we're here to help. I know you're going to enjoy today's podcast.

Dr. Jeff Harris is an amazing naturopath. He's been practicing for over 30 years. World's leading expert in neuraltherapy. It's phenomenal. I can't wait for you to hear it. You can go to jeffharrisnd.com ND as in naturopathic doctor. jeffharrisnd.com is his website and to check out more information about the conference, naant.org North American Academy of Neural Therapy conference April 4th through 7th. Check it out and if you're listening to this and you can't make it to the conference or it's past April, don't worry, go check out their website anyway, because they ongoingly have workshops. But this conference is once a year, so you definitely want to jp in. You're going to be surrounded by amazing world healers, just like yourself, and I can't say enough good things about this.

I'm very excited for you to hear today's interview. Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. If you have a practitioner in your life, share this interview. It is very meaningful. If you have someone in your life that has chronic pain or they have a health condition that they just can't overcome. Those like really difficult cases where it's like they've gone from doctor to doctor to doctor and they cannot get on the other side of it. They're going to want to know about this. So share this episode with them, and thank you for sharing this episode with those you care about, because together we are helping people to learn true health.

Ashley James (0:07:29.639)

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 518. I am so excited for today's interview. I know today's interview is going to change lives. That's why I almost have butterflies. I'm so excited! Dr. Jeff Harris, I'm thrilled to have you on the show today. It's going to be amazing.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:07:55.381)

Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Ashley James (0:07:57.317)

Before we jp into you, I've got to share a quick story. I haven't talked a lot about this. I've talked a little bit about this in the last two years, but for the last two years, my husband has had chronic pain and I have had every holistic therapy I could get my hands on, he went through and he has had like this nonstop on again, off again, almost daily and sometimes daily neck aches like radiate up into the head and it's trigger points. And we have had him go through, if you can name a therapy, we had him try it. And everything helped a little bit and would shift a little bit, but it would always come back. And there was specific patterns to his chronic pain and the chronic pain was so bad. It was like migraines. He couldn't think. He often jokes, but please get me a guillotine. Like he doesn't want to die, but he doesn't want his head to be attached to his body. That's how much pain he was in.

And we tried everything. I've been reaching out to everyone I knew in the holistic space for answers. And one of my naturopathic friends suggested that I reach out to you. And I can't tell you, you are worth your weight in gold because after almost two years, it'll be two years next month, my husband's chronic pain has stopped.

It's not just for people with chronic pain. It's more than that. So if you're a listener and you're like, wow, I don't have chronic pain, so this doesn't apply to me. No, no, no. This therapy is saving lives, changing lives, just drastically improving the quality of people's lives. So I wanted to give this little testimonial to set the stage that I think that everyone should listen to this episode, that everyone should learn from you. And that everyone should know about this therapy that I feel like is not very well known because so many of the doctors and naturopaths and chiropractors and acupuncturists and rolfing people and everyone that my husband went to, no one suggested this. They didn't even know it existed and they really need to. I'm very excited to have you on the show. Welcome.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:10:01.285)

Thank you. I'm really excited to have people know about this. Neural therapy has been around since the 1940s and it's been amazing. And I've wondered why doctors can't always figure it out. I'm happy to talk more about it.

Ashley James (0:10:21.189)

You're like one of the world's leading experts in this. And I want to know, how did you even find it? Because it's something that not many people know, but once you do learn it, it's like the tool you are so grateful for having in your tool belt. And everyone who's listening who's a practitioner, listen up because there's a conference coming up in April. I'd love for you to come do this conference and learn neural therapy.

And for those who aren't practitioners, share this episode with your holistic practitioners. They're going to want to know that they can learn this and use it in, in, with their clients, with their patients. But how did you discover this?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:10:59.554)

So the way I discovered it was I have a patient that I met down in Oregon. I was working with a doctor, Terska. And when I met her, she says she was from Seattle area and there was a doctor that she was going to see and she wanted me to come along and watch. And when I went, the doctor was Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt and he started to inject the scars. And the first thing that came out of my mouth was that looks pretty easy. And he says, you should come to my workshops and learn how to do it.

And so he had a workshop that was coming up in about two weeks. I went to the workshop, there was like 70 people and I couldn't get in the front row. And so whenever there was a treatment that was happening, I would walk up to the front and watch very closely because I had a patient, he wanted to see me on Monday morning. He had had diarrhea for two weeks and he was losing about, 20 pounds a week and it was skin and bone. And he'd been to the ER. He had been t, multiple other doctors and nothing had changed it. And, I told him that on Monday morning, I would know what to do with him, which I realized later that was kind of silly. It was like, I'm going to stop all that. And when he came in, I did some testing, actually muscle testing. And what I found was there was nothing wrong with his gut which was surprising. He was having gut issues. So what I did is I started to search around and tried to find where the problem was. I looked in his mouth and he had some pink stuff in this one tooth. And I tested that tooth and it related to the pain and diarrhea that he was having in his gut. And I did an injection into his gum and immediately all his gut pain went away.

And I was surprised. And I was like, Oh, good. And he asked me a question. What did you just do to me? And I was a new doc. And I thought that, well, my career was over and I was going to get sued and everything was going to be go wrong. And so I explained in very detail what I just done. And he says, no, he says, not that. Why did all my pain just go away? And this little dark cloud that was raining on me over my head turns into sunshine. And I was like, oh, that's great. That means I need to do the other side of your tooth. And so he opened up his mouth and I treated the other side. And when we treat a tooth that has an infection, it only lasts between four hours and maybe two days.

So I told him to go to the dentist. He needed to get that tooth removed. And he did. And all the gut pain continues to stay gone. He called me again the next Monday, pretty despondent and said that his diary was back and I had him come in and then I put some iodine on a Q -tip and then I put it down in the socket that was there and immediately all of the pain went away again and at that point it never came back.

So that was my first introduction to neural therapy actually in practice.

Ashley James (0:14:53.084)

And how long ago was that?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:14:54.290)

That was 1993.

Ashley James (0:14:57.496)

And since then you have been using this successfully in your practice. What are some of the most common things that people successfully have resolved with you using neural therapy?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:15:10.308)

It seems like just about everything. Well, one of the things that's not for, is cancer or epilepsy. So to know that is an important thing, but I've treated all kinds of pain, all kinds of issues everywhere in the body that nobody else could even touch. And so often when somebody goes to see another doctor, they'll do treatments like your husband. Well, he'd seen it and there's a little bit better and all those things were important, but the final thing hadn't been found. And is it okay for me to say what we found on him?

Ashley James (0:15:57.802)

Oh, yes. He is given his permission that we can discuss his case.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:16:02.608)

Okay. The most important thing on his body when I did my testing was a scar that was on his left side that he got when was nine years old. And when I find that it's like to me, it's Eureka. Because that's the place that if we treat that, then his body has the ability to have to get better.

Ashley James (0:16:33.690)

The chronic pain started right after his dad passed away and he had a dental procedure within the same 24 hours as two years ago. And then the chronic pain started. And it's like someone wouldn't think that's related to a scar that he's had since he's nine. Right. But it was interesting to see that there was a lot of similarities between the scar over his spleen and when he had the chronic pain from about and the fact that the tooth they worked on was also related to the spleen. So everything was kind of pointing to that scar, but you'd have to know what you're looking for.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:17:16.514)

And it's on the surface of the body, right? I mean, to me, since I've done it for all these years, 33 years, essentially, and maybe 30, if I can get 31, get my math right here. The scars are so often missed because we don't usually think that they're a problem.

And scars can cause all kinds of problems in the body. I mean, from the head and neck pain could cause a problem to the spleen tooth that he was having. And then also relating to the headaches, which we found after I did the treatment and that his headaches got worse again, right? Like soon as the Procaine kind of wore off.

Ashley James (0:18:02.404)

Yes, it was very interesting that his headaches went to daily and got worse. But right when you treated the scar with the little needle that you inject the fluid into the scar. I watched as his whole demeter relaxed and he became very happy, very relaxed. It was a huge shift. And then later that day, his headaches proceeded to get worse for a week until we saw you again.

But that informed us that we were on the right path, even though it was negative change, it was actually like it's not nothing, right? We were tapping into something in his body, something in his body was saying, you're on the right track. And we hadn't had that result from any other type of therapy. And so when we came back to you, that's when we were very excited for the next phase so that we could turn off the chronic pain.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:19:03.304)

So what I saw when he had the treatment is it looked like he went back to nine years old when the injury happened. And to me, he looked like that cute little boy again and he got that memory. So the headache came back because there was more that needed to be done. And I remember telling you ahead of time that we didn't know how it was going to affect the headaches, but it was going to help a whole system.

And I knew there was another place that needed to be treated. And because the testing had showed that, but it's not a good idea to do both of those things at the same time. So when he came back, I treated the place in his neck and then that made the rest of the change. I don't know his status now. That was just a couple of days ago. Has he had headaches since then?

Ashley James (0:20:00.104)

Not had any. It’s been zero.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:20:03.685)

No headaches?

Ashley James (0:20:04.561)

No headaches. Zero, like not even a little inkling. It's been absolutely zero.

Too soon to tell. It's only been a few days, but he normally has one every two days or every three days. So he hasn't had any, which has been wonderful. He's been sleeping deeper. Like a third party observer, I can see that he is out of fight or flight, that he is in that rest and digest state. Cause he's wanting to go to bed at night as opposed to being kind of jacked up at night. His body is wanting to go to sleep on time and he's sleeping completely soundly through the night. I have not in the last few nights, he's not gotten up, like his body is in healing mode and it is so cool to see what you do with neural therapy and to see it on someone who I know very intimately, to see how brilliantly it works in supporting the body's ability to heal itself.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:21:19.357)

Yes, it gets the body out of its own way. So the scar was an interference field. And in neural therapy, that's kind of one of the main things we look for. And an interference field can come from a scar. It could come from a trauma that's physical or emotional and can even be psycho-spiritual kind of traumas that have to be dealt with.

And by doing an injection of local anesthetic or Procaine into the area. So we can do injections over an organ, like the liver, the spleen, large intestine, lungs. And then the place that I did in his neck is, is called a ganglion. And we have sympathetic ganglion which go along our spine that are part of our fight or fight network. And what they do is they get stuck. They get stuck in the healing process and by giving an injection of Procaine into the area, it helps to reset it by adding more electrical energy to the area and having it come off of line, which is what the numbness does.

And then when it comes back online, the brain resets it with its connection and it's like, oh, these areas need to be healed. And then it allows the parasympathetic nervous system to do its healing. So the injection that I did is called the Stellate Ganglion Block. And it's gotten quite famous for treating PTSD, headaches, stroke and left arm pain, teeth pain, heart attacks, heart issues. So it actually does a lot. And the balancing one with that is called the Vegas ganglion, which there's a whole school of people that talk about just doing everything with the Vegas. They want you to hum. They want you to rub or gag or do something to be able to stimulate that when we can do an injection into the Vegas ganglion and that helps to reset it with a with Procaine.

Ashley James (0:23:53.964)

Not everyone knows what Procaine is. So they're like, well, why do I want you injecting me with this stuff? So just reassure us what's in this needle.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:23:59.990)

Oh, totally. Procaine is a local aesthetic. It was actually invented in about 1901 or 1903 by a doctor. They were looking for something to use for an eye anesthetic for eye surgeries that wasn't cocaine because cocaine was addictive. And so when they came out with Procaine, they would first use it to drip it into the eye, to numb the eye for the eye surgeries. So it's incredibly safe to just put anywhere in your body. It breaks down fairly easily. So DEAE (Diethylaminoethyl Cellulose) and another product that's slipping my mind at the moment PABA (Para-aminobenzoic acid) and every cell in the body as well as in the plasma can break it down.

It doesn't have a toxicity effect, which is super nice. And the thing I like to tell people is that it makes you younger, stronger, and healthier, even if you just put it in your hip. There was a whole sanatorium that was in Romania for many years, Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, and a number of famous people would go there and they would get injections of Procaine. At the time it's called GH3 and they would be there for like six weeks. They'd get twice a week, three times a week. And then they would be refreshed and they'd be able to go back to work. Their schedules are pretty intense.

I've had Procaine injected in me in lots and lots of places over the years. And people will see me that haven't seen me in 10 years and they'll say, you look the same age as when I saw you 10 years ago, you didn't age. And I said, well, Procaine is one of my, my superpowers here. So it does answer the question?

Ashley James (0:26:07.472)

Yes, it's safe. It's it's healthy for the body. And then it's a temporary numbing agent that when you're injecting it by the autonomic nervous system, it creates a reset.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:26:24.220)

Yes. Anywhere you inject it, it creates a reset. So our autonomic nervous system, it innovates all of our skin, every organ, everything in our body. So any place you put it, it actually is treating the autonomic nervous system.

Ashley James (0:26:44.638)

So tell me about this conference in regards to practitioners who are listening who are like, whoa, I want a way to reset people because I'm hearing that we could take someone who has insomnia, someone who has trauma, right? Someone who has a high blood pressure and heart disease, someone who's suffered a stroke. All these things, when you look at it, they're all definitely related to being in fight or flight, to not being able to get that body in the healing mode, right? They're stuck. And I've seen that, like with my husband, no matter how much I attempted to get him to meditate or relax or massages and acupuncture, all the things we attempted, I could still see that he was stuck in that fight or flight. We couldn't fully get his body to relax, even though he was consciously trying to get his body to relax. He couldn't.

And then after the neural therapy, I saw the reset. So for all the different illnesses and chronic illnesses, there definitely is that fight or flight element that you're stuck in fight or flight. This is applicable too. So for all the practitioners listening, tell us about the conference coming up and what will the be learning and what will they be able to treat when they leave the conference?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:28:16.100)

So the conference is downtown Seattle at the Renaissance Hotel. And it's going to be April 4th to 7th. The first day is going to be a pre-conference workshop. And we have two of those happening at the same time.

The first, one of them is a basic training, and in the basic training you're going to learn the theory of neural therapy and then how to apply it in clinical practice. Well, they'll talk about the pharmacology, how to do injections, indications, contraindications. What kind of responses people have, how to manage the patient, and then safety procedures that will happen in the office. And the main part is really the hands-on. So you get to learn how to do these scar injections, and you get to learn how to do what we call segmental injections. And segmental injections can go over the organs. There's like patterns that we'll use with injecting the Procaine at a shallow depth, not into the organ itself.

And then we also, a really common one that we do is goes around the head. And we call that one the crown of thorns and our joke is that it's popular at Easter, which is coming up here soon. And so that's what they'll get to learn in the basic training in the advanced neural therapy, I'm the one that's teaching along with other doctors that have helped me at other workshops. And I'll be taking people through my protocol for the athlete's full body reset. So we're going to go through all the major neural therapy ganglion from top to bottom and reset everybody's body that's in the conference. And so the stellate's going to be one of those. There's other famous ganglions that are part of it which in my world are famous, which is the sphenopalatine ganglion, the vagus ganglion, we’ll do the ciliac plexus, the inferior hypogastric plexus, and the stellate ganglion on each side. If we have time, then I'll also include ganglion impar or possibly the presacral ganglion.

But most people don't know where any of these places are.The only ones who tend to know these end up being anesthesiologists. But they don't use these the same way that we do in neural therapy or understand the theories of how to balance the autonomic nervous system so that people can get well from these treatments. So that's going to be the first part that first day.

At the end of the day, we'll also have one of our long time neural therapy docs who's also an anesthesiologist who's going to talk about neural therapy IVs. I should say, Procaine IVs, ozone, and then other pearls from his practice. Rob Banner is a terrific doctor, has a great education in diet therapies as well. And so I'm sure we'll hear about those.

The next day, which is Friday, which we're calling the main conference, where we're going to hear from Dietrich Klinghardt and the history of neural therapy in America. And from listening to what he was talking about, we may hear about it in more worldwide as well.

Then we're going to have Dr. Perry Peretz is going to talk about neural therapy and taking acupuncture to the next level. So he's an osteopathic doctor that's also an acupuncturist that has included neural therapy into his practice and had terrific results. And so we're really looking forward to hearing from him.

After that, we're going to have a lawyer that's going to speak, but he's one of the best trained people in how to do O-ring testing. And O-ring testing is a formal muscle testing that ends up being very good and very effective. And it helps you to find the indications that for neural therapy and we'll have another type of muscle testing as well for people to be able to learn because not everybody can catch on to the ones that are there.

And then we'll have a guy, Warren Slayton. He's a medical doctor from New Jersey, and he'll talk about enhancing prolotherapy with neural therapy. So he's mixed those two together. More people do know about prolotherapy than neural therapy. But most neural therapists do know on prolotherapy. I’m one.

The next one we'll have is a dentist that's going to speak. Carl Anderson. He has his talk on focus and the foci in dentistry and neural therapy. And he's got some great stories about how treating the teeth has helped the body, just like my first patient that I had talked about earlier.

And then in the afternoon that day, he and I are going to do an intraoral neural therapy hands-on workshop. So he's going to teach how to do an intraoral injection for the sphenopalatine ganglion. And then I'm going to teach the inferior orbital to be able to numb the upper teeth and to treat the maxillary sinuses. I’ll be able to do an intra-oral training on how to do the vagus ganglion. And then I'll also do a submandibular ganglion. So if anybody's ever had like big swollen lower jaw from any dental work and it's hard to get that to go away, that's what the sub-andibular ganglion works with. And it's magic.

And afternoon we'll have an update from a doctor from Austria, from Colombia and from Spain.

And at the end of the day, we actually have what we call breakout session, where we'll have docs that are on our board or other ones that are long-term neura-therapists that will have a table and they'll be treating patients or other doctors there that have specific things that they want or that they want to learn. Because we want to have that opportunity for everybody to have a chance, and that's just Friday.

Saturday, I'm going to talk in the morning about neural therapy and two other therapies that I do along with it. One of them is called PIT, which is perineural injection tube, which is shallow injections of dextrose, which is a sugar that's dilute. So it's D5W into the cutaneous nerves to turn off pain and inflammation. And it's been miraculous in healing. I mean, neural therapy is miraculous. PIT is miraculous and putting a boat together makes it even better. The other thing that I'm going to be talking about along with neural therapy is called medical Qigong. We've all heard of Tai Chi and we've seen people in the park, and moving the energy and having these different postures and positions. And medical Qigong actually comes from the hospitals in China

In the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, China had medical Qigong hospitals all over China. And the guy that I've get to learn from what his name is, is Jerry Allen Johnson. He got to go to those hospitals and learn what they were doing and then he wrote it all down and he wrote five books on it all. I mean, it's pretty, pretty extensive knowledge. And then he's been teaching a doctorate in medical Qigong of which there's 16 classes and I've taken 14 of them so far, and been practicing it, two and a half hours a day or more, because it's just so fun and interesting.

So how I work with that with neural therapy is I'll do a neural therapy treatment and now the person is relaxed. Their parasympathetic nervous system is on and I'll do a medical Qigong treatment, which is I'll have them laid on the table and clean their energy field and their energy system, their physical body, their energy body and their spirit body. And then, set things correct that need to be corrected, say in their energy fields, kind of like a mechanic is the way I think of it. And then recharge the energy system. So the organs need to be recharged. There's energy organelles called dantians that need to be recharged. And then I regulate them so that they can be in balance. And then the final thing is we set three layers of protection.

It's for the physical body, the energy body and the spirit body and it's just been amazing. And sometimes people don't know about that part because they usually have so many questions so that we don't get to that part, and, I'll say, if you have more questions, then I will take the time. So I can't get to this and often they'll say, I'm done. I only have this one question left and because it ends up being so valuable. There's very rarely we have anything that can take these thought forms that we have out of our body. We will have constant thoughts. I'm in pain, I'm suffering, I want this, I need that or whatever it is, or there's something wrong with me is even more common. And it can actually take those out and lessen them. So a person can actually put good affirmations in their place. So, and then we have a neural therapy and psychiatry that's happening on Saturday.

We're also having Dr. Schwartz, he's going to come and teach us autonomic response testing, which we call ART, which he originally learned from Dr. Klinghardt and has advanced it himself. We're have palpation guided injection technique. That's going to be taught by Dr. Richard Nahas and they'll have a workshop in the afternoon by Mark Schwartz on how to actually do the muscle testing and try and take people through it. Because if you have a test for the autonomic nervous system, then you can find the interference fields that are interfering with the autonomic nervous system. And so that's really important.

And then on Sunday morning we'll have Dr. Rutledge or Dane Rutledge he's going to be speaking about how to protect your practice. He's a lawyer. He says, target hardening, how to legally protect your practice. And so he's got an hour of that. And then Dietrich Klinghardt will give us his neural therapy pearls of wisdom. And then we have a doctor from Mexico that's going to speak she's going to be talking about using another technique for diagnosing the autonomic nervous system, which is called heart rate variability, and she'll talk about that. And then at 11:15, we'll have a doctor from Germany that's going to be talking about gynecological issues and also give us an update about neural therapy in Germany. We have some of the best people in the world that are coming to this and speaking at it and it's an opportunity to learn while it's not a full -on workshop that you're going to get, usually a workshop in neural therapy is about three days. So you're not going to get every single piece, but what I do expect is you're going to walk out of there with the ability to do something in your practice that you didn't do before and I'm confident and you're going to be able to help the patients that are your failures.

All of us docs have failures. We haven't been able to get the patients better. And then they move on to somebody else or we're able to just treat them for, it's like, okay, I have to keep repeating this thing every six weeks, every week, whatever, however long it is. And that's as far as we're able to get with them. And neural therapy is one of the things that can actually break through that. And so usually people have seen other doctors before they see me who have done really good work, put them on really good nutritional programs. They have them on good other types of programs. And neural therapy just gets to be the one that shines because it got this scarf and it got the nervous system back online. But the other things that were being done were actually important and valuable.

So that's the conference and I'm really excited about it. I'm going down today to help do the room set up and pick the foods that we're going to have. We have some really cool vendors that are coming from different places. One of them has injectables for a number of different things. I guess some of them, I'm not probably not allowed to say that they relate to some of the injuries people have had from the-

Ashley James (0:42:57.657)

From the wacky vaccines. Those injuries.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:43:00.516)

Those kind of injuries. Yes. And neural therapy has had some good results with those.

Ashley James (0:43:06.400)

Really? Have you been able to successfully get people out of long haul?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:43:16.279)

Yes. So with long haul, I use a combination of the neural therapy and then I also do the medical Qigong. With that illness, it's very very sticky kind like a black tar that gets stuck in the lungs for sure, the throat, but I've seen it all over the body, but it's an energetic thing and so people don't have a way to really get rid of it because they don't have any energetic skills and so with the medical Qigong, we can break that up and pull that out.

I had a woman recently that had had that illness really bad and she had gotten over it, but she was still coughing and she couldn't even lay down. And so I did the neural therapy, which we call the infraspinatus respiratory response and the sternal reflex patterns. And it opens up the lungs. And then I did the medical Qigong and kind of did a cleaning, a real deep cleaning and also cleaned the heart chakra and the throat chakra and shined them all up and refilled her all up. And when she went home, she didn't cough the rest of the day. She slept with a flat in her back without any problems. Texted me in the morning and said, Hey, I'm all the way better. I've had that happen a lot.

Ashley James (0:44:58.772)

Love it. Tell me about who can come to the North American Academy of Neural Therapy conference. So obviously doctors, naturopaths. But can a midwife go? Can I go? Someone who's just like really interested or do you have to be a licensed or do you have to be a doctor to attend the conference?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:45:20.266)

You don't have to be licensed to attend the conference. Well, I don't even know. You don't even have to know how to do injections, honestly, but to be able to go and see what we're doing and how cool this therapy is and how important it is, is really nice. So naturopaths, osteopaths,, acupuncturists to have the ability to do injections in some states. Chiropractors have the ability to do injections in some states. And also we have nurse practitioners. We have some PAs (physicians assistants), dentists of different types as well. All of them have injection skill sets. And they can actually do them. I think after any surgery, they should actually get neural therapy by the nurse that actually takes them out in the recovery room, they should inject on either side of the scar, not into the scar itself. And then come back at six weeks and have their scars treated. It would improve the success of surgeries by probably at least 70% because they come and see me or my colleagues after a surgery that went well, but they're having some issue and all I do is inject the scar, and now that's better.

There's an emergency room doctor that's going to be there. That's what used to do in the emergency room. I have surgeons that use it as part of their surgery that have given me those types of statistics. And we need more. Every doctor should know how to do neural therapy at the level of doing the scars and segmental because it'll improve everything that happens in their practice and everybody will be so happy with them.

Ashley James (0:47:29.531)

And that's something they'll learn at the conference?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:47:32.337)

They can learn it at the conference and also have it done. We'll also have a time where there's going to be a few couple of medical Qigong practitioners that will actually be there in the afternoon on Saturday to be able to get treatments.

Ashley James (0:47:50.619)

I think, I would be as a practitioner most interested in having it done to me. So I had the experience of what the patient or the client is experiencing. So that's the exciting part that not only is it hands-on, that as practitioners attending the conference, they'll be able to do it. That's why it can't be virtual. There's so much hands-on work that you get to do. This isn't just a theory conference. This is a get down and dirty and actually get to do it and then have it done to you by the very experienced practitioners.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:48:25.703)

Very experienced practitioners that are going to be there as well as you get to feel how it is from a new person as well. What I found is when somebody just sees the neural therapy, it usually looks really easy. Like if you watch how my hand does it or I'm doing it after 30 some years,, everybody goes, oh, that looks so easy. But I've done 10,000 of those injections or more. And so what I do when somebody is learning and they're hesitant and they'll allow me to touch their hand or the syringe, then I'll hold their hand and I'll help guide their hand and tell them what they're feeling in the tissues. We call it tissue palpation.

So as they're going through the tissue, they can actually get some feedback and then they have a chance of learning it kinesthetically as well as by watching it and hearing it. And then they have a chance of learning it kinesthetically as well as by watching it and hearing it. And some people are kinesthetic learners and my hand can teach them really well.

Ashley James (0:49:29.588)

So that's the exciting part. I want everyone to reach out to all their practitioners. I know when I get off this interview, I'm contacting every single person that my husband went to, all the practitioners who really were eager to help end his chronic pain, but didn't have this tool set. And I just think that there's so many practitioners out there that want to have this tool set and don't even know it exists.

So listeners, we got to get together, we need to spread this information, let them know about the conferences coming up, because no matter what kind of thing your practitioner practices, they're going to want to know about this and to have this as a tool set. And even people who are just interested in learning more, the fact that you could go to this conference and get treated and learn all this stuff is so cool. These tools are non-invasive, which I love. It's non-invasive.

Let's talk about, are there negative side effects? Like, if someone says they're going for surgery, of course there's risks, right? Or they're going to get on a new drug, there's risks. But this is so different. So what are the things that we look out for or what are the risks? Or is it only like, oh, redness at the site and that's very minimal risks. Can we talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:50:48.377)

So there's, there's very minimal risk, which is really nice about it. There's more risks with maybe where you place the needle than with the Procaine itself. The redness or bruising on the surface. And I tell people I don't charge extra for bruising because I used to get calls like, hey, I got a bruise from that. And it saved me a bunch of phone calls, calls to be able to remind them that bruising does happen. And often I tell a person when bruising is going to happen, I can see it on the surface when I'm doing it. Somebody could be allergic to a Procaine. I've only found one of those in 31 years. So that was rare. And I used dextrose instead on them and it had decent results. Also, there's other local anesthetics that are known, a bunch of them, of course.

The one that's most commonly used is called lidocaine. That's other names are xylocaine. And it actually has to go to the liver to be broken down. So there's a toxicity that's fairly low with that. And there's some neural therapy docs, they won't use it at all. I've used it very sparingly. It has a little bit longer numbing effect. It doesn't cause the vasodilation, which is something that I want. And it doesn't have the healing benefit of the anti-aging properties that could be part of it.

If you put a Procaine into blood vessel, so we can use it in IV and it's been safe for the heart, it's been safe for the brain. You can’t get too much, if you injected it directly into an artery that goes into the brain, then the person will have a very short time seizure. And which, when that's happened, they've said it's probably the best neural therapy treatment they ever have, but they wouldn't volunteer to do it again. So, I haven't really had that.

Ashley James (0:53:26.827)

You're palpating so precisely that you're not trying to find the carotid artery?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:53:30.632)

No, you're not trying to, even though in Argentina, they actually were doing injections directly into the carotid artery very slowly. And they stopped that and decided that they were going to be doing that anymore. They'd done it for a number of years in their psychiatric, with their psychiatric patients.

Ashley James (0:53:53.194)

Did they get results with them?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:53:55.558)

They got results with it? Yes.

Ashley James (0:53:57.327)

Like what?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:53:58.052)

They were having people get better. I mean, we do know that Procaine itself is an MAO inhibitor, which is an antidepressant, which is kind of nice to have, but they were treating lots of different things. And I don't remember what all of them were, but we have a psychiatrist that will be coming to tell us his treatments for his psychiatric patients and how it works.

Ashley James (0:54:23.323)

I'm thinking about the people with long-term chronic depression. Anxiety is through the roof. I mean, when we look at the suicide rates, they've gone up in the last four years. I saw somewhere a statistic that the younger, like 24 and younger suicides, the number one cause of death. I'm not sure if that's still accurate, but it is just very depressing and bleak when we think about mental health in the United States and I don't really know any country that's doing mental health right. But when I'm in the United States and I'm originally from Canada, so I can say Canada and the United States is not doing mental health in a healthy way that we can see the outcomes. People are just put on drugs. I think having it going to an MD saying you're depressed and an MD being allowed to put you on antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds without also having you in therapy.

I just think it's ludicrous because it's like, here, let's just mess with your brain. Numb your body's trying to communicate with you. Your emotions are trying to communicate with you, but let's just numb all that. And don't go to therapy. Don't resolve this issue. It's like we're not giving the patient the tools to heal. Let's just throw drugs at them, which is a crutch. You wouldn't put a cast on a bone that's not broken, but yet MDs are allowed to prescribe antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds like they're candy and that really messes with people. It doesn't help them overcome.

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:56:03.493)

So I think of them as a bandaid. So antidepressants are trying to treat a second level problem, which is an emotional and electrical problem with a physical product. And so you give the physical product and it has an effect but it's always a diminishing return. You get three months, six months. And then now the person their neuraltransmitters are now even more depleted because the drug has been enhancing them. And now the person hasn't done any of their emotional work. And so now they have the double whammy that the antidepressant isn't working and they haven't done their emotional work.

So I agree that if you go into antidepressant, you have to go to a counselor, get therapy that's effective because you got three to six months before that wears off and it doesn't work anymore. And now you'll have more depression and you'll still have the same problem.

Ashley James (0:57:11.858)
So in terms of neural therapy, because it's resetting the nervous system, getting them out of that fight or flight are you seeing that people with depression or even on antidepressants or people with anxiety, are they able to recover faster? Can we talk a little bit about that emotional or psychiatric experience?

Dr. Jeff Harris (0:57:37.038)

So to do that, I'll have to talk about the five levels of healing. Okay. So the first level is physical. So you have, let's say massage, pharmaceutical drugs, surgery, a whole host of things, you blood work, lab work, all is there. So that's, that's the first level. And that's where most doctors are trained and where they actually have a level of competency. In my opinion. So the next level up is the nervous system, the electrical part of us, which is where the emotions are. And emotions carry a charge. And so do interference fields.

So neural therapy works on the second level. And whenever you work at a level higher than the level where the problem is, then it always treats all the levels below. So if somebody gets neural therapy and their problems on that same level, then they get better. Okay.

The third level is the mental level. So we can have all kinds of things that mentally. I think of them as the programs that got in prior to the age of reason, which is between five and seven. We learned these from our parents. We learned them from our peers. We learned them from our environment that we're around. And those programs we're designed to have those go in because the people that are around have been successful at being able to have children. So we need to be programmed so that we can raise children.

But not all those programs are actually healthy. So we need to find those programs, and then be able to reprogram a person. And with Procaine, treating the interference fields that are below that, it makes it much easier for the mind to be able to face those mental programs in an honest way so they can actually do the healing work through affirmations, through mantra, through a number of different ways, there's psychotherapy, there could be homeopathy. And then, so that's the third level.

Fourth level is archetypal. So, an archetype is a symbolic representation. So the kind of the first archetypes that we have are male and female. So we can look across and we see it, see a man. And he has a baby, let's say, in a carriage. And he pick up the baby that's crying. And he pats the baby. And he tries to make the baby happy in some way. And we go, oh, a good father. If we see the man or women pick up the baby and it's crying and they shaking it, we go, oh, bad mother, we must take that baby away. They could hurt that baby. And And archetypes are something that we all agree upon. So good and bad father, good and bad mother, good and bad person, that we'll often go to.

The thing that I've liked is that we all share kind of four of the lower archetypes. According to Carolyn Myss and her last name is spelled M-Y-S-S. She still teaches. And she says we all share the child archetype with the saboteur archetype, the victim archetype, and the prostitute archetype. And we think of these as like, oh, that's bad to be a child. I'm a grown person. But we will see people they'll talk like a child. They'll act like a child, even late into life. They didn't quite grow up and most of us go, I don't want to be a child my whole life. Well, the way that you actually work with the archetype is by seeing it and recognize it's there and know that archetypes have two sides.

So the child archetype, when it stays a child, is childish. But when it grows up, it becomes the adult. The same let’s with say the saboteur. So my life keeps getting sabotaged by this, that, and the other thing. Something's always in the way. I can't get where I'm supposed to be. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I don't know what my purpose is. And the saboteur, it's like, oh, you have a saboteur. It's like, oh, I don't want the saboteur. That's terrible. It's like, no, the saboteur itself, when it's healed, it protects you from being sabotaged. The same with the victim, the victim, oh, everybody's doing it to me. This is a problem and it's there to blame. They're blaming. And when we blame somebody else, we don't have the opportunity. We can't heal it because we pushed it outside of ourselves. The healing of the victim is the protection from being victimized. And the same thing happens with a prostitute. We see that, oh, I'm doing this. I'm selling myself cheaply for things and my spirit is far more valuable. And so I need to actually up my game. And then we end up becoming finding that we're all truly valuable every one of us. So that's the fourth level.

The fifth level is spiritual level. And often we talk about that as being self-healing and doing meditation, focusing on the divine. And there's a whole host of like beings that live in that realm.

The fifth one is the divine or light realm and when that shines the light down through the fourth level, through the third level, to the second level, to the first level, then we actually can have physical healing. The scars and interference fields can be blocking that light from coming through. The mental programs can be blocking that light.

So each one of us has the ability to heal all the way to the spiritual level, but not all of us have the wounding to that level. So some people only need to be treated at the second level. And so for me, neural therapy works on all these physical problems, but if I don't get a result, then I know that I have to go up a level and then if I go up a level and I don’t get result then I keep going up a level.

In my own case, I had to go all the way up to the spiritual level to get the healing that I needed. And that was my contract it’s the way I think of it for when I came into this world.

Ashley James (1:05:23.792)

It's funny, as healers, right? You're a naturopathic doctor and I'd see that there's a calling. I hung out with a lot of naturopaths in my lifetime and there's a distinction between a naturopath and a traditional medical doctor. When someone's in allopathic medicine, you don't even have to tell me what your profession is. I can pick up who's the holistic healer and who's the allopathic healer. There's a definite distinction. And it's funny how as healers, we have to have some wounds to heal ourselves in order to develop that empathy with our passion, our calling is to help others. So the fact that you had to go all through these levels to have your own personal experience so that then you could inform people on an empathetic level and help them with their healing process. I mean that makes complete sense.

I've had a similar experience. And for those listening, a lot of people go, well, I can't do what I want to do because I'm not perfect yet, I'm not at my goal weight, so I could never help someone with health, or I don't look like I'm super healthy, or I don't look perfect. People wouldn't perceive me as perfect. And this is where I catch people and I go, if you wait to be perfect, you've missed out on the opportunity to help hundreds of people or thousands of people because as long as you're working on your journey, you're working towards your health, you're going to learn along the way that you'll be able to immediately take those lessons and apply them to others. I think that there's a lot of healing that's going to go on at your conference. I just have a feeling the way it's set up.

The North American Academy of Neural Therapy has been around for a while, right? So you've had these experiences at the conferences, obviously. You're one of the world's leading experts. What do practitioners walk away in terms of their own personal growth? Can you share some experiences?

Dr. Jeff Harris (1:07:48.859)

So to me, that's what's most important is that the doctors and people that are practitioners that are there, whoever it is gets their areas treated that need to get treated because all of us need healing. And, I'm hoping, and like when I teach a three day workshop on the basic training or the advanced, my goal is to get everybody there treated so that they can actually go back and they're more healed practitioner than they were before. And they have some new tools to be able to work with others.

So they get the experience of actually having the injection and also when somebody is like afraid of it, then they get to have the experience of watching me, how I talk to them to help them make a decision about doing an injection or not because I understand that we all have a right to say no then and that's where I start.

I'll tell them, this is my sales pitch for on why I would do this injection and why I'd even suggest it in your case. But you still have that right to actually, to truly say no. I find if somebody doesn't have the right to say no, then their yes is not, is not definite. And I really want them to be on board and understand or be able to say no, if they need to.

The naant.org is the website and like all website, it has flaws. We've worked on it so much. That's crazy to do so usually if do the contact button on the naant.org website, then you'll end it ends up coming to me. I'm the current one that answers the question and I'm the the current president of the North American Academy of Neural Therapy.

Ashley James(1:10:03.061)

I'm impressed with the website. I haven't found any flaws on it.

Dr. Jeff Harris (1:10:06.617)

Good. I was just looking and I saw a couple.

Ashley James (1:10:17.001)

I do. I know how it is. I've been clicking through the conference and looking at all the amazing classes and everything. And I was actually really impressed with the website.

So the links to everything today, Dr. Jeff Harris's website and to the conference are going to be the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. But I'll just throw them out here. So it's jeffharrisnd.com is your personal website. And then, of course, I want everyone who's listening to go to this conference. I just think it's going to be phenomenal and that is naant.org.

And then from there, they should be able to just click right there on Find Out More or Register Now for the conference coming up April 4th through 7th. And you can go to the whole conference, if you're flying into Seattle, you might as well do the whole conference you can do the pre stuff, there's different options for which things you want to attend.

Dr. Jeff Harris (1:11:15.265)

You can join. You can join if you want to too from the website.

Ashley James (1:11:19.220)

Yes, so tell us about this. So I'd like just to wrap it up. I want you to speak to the providers who are listening and you've mentioned some, but like anyone who's working with clients or patients, anyone who physically sees their clients or patients and wants to help them on an emotional and physical level and help them on these deep levels, especially the patients who haven't or the clients who haven't gotten results who just like they still have the anxiety, they still have the sleep issues or they still have the chronic pain or you've worked with people with PTSD and very quickly seen amazing results, right?

So if any client or patient who you know that taking them out of fight or flight and resetting their nervous system so that it's no longer like stuck in that fight or flight, you want to bring them in to be able to do this therapy with them. So, speak to the practitioner who is interested in learning this, possibly joining the naant.org but especially those who are interested in coming to the conference. Speak to the practitioner who just learned about this therapy for the first time in this interview.

Dr. Jeff Harris (1:12:37.611)

So there's a thing that's a hundred percenter kind of question for neural therapy. What happened just prior to this condition that you have to your body, your mind or your spirit? And most of the time people don't always remember. So it usually takes a little bit of prying. Say you've had this illness for five years. What was happening five years ago in your life? What do you remember from that time? What do you remember from six years ago? What was happening in your life? Did you have any surgeries? Did you have any car accidents? Did you have a divorce? Did you have any kind of emotional trauma? Somebody die in your family. And if they've had any of the thing that's happened, that was a big event, then we know that neural therapy is going to help. That's how we knew with your husband, we'll bring it around to that. It was like, oh, nobody's treated this scar. And it was a kind of a life and death situation. The aid cars showed up the older boys that were around. They all abandoned him. His friend that was there did run and get help, but he got abandoned. He had to lay there by himself maybe for a period of time and he's bleeding and hurt and he's hurt.

Ashley James (1:14:11.970)

Yes, my husband fell 30 feet into a river bed and had river bed rocks lodged in between his ribs and nearly lost his spleen. He was nine years old. There's no cell phones and they were in a park. So his friend ran and got help. And then there was a woman who was happened to walk by and she was the one that was with him. But yes, it was my husband says he doesn't remember being afraid. But but it's like, well, of course we were afraid in that moment. And he was in tremendous pain and I think that it's interesting how we bury stuff and when we go through trauma, if we're not ready to process it, we bury it. But the moment you finished injecting the scar, he had his huge reset and could definitely physically see it. And then the next week when you did the therapy to reset his nervous system, the next injections, that's when all the pain stopped and hasn't come back and it’s like I got my old husband back.

Dr. Jeff Harris (1:15:16.867)

And if his pain does come back, we know that we could repeat the same treatment and get a longer result.

Ashley James (1:15:24.851)

Right. It is so cool. And it's so worth it. Like I said, it's the only thing I've tried. We've tried probably 20 different therapists. I mean, I should sit down and think about everyone we went to, but we've tried everything.

And even he went to allopathic medicine and that didn't work. It didn't even touch the pain, like everything. And this is what did it. And I imagine so many people out there who are suffering, who we could end their suffering quickly and without side effect, without harm. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I know your schedule is tight. You're preparing for the conference. It's been wonderful having you here and I'd love to have you back to talk more about this in the future.

I urge listeners to share this interview with your practitioners in your life, your dentists, your chiropractors, your doctors, your nurse practitioners, your acupuncturists, everyone who sees their clients or patients in person. Let's get this information out there. Dr. Jeff Harris, it's been such a pleasure.

Dr. Jeff Harris (1:16:28.943)

Can I say one more thing? On the topic of doctors who are allopathic and medical doctors and DOs, they're often so wounded and they never get the help that they need. Our society, in my opinion, has let them down. They spend all their time getting grades, having to learn these things, and they get brainwashed that this is the only way to do healing, is my opinion. Their relationships that they have are usually not very good. I think that we should actually give them a practice boyfriend or a practice girlfriend as they're going through school so that they can learn about relationship from somebody who's healthy. And so I'm all about helping heal anybody in the medical profession. So, I'm going to make sure that's got said too.

Ashley James (1:17:30.847)

Thank you. You called me out. I think I've been holding them in a negative light. I should imagine all the medical doctors and hold them in love and just shine light on them and say, I want all of you guys to heal. Heal thyself and come to the NAANT conference where you could begin that healing. I'm excited. The energy is going to be wild. A bunch of healers together, ready to heal themselves and help heal others. What a wild conference.

Dr. Jeff Harris (1:18:03.831)

Yes. We call it the neural therapy family. It's a group of healers and we get together and we help each other and flourish and have a really good time.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I was glad to find out that you actually did podcast. I didn't know that until just the other day.

Ashley James (1:18:26.180)

I know. Well, I heard about your conference. We were talking about your conference. I'm like, okay can I help you? And I want to get this word out. And anytime I meet a holistic practitioner, I'm thinking, I should definitely have them on the show. And I was so grateful that you wanted to come on, because my goal is to help change lives. And that's by spreading information. You're the one changing lives then I'm just like, the farmer has a machine that spreads the seeds, right? I'm like that. I'm like, let's just spread it. Let's just get it out there and get all this information out there.

Dr. Jeff Harris (1:19:01.407)

And that's not my skill. My skill is just doing what I do, the treatments.

Ashley James (1:19:06.494)

Yes. You keep healing people and I'll keep telling people about how you heal people. So it works out.

Dr. Jeff Harris (1:19:12.601)

Great. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Ashley James (1:19:15.928)

Wasn't that an amazing interview with Dr Jeff Harris. Give it up for Dr Jeff Harris. I just love this stuff and I'm so excited for you to share this information with your practitioners. Please, let's help spread this information. I want you to know about my absolute favorite non-toxic mattress. I have done interviews in the past.

This is a medical device. It's a medical device you sleep on, because they made this mattress so that it aligns your spine. No matter which side you sleep on, whether it's your front, your back, your side it aligns your spine and there it removes all pressure points. This was designed by an engineer who patented who is a medical device that originally and is still used in hospitals today, but originally was proven to reverse bed sores prevent a reverse bed sore.

So can you imagine sleeping on something so comfortable? It's firm yet soft, because it keeps everything in alignment and it feels like you're floating on a cloud. It's so supportive. People who love firm mattresses love it. People who love soft mattresses love it because it's firm but you feel no pressure points. It's amazing because it collapses exactly where it needs to. It's the coolest thing and I swear by this. I just love this mattress.

Well, they're doing something they've never done before. This mattress has been sold for over 20 years and in fact it lasts for over 20 years. It has the best guarantee, the best warranty, in the entire mattress industry. It's meant to last over 20 years without warping, without any negative damage. Usually, mattresses go every five years and if you're sleeping on a mattress older than five years, it's warped in some way because they don't design them correctly. So this mattress has never been on sale.

They have a sale going on right now and I have to let you know about it, it's 25% off. Go to learntruehealth.com/organix. That's with an X at the end learntruehealth.com/organix and check it out. You can also, when you go to my website, learntruehealth.com, you can click on what Ashley Recommends at the top of the menu and then you'll see it in there in my list of the things that I recommend. Give them a call. I mean you could check it out their website. You can also give them a call. Let them know I sent you because they throw in goodies and stuff, but it's 25% off right now. They usually throw in some really great goodies for my listeners.

I have the owner of the company. I had him on the show a few months ago and he's giving us some great stuff, but right now, huge sale, 25% off, and they do payment plans and stuff. So if you don't like your mattress and you want a new one, or you're thinking about getting a new one and you're like, well, I don't have all the money to buy this amazing sounding mattress, don't worry, they have payment plans. They have a crazy return policy, like I think you could sleep on it for 90 days or 120 days or something. You sleep on it for months and then you could still return it if you wanted to. So very few people do because they love it, but there's no risk. I love things that are no risk and they help you and they're non-toxic. It doesn't off-gas crap and it helps realign your spine and keep it there. My chiropractor was really amazed because she noticed a difference when I went from my old mattress to this mattress that we've now had for several years. We've been sleeping on it for well over five years and it's true, it doesn't warp. It feels just as good as the first day we got it.

So learntruehealth.com/organix Check out their sale right now. I don't know when the sale's ending. You know how sales go. They can have it for a day, they can have it for a week, but they just let me know that I'm allowed to tell you guys about the 25% off, and be sure to mention that you heard it from the Learn True Health podcast, because I want you to get whatever goodies they're throwing our way. They were mentioning pillows or pillowcases or a mattress protector or something cool.

So get that organics mattress 25% off, learntruehealth.com/organix. That organics mattress 25% off, learntruehealth.com/organix. And make sure you go to Dr Jeff's website, jeffharrisnd.com. Check out that conference naant.org. Of course, the links to everything I just talked about today in this episode is going to be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com. Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

Get Connected with Dr. Jeff Harris!

Dr. Jeff Harris Website

North American Academy of Neural Therapy Website

Download this Episode

517 Leap In Regenerative Science Has Mastered Age Reversal & Tissue Regeneration Using All Natural Photobiomodulation, David Schmidt 0

Mar 5, 2024

To book a free session with me to discuss trying this technology, visit https://www.learntruehealth.com and click Work With Ashley James in the menu!

Check out my new book! https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

517: Stem Cell Stimulation Through Photobiomodulation Creates Cellular Age Reversal

https://www.learntruehealth.com/stem-cell-stimulation-through-photobiomodulation-creates-cellular-age-reversal

Can light transform your health and wellness? Join me, Ashley James, as I sit down with the ingenious David Schmidt, the mastermind behind LifeWave's phototherapy patches, on this episode of the Learn True Health podcast. David shares his remarkable journey from childhood aspirations to creating groundbreaking non-invasive wearable technology that has revolutionized health care. Discover how these patches, inspired by divine guidance, have helped countless individuals, including my clients, with issues ranging from insomnia and depression to physical pain and anxiety.

Highlights:

Powerful Healing With Phototherapy Patches
Technology and Faith
Innovative Stem Cell Activation Technology
Stem Cell Therapy and Nutrient Supplements
Product Testing and Third-Party Studies
Revolutionary Light Therapy for Age Reversal
Youthful Aging and Patch Technology
Patch Protocol and Potential Benefits
Phototherapy Patch Benefits and Usage
Patches for Travel and Wellness
Natural Solutions for Health and Wellness
LifeWave's Vision for Global Impact
Empowering Health Through Natural Solutions

Intro:

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James, and I am beyond excited for you to listen to this episode with David Schmidt, the creator of the phototherapy patches that I've been using for over a year with many of my clients having phenomenal results. I'm not going to take up too much of your time right now before we jump into this thrilling episode, but I wanted to give you a few pieces of information that are key. One go to learntruhealth.com and in the menu there click on Work with Ashley James and the very first appointment type is a free chat with me, just says phototherapy discovery session. Go ahead and sign up for that. If you are interested in any way in learning more, having a talk with me about the phototherapy patches, in trying them for yourself, there's a money back guarantee, so there's no risk and there's no negative side effects. It's not a drug. We're getting really amazing results.

So if you have something nagging in your life, something in your health that you're not happy with and it can be emotional issues, it can be physical issues. I've helped people using the flow therapy patches. I've seen with my clients, they overcome things like insomnia, depression, anxiety, exhaustion.

I myself have tremendous energy and I've noticed that sleep is better, energy is better throughout the day, digestion improves. There's so many things that improve so many levels of health. So pick something you're not happy with. Let's have a discovery session where we chat about it, and I'll be very straight up. If I don't think that phototherapy is right for you, we can just talk about what it is, what your health goals are, what you're frustrated in terms of your health emotional or physical or otherwise and what you want to overcome, what you want to get, what you want to improve in terms of your happiness and your health and your life, and if it's on phototherapy, I will point you in the direction of other resources. I love, love, love talking to you guys, so jump in, have a session with me and let's see how I can help you. I have a feeling, though, most of the time, most of the people that I talk to, phototherapy has worked when I suggest it. I have over 160 clients now using phototherapy, successfully using this.

What were the whole interview today? It's about phototherapy, and when you hear phototherapy, when I heard it, I thought is it a bunch of like lights. because you think photo light it's a no, it's not. You're not getting in a giant machine. It's actually a really easy wearable technology. It's so simple that it's kind of wild how powerful it is. It's very simple, it's very powerful and it's affordable, which is exciting, one example, there is one of the phototherapy patches and this is all proven. They've done studies and proved it that it increases glutathione production.

It asks the body to increase glutathione production by 300% in the first 24 hours and for some people it goes even beyond that after 24 hours. In comparison, if you were to take an oral glutathione, you raise your levels by about 10%. It's hard to absorb exogenous glutathione orally. Good oral glutathione is in the range of $50 to $100 per month; you're only raising it by about 10%. If you were to go to get an IV, that's between $100 and $200. And that doesn't last very long. That's only lasting a few hours. Glutathione doesn't last for days. It's a very short half-life in the body and that is very expensive, if you think about it- the oral glutathione, the injections. The phototherapy patch you're between $1 and $2 a day, basically for increasing it by 300%. So it's actually the cheapest way to support the body in terms of raising glutathione levels. And that's just one of several patches that they have that ask the body to perform specific functions more. So we're helping the body come back into balance. We've got great results around pain, around stimulating healthy bone healing. I've had several clients with broken bones that healed incredibly faster and got them out of pain much faster. That's really exciting.

I do have a quick story In our Facebook group, you can't see it, you can't find it on Facebook. I have to send you a unique, private link. So, if you want to, when we have our call together, I will give you that link and the link expires. So I can't even share this link publicly because it's a unique link that invites one person into this group. That's a private, hidden Facebook group of practitioners and their clients and all of the people in this group that are using the phototherapy patches in a specific way. We use them with an understanding that the body has meridians, like traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and so we place them on specific points of the body and we get even better results because there's that synergy of working with the energy system of the body and the nervous system of the body. We're working with it in that way.

In that group. If you type in in the search function, if you type in thyroid, you could spend over half an hour scrolling and reading testimonial after testimonial of people in that group. Mostly women are sharing about their thyroid who had hypothyroid but after using the phototherapy patches to support their body's ability to heal itself, no longer have hypothyroid, so much so, in less than two months of doing the protocol, and these are several, several testimonials, all said the same thing, went back to their doctor, and their doctor did testing, and their doctor took them off of their thyroid meds. They no longer have hypothyroid and it's just two types of patches.

Again, I'm not making medical claims. I'm not saying we cure or treat anything. We're supporting the body's ability to heal itself. And then people say, hey, wow, my health is getting better. We're noticing my health improving in this way. And my doctor did blood tests. My doctor said I don't need this medicine anymore. And that's my goal. My goal is to get people so healthy. Their doctors take them off meds and because they're so healthy, they're not leaning on those crutches anymore. They don't need to, they're so healthy.

Well, this happened with one of my clients. I told her she didn't want to have hypothyroid anymore, she didn't want to be on meds anymore, and I said, ok, well, here's what other people have said they've done to support their thyroid in optimal function. And she texted me just very casually. I was like jumping up and down, screaming. I was so excited. She texted me like within less than two months into doing this protocol, she goes. I went back to my naturopath, like you said, and I got my blood work and she took me off of all my thyroid meds because my thyroid now is performing completely normal. How exciting is that? It's wild, because phototherapy, as you will discover in this interview, it's not molecular medicine, it's just asking the body to come back into balance.

I have many, many other examples of how this has helped, specifically to help people get back into balance, and that is why I'm doing this interview, because my goal when I started this podcast. I started it eight years ago with the intention that I would reach those who are sick of suffering, who cry themselves to sleep because the doctor that they see have given up on them, or have just have one drug after another or have side effect after side effect and they're sick of being sick and they're tired of being tired and they want to help their body heal and come back into optimal health, but they don't know how, and that's why I started this podcast to find the answers for you. I don't believe there's like a magic bullet out there. I don't believe there's a magic pill.

I think that health is multifaceted. I believe we can't out-exercise a bad diet. you can't, you can't. There's no shortcuts and there are tools that we don't even know about, that you don't even know about, that you're about to learn about today. There are tools out there that will supercharge our healing as we work on supporting our body's ability to heal itself. So that's why I'm really excited for you to hear this today. It's kind of crazy. You've got to open up your mind. So I was resistant at first and I talk about this in the interview I did just over a year ago about the phototherapy patches, I was skeptical then I went, wait a second I got to be a bit more open-minded and so I tried it and I had an immediate, immediate result, and I thought this is too cool.

This is too cool, so I'm very excited to introduce you today to the creator, the inventor, of LifeWave, and I hope you enjoy today's interview and please share it with your friends and family. I'd love to hear from you also, after this interview, come join us in the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group. I'd love to hear what you thought about it, your questions, what you learned from it. I'm all for starting a discussion about this and, if you are super skeptical, I invite you to have conversations about it. I appreciate skepticism because I think we need to, especially in this day and age where we're being told what's safe and effective is now no longer safe and effective, that we shouldn't just blindly trust anyone.

So definitely come in with your skepticism, but also remember to bring your open mind, and I love that this company does have a money-back guarantee. They stand behind their product, because it is kind of out there when you think about it, but when you look into the results they get and the science behind it, it's phenomenal. So enjoy today's interview and remember, go to learntruehealth.com and click in the menu Work with Ashley James. Sign up for a free phototherapy discovery session with me, because I'd love to help you try these and just see what happens.

Ashley James (0:11:15.701)

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 517. I am beyond excited to have David Schmidt on our interview today. I'm a fangirl, so I'm kind of blushing a bit here just having you on the show.

My husband and I are big, big fans of you and of the technology that you've created. I've, pretty much for the last almost year and a half, have talked about you to someone every single day. Our eight-year-old son, actually, he gravitated towards this technology before I was super interested. I was kind of like at first, when we first heard about it, I was like, hmm, this sounds a little like it's so new, it's such a new concept. I know it's not new technology it's been around for over 20 years but it was new to me and new to a lot of people that I introduced it to, and my son, who's like a science geek. He immediately understood it. He understood the technology before I did.

We watched some webinars, watched some of your science webinars, and he was like I want this now. I want to put it on me and every week. At least once a week he'll say can you put this patch on me, can I get this patch? And last night he was asking me for a patch. And it's so cute that an eight-year-old totally gets it.

And he's had several amazing experiences with your phototherapy technology where he had a really bad sore stomach. He was really nauseous. We put some patches on his tummy and it immediately relieved the nausea and he wouldn't let me take him off him. He's like no, this is making me feel better, don't take him off. He's not generally like a sick child, but he has allergies and it leads to asthma. And we're really good about diet, like we're really clean and eating and we were really health focused. Obviously I'm like a big health nut doing this podcast. After he started using the patches a few times a week, after a few months I noticed that he wasn't using his inhaler. He didn't need it, he wasn't having asthma and his allergies were going away and we've seen a significant reduction in his allergies and that coincides right when the time he started using the phototherapy technology. So just really interesting on that end. We've used it in acute situations in our family, like first aid situations where it immediately stops the pain, immediately stops the swelling. My husband, by the way, says thank you. My husband, Duffy, says thank you so much. I was on the phone with him earlier. He goes tell David I say thank you.

His favorite phototherapy patches, alavita. He wears it nightly on his forehead. It gives him such great sleep, such deep sleep, and gives him dreams. And I've talked about this on the show before, he was for 50 years had no dreams. He couldn't remember his dreams. They weren't colorful, he didn't have anything. And then there was one time we took a medicinal mushroom not psychedelic, like a medicinal over-the-counter mushroom tincture and he had colorful dreams. He's like, oh my gosh, it's never happened to me before. But since he's been using the patch on his forehead at night, it gives him such deep sleep and he wakes up remembering these amazingly vivid dreams and he just loves it. What the patches gave to me is I got the energy that I had as a child back. I feel like I'm seven again in terms of my level of endurance and energy throughout the day. So I never thought I'd get that back and I'm so grateful. So thank you, David, for everything that you've created in the last 20 plus years and what you continue to do, and I'm a huge fan and I can't wait for the listeners to dive in and learn more about your technology. So welcome to the show.

David Schmidt (0:15:05.846)

Oh, Ashley, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for that background information. I will warn you that it sounds like you have an inventor on your hands. So because there's some similarities there, I think from my past, from when I was eight years old. So I would encourage you to encourage him to explore that side of inventing or engineering. So that could be very, very interesting for you and your husband.

Ashley James (0:15:37.718)

You have no idea how happy my son, I bet as he's listening right now, he's got a smile from ear to ear, in the future when he's listening, because he identifies as an inventor. And he wants to be a physicist, he's into quantum mechanics, he wants to be a pilot, he just wants to do so many things, but he loves science. And the way his brain works, it just surprises me. So thank you for saying that. I really appreciate it.

David Schmidt (0:16:06.136)

Well, you never know where life is going to take you. When I was about eight or nine years old, I knew I wanted to be an inventor, but I didn't know how that was really going to manifest. And fortunately, I've been very blessed with divine guidance leading a life of prayer. And from my perspective, God has played the top role in my life, guiding me and directing me to lead me to where I am today.

On these journeys of faith, you end up in places that you don't expect to be, but it's incredibly rewarding. And so part of what goes with the path of being an inventor is allowing yourself to be subject to the will of God, to put the will of God first, and then act in a way that's going to benefit the greater good. So if you have those ideals in mind, you'll end up in places in life that you would least expect, and you find that the journey is exciting and unbelievably rewarding, and that's really been my experience.

Ashley James (0:17:27.824)

I love that you started the conversation this way. When you dive into what David's created, you see that you are David, this amazing inventor and scientist. And to have someone who has such a strong science background and has invented this amazing technology say that first and foremost, you make sure that you're in alignment with what you feel God's vision is for your inspiration and for the way you touch people's lives. And if you follow that level of ethics, we make sure that we do no harm. We make sure that we are leaving a positive impact globally. And if everyone align their hearts and their actions with God's will, what an amazing world this would be. So thank you for starting the conversation off like that.

I have a bunch of really cool questions from my clients and from my fellow teammates that are also practitioners that I've introduced to you and to this technology. And I'm going to save that for the second hour. The first hour, I really want to get into understanding what is this thing we're talking about? Because I'm sure a lot of listeners who don't know are like, what's this? Tell me finally, what is this thing?

What I want to do is reference Episode 496. That's when I had Trina Hammack on the show, actually a year ago. I had been using the patches from about November to February personally and having amazing results. And then I had Trina on last February and shared some of my results. And since last February, so it's been a year, outstanding results. I have over 160 clients having like life-changing, remarkable experiences, pain gone, bones healed themselves twice as fast, people's tremors going away, migraines going away, symptoms of a brain tumor going away, just like hot flashes immediately, instantaneously going away, insomnia going away. Anxiety, depression, just on an emotional level we see a shift, on physical levels we see a shift. It's been remarkable, the stories.

I had one woman she had tons of mystery symptoms and all of them, all of them went away. And she was just like reeling, like she couldn't believe it. She'd been from so many different doctors and they all didn't know what was wrong with her. And after she started working with me using this technology, everything went back to what it was supposed to. So we've just had so many remarkable experiences.

So listeners can go back and listen to 496. And then if listeners want to jump in and purchase them, I want you guys to reach out to me because I work as a practitioner with these and I want to make sure that I help you purchase them and use them correctly. So you can go to learntruehealth.com and click Work with Ashley James and book that free session with me so we can talk together.

And then if you want to just jump in and check them out, go to lifewave.com/learntruehealth. That's lifewave.com/learntruehealth. So David, take us back just over 20 years ago where it all began, where creating this phototherapy wearable technology all began.

David Schmidt (0:20:48.596)

Actually, if it's okay with you, let's go back maybe 40 years. So I just turned 60, so this would be when I'm in my 20s. And I've been to college and gone for a degree in computer science and management information systems. I took a year to go out and work and I worked for a company designing medical devices.

And then I went back to school to get a degree in biology. And at that time I became friendly with the chairman of the biology department, wonderful man by the name of Bill Ventura, and he was a pharmacologist, so he and I would butt heads a little bit on things, but it was okay because he was very kind to me, and I had approached him, and said, I have some ideas on a novel method of treating cancer and I need a laboratory. So, is there a way that I could do this with the university? So he said, well, as it turns out, I'm not going to be using my lab for the coming year. So if you want to use it, that's fine, but it's going to be up to you to raise the money and the resources that you're going to need for this research.

So, I went ahead and I got a grant from a company in New Jersey. This was in New York. I went to Pace University in Westchester. And then I got a relationship with the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and they were donating animals, these was mice that had two different types of neuroblastomas. They were an immunogenic and non-immunogenic neuroblastoma. One was called a TBJ and the other a C1300. And the difference between the two was that the C1300 would promote a response from the immune system where the TBJ would not. And the method that I was working at that time was to see if we could electromagnetically manipulate selectively the membrane potential of the cancer cells without harming the healthy cells.

And number one, it was electromagnetic energy and devices that I was working with and I was building these up from scratch. But it's important because the life wave technology works of course with light and that's a form of electromagnetism. But this was a very low frequency electromagnetic wave.

In any case, after two years of research, what I found was that it was possible to depolarize selectively the membranes of cancer cells and do that selectively in the sense that you could kill the cancer cells without harming healthy tissue and there were no types of toxic side effects.

This is important because many years later in the 90s, this was about 1986, 1987. So later on in the 90s, when I was doing work for government contractors and this opportunity came up to improve the survivability of the crew of submarines, I wanted to go back to this idea that we could do this with energy, that we could improve people's energy instead of having to use a stimulants like caffeine or amphetamines, that we could do this in some way naturally and communicate with the cells and do it that way. So that background is probably important because if it wasn't for that experience, it wouldn't have led me down the road that I eventually ended up in.

Ashley James (0:25:08.644)

I've listened to so many of your lectures, but what you just shared made so much sense and got me so excited. We're kind of on the edge of our seat because we just heard you depolarize the cell walls of cancer cells. And what kind of potential that has, right, for the future of natural medicine to naturally stimulate our body's own ability to heal itself. So at that point, you were working on developing a natural technology to help increase energy. I know what happened, because I've listened to so much of you, but the listener doesn't. So please continue with your story.

David Schmidt (0:25:49.786)

Sure. So I was developing power generation technology for the US Navy through government contractors, principally General Dynamics Electric Boat and Newport New Shipbuilding, although there were some other big companies that I was going and visiting and speaking to about some of this tech that I had invented. And I had been at a meeting and I was being told that the power generation equipment that I was proposing they couldn't use on a sub in an emergency situation because it would pull all of the oxygen out of the sub. So I said, well, what are you doing for oxygen during an emergency? And they started to tell me about chlorate candles.

Now, chlorate candles have been around for about 150 years. And it literally is a candle that you burn that causes a chemical reaction that releases oxygen into the air. It's about 60% efficient and it's very dangerous and it's also very, very messy. So on a nuclear sub, they have to put these chlorate candles into an oven, as they call it. They burn them at high temperature and then it releases oxygen.

So I happened to make the comment that I couldn't believe on a billion dollar sub they were burning candles for oxygen. And so one of the fellows, the head of emergency systems said to me, well, if you can think of a better way to do it, then go ahead. So I took that as challenge accepted.

And three weeks later, I called him and I said, okay, I've invented a better way to do it. I'd like to come up and make a presentation. And they thought, oh, there is just no way this guy invented something in three weeks. So we're going to embarrass him. So they told me that I had to give them a presentation in front of about two or three people and it turned out to be 30 people.

And we went down to their microanalytical lab. They had a mass spectrometer. And they put my device into the mass spec. And the chlorate candles, as I mentioned, are 60% efficient. And my device was over 99% efficient. And so that got their attention.

So one of the fellows that was at the meeting was running black projects. And he contacted me two weeks later. And he said, I was really impressed what you came up with and how you handled yourself. And I'd like to invite you to be part of a program we have. It's a mini-sub. And the mini-sub is going to attach to a nuclear sub. And it's going to be manned by navy seals and they're going to go on these very long missions that would be 30 hours, 60 hours at a time, and I want you to take a look at the project and see if you can make a contribution to it. So I took a look and the first thing that came to mind was I didn't know how these guys were going to stay awake for 60 hours. And I've always been a supporter of natural health, so the very first thought was, let's see if we can find a way to improve the energy and stamina of the crew without having to use drugs. So that's when LifeWave really started.

Ashley James (0:29:40.006)

I love it. So you took that concept and obviously it worked 20 plus years later. But tell us a bit of what happened. How did it go from the private sector to the public sector?

David Schmidt (0:29:55.482)

Yes, so that's a great question. So I had developed the patches and then 9-11 hit. So it was all during that window. And at that time, of course, what the government was interested in was developing weapons. So it was like a wall went up. The people that you would normally communicate with, you couldn't get in touch with.

And I had a family to support and contracts that we had were put on hold. And so there was really no telling at that time when things were going to change. So I decided that I was going to try to take the technology public. Since I had developed it, I wasn't under any burden to keep it a secret.

And so in July of 2002, I set up LifeWave. And with the idea that I was going to see how can we do clinical studies? How can we set up manufacturing? How are we going to market this technology? And it was really like entering a whole new world for me since I had been used to doing business with nuclear engineers and very bright mechanical engineers.

So it was entering an entirely new world, but if it hadn't been for 9-11, this technology would have stayed secret and it would have stayed with the military.

Ashley James (0:31:30.852)

How interesting is that, the timing to be just that perfect. I mean, obviously we didn't want 9-11 to happen, but it's always nice to hear something good come from something bad. So I'm so happy you didn't just scrap this and move on, that you had the courage and you had the cojones to say that you were going to start a company, because that, I mean, that does take a lot of faith and a lot of faith in yourself and a lot of faith in God and a lot of just a lot of faith in general. Not everyone is cut out to start a company, but look at you, LifeWave is global. It's helping so many people. And it's so neat to see how far it's come in such a short time. I mean, 20 years is like a blink of an eye. I remember 2002. That's a blink of an eye.

What's cool is when we watch sports, we see major athletes wearing your technology. And that was the first patch you created, which tell us just a little bit about that, because I want to talk about the studies, but that very first phototherapy patch that you created has worked so well for athletes. And that was designed, first of all, for the navy seals, but why not for the average person?

David Schmidt (0:32:57.424)

So, yes back in 2002, 2004 in that window. It was very self-evident that there were going to be people that were interested in improving energy and improving fat burning in a natural non-drug non-chemical way. Really the question was how to go to market with these, how to support them with clinical studies and, how to set up the manufacturing so those early days were incredible because the first thing is I just got out on the street and went to visit medical doctors, acupuncturists, chiropractors, personal trainers, athletes, coaches, and just had them start using the product. I gave away many, many free samples so I could find out, okay, how is this really going to work in real life?

And then in around 2003, I had the opportunity to meet Coach Richard Quick. And Richard was a six-time United States Olympic swim coach and he had countless number of awards. I think it was over 12 NCAA championships and highly respected in the sport. And so I had reached him through a medical doctor and he had said, okay, I'd like to give this technology a try as long as you can convince me that it's safe and it's not going to cause any type of harm to my athletes.

So I sent him out the energy patches and he applied them to his Stanford women swim team. And we spoke three weeks later. And what he had said was that he tried the patches on eight of his swimmers. And during those three weeks, six out of the eight swimmers had broke their personal lifetime best in their event.

And one of the swimmers, Tara Kirk, had broken the world record in the 50 meter breaststroke. So Richard was absolutely convinced that this was working and that began a long friendship and we would work together for many, many years. And that also really played a very, very important role in the beginning of LifeWave because it was having those Stanford women swimmers use the patches and get national attention that led to many, many other athletes hearing about LifeWave and using them.

Ashley James (0:35:42.577)

I love it. It's so exciting. When I first started using your phototherapy technology, I had been going to the gym on a regular basis. I was going to Orange Theory at the time because I liked their structured classes. And when it came to doing the rowing, I could only aerobically row, where your heart rate is in that, that orange, like 150 beats a minute kind of thing for five minutes before I was like needed to take a break. And I could not go more than five minutes. Just every time I went to class, I was going three times a week, couldn't row more than five minutes straight before I needed to take a break.

And then, we had this day where it was like a challenge day. And just so happened to be the first day I walk in there wearing two pairs of energy enhancers, and, as well as a few of your other patches that I adore. I did twenty-three minutes straight. I'm not like an athlete, I'm a health nut, but you wouldn't look at me and go, oh yes, she's an athlete. Inside I’m a pitbull, inside I'm an athlete, but in my heart, I do not look like an athlete at all. And to go from five minutes to twenty-three minutes, I was without a doubt, you can't call this placebo.

And I have some fun stories about how I definitely know there's no placebo effect here. But that was like, I could not muster the will to go more than five minutes without the patches and then boom, I had this huge improvement. And I also noticed my recovery is faster during and after workouts. We switched gyms because my husband wanted to come with me. I like weightlifting more. I'm more into like, just exerting myself in that way. And we noticed that when we wear the patches, we can lift more, it's like almost like it's helping with lactic acid. Like we don't hit that fatigue. We can go longer before we get fatigue. And then we noticed that we're less sore, that we recover faster. Just everything. I love that there's that significant shift. And like I said to you before we hit record, I'm pinching myself still. I kind of the first few months of wearing the patches, I'm like, is this real? Is this real? There's a skeptic in the back of my mind. And I tell my listeners, I'm the biggest open-minded skeptic, but there's this little voice in my head going like, you're putting a sticker on yourself and then you are feeling better. Like what's going on?

Now, we're wearing this technology. It's not transdermal, like we're not absorbing something from it, like a vitamin patch or like a nicotine patch. It's not like that. That was my first thought when I first saw this. I’m like, are you telling me I'm like absorbing energy from it? Not in the sense that you're placing a nutrient inside it for us to absorb, but I'd love for you to explain since we've talked about the benefits and about the impact on athletes. How does wearing this phototherapy patch work?

David Schmidt (0:39:02.536)

Yes, before we get into some of the other signs behind this and the clinical studies that we've done, we should talk about method of action because the product, when you get right down to it, basically what it does is it's stimulating the skin with light and this is inducing very favorable biochemical changes within the body.

So to preface this, we would need to understand, why would that have an effect anyway? It's pretty self-evident that when we go out in the sun, our bodies are going to experience biochemical changes in the presence of light. Everybody knows you go out in the sun and you can get a suntan. So that's an example of UV light changing the melanin content in the skin.

And interestingly, melanin, most people don't think about it this way, they just want to look good from a suntan. melanin is an antioxidant. So actually what happens in the skin is the UV light is going to being, very high energy, electromagnetic energy, is going to reduce the vitamin C and glutathione content in the skin. And in response, to protect itself, the human body releases melanin as an antioxidant to shield the skin from further damage. So that's how we actually end up with a suntan. It's a defensive mechanism to protect us. But it's a very elegant way that everyone can relate to that there is an interaction between light and the human body.

One thing many men don't know, and this will explain some teenage and young adult behavior during the summer, is that when men take off their shirts and they go to the beach and they get sunlight on the androgen receptors in their shoulders, it elevates testosterone levels. Yes, and dangerous around young horny teenage men, and men in their 20s because their testosterone levels are already high enough as it is, but that's an effect. In the absence of light, our bodies are going to elevate melatonin. So this is why it's very important for people to sleep in a room in the absence of light, so they can optimize their melatonin levels. And so when we look at how we were created, there is this incredible interface between the physical world and the spiritual world.

And that intersection occurs right at the cell nucleus and right at the very center of the DNA. So when we look at how the DNA is structured, it's held together by hydrogen bonds. So there is on one strand of DNA, you have you have hydrogen atoms and on the other strand you have hydrogen atoms and when the DNA, when these strands come together the hydrogen atoms counter-rotate and this holds the DNA together.

Well what's not very well known is that this is a very special structure because coherent light comes out of the vacuum and enters into the cells, and the light is coherent in the sense that it is just the same as laser light. And so you have these highly coherent pulses of light that initiate thousands of different biochemical reactions in the cell. This is called signal induction and signal transduction, communications inside and outside the cell.

So it's really the spiritual domain that is responsible for initiating the release of light into our cells that guides the chemical reactions within the cell, which ultimately leads to the expression of our health. And this is one of many reasons why spiritual healing is the most powerful healing of all, then emotional healing and then physical healing. So the reason why LifeWave works so well and so quickly is that we're tapping into this very basic mechanism of how the cells communicate within them and in their environment, and we're doing it with light because that's how we were created, to communicate with light.

Ashley James (0:44:06.719)

So, to say that simply, although we cannot see it because we cannot see the full spectrum of light, we can only see a narrow band, right? There's a lot of light we can't see on either side of that spectrum. Our body, our cells are emitting light, our body is emitting light, and your wearable technology refracts that light back to us? Or you're just talking about the method of action first? You're talking about how the body is emitting light, and then we're going to get into how your technology uses that light. But isn't it cool just to sit and contemplate for a moment that if we could see the full spectrum of light, we would just be light beings walking around. It would almost be like seeing angels, just like, we're just like emanating light. Isn't that neat? We wouldn't see race, we wouldn't see where someone's socioeconomic status, we would just be walking around like these beautiful beings of light.

This hit me a few days ago. I was just driving to park at Trader Joe's and I just was struck. I saw a bunch of people walking in their cars, walking in Trader Joe's, like walking their dogs and I felt like God said something to me. I love everyone. Look through my eyes. And I just started crying. Because I'm like if we could just for one moment look at complete strangers, look at people who are Democrats, look at people who are Republicans, look at people who are Russians and Ukrainians, just like anyone, anyone from anywhere, and look at them through the eyes of like this pure love as if you were their parent, as if you love them like they're your own children, and that's the vision God has. And what was rushing through my brain was all this scripture of the gospel. How interesting and how cool is that?

We've been taught for thousands of years to like love each other, especially your enemies, but just see them through that lens of love. And if we could just for a moment, see the light that's emitted from each person. And in Indian faith, they say, Namaste, which I think has been told to me that it means, I see the light that's in you that's also within me. And so just that idea that we are all emitting light, we're all beings of light. We can't see it, but we can measure it with different machines, which I'm sure you've done.

David Schmidt (0:46:29.639)

Yes, and that's really beautiful the way that you've expressed that. I think the other thing that I would say is, especially with everything that's going on in the world, to be talking about loving others in a true sense, even those people we may not necessarily like, it's great for society and it's really great for ourselves.

What studies have shown is that when people live in a state of anger, no surprise that this causes very harmful effects for the adrenal glands for the entire endocrine system, and it leads to acute then chronic elevated levels of oxidative and inflammatory stress.

So in other words, people that choose to live in a state of anger or a state of confrontation, will see their health diminish more rapidly and they will suffer the consequences of aging more rapidly. And this may actually in turn out to be an interesting mechanism that nature has from the perspective of natural selection. In other words, people that choose to live in a state of anger will not be around very long.

Disease will end up catching up with them. Whereas when people live in a state of love, it's the exact opposite. So you're a mom and when you gave birth, you had a massive release of oxytocin and this allows a mother and child to bond with one another. That's one of the things that this does. But if we have a lifestyle of loving others, the data is extraordinary, because what it shows is that whether or not we're 60, 70, 80 years old, the oxytocin will regenerate muscle fibers and the muscle fibers now resemble someone in their 20s or 30s.

So this is showing number one, we should be living in a state of love. And number two, something that I think we'll talk about later, which is our primary area of research, is that there are real biological ways to both stop and reverse human aging. And all we have to do is look at God's creation to see examples and then convert those examples to technology that human beings can implement. But your message from my perspective, spot on.

Ashley James (0:49:30.056)

I had mentioned earlier that I have examples of this is not a placebo effect because my clients and I have put your wearable technology on crying infants that are teething. Within four minutes they're sleeping. They stop crying within a minute and they fall asleep because they're out of pain. And there's thermography. I know several people who've done thermography that showed within minutes of wearing them that you could see significantly lower levels of inflammation in the body, which is just so cool. It's so cool that you could wear something, just put this little patch on and boom, it's utilizing your own healing mechanism.

I have a client, a dear friend of mine who's a client for 12 years. She is bedridden. The doctors thought she would die years ago, but she's a fighter and also believes in holistic medicine and her service dog could not jump up onto the bed anymore because he would help her adjust her pillows because she's been bedridden. And he had like a hip dysplasia, lots of pain. He wouldn't bite you, but he'd growl if you tried to touch his rear end. And we put a patch on his hips and two minutes later you could touch his leg. He stopped growling and because he wore it every day, during the day, within two weeks, he could jump back up on the bed. And that has been several months. He has been fully recovered. All his caretakers, because they have volunteers that walk him, say he's like a new dog.

But this is just two of dozens of stories I have where with animals, I have a client with horses. The horses, like immediately there was a shift in them and they were out of pain. I have another client who had a dog who he spent $7,000 on this puppy. The vet said, it's just failure to thrive. This puppy's going to die. I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do. 7,000 with the vet bill. And we put the patches on him, and less than three days later, he was fully recovered. But we just have so many wonderful stories where we see it. If it works on children and it works on animals, that's a really strong indication that it's not a placebo effect because this animal doesn't know, or this baby doesn't know, all of a sudden have no pain and go to sleep from wearing it. So it's just so cool. And what I love is that your technology helps in the short term with that pain and inflammation, but then it stimulates the body's ability to heal itself in the long term. So we're seeing this reversal of so many issues.

Before we jump into that topic of stopping and reversing human aging, can you tell us what happens when you apply a patch? Now that we know our body emits light, what happens when we wear your technology?

David Schmidt (0:52:29.298)

Yes, fantastic question. So we've kind of taken a long way to get there, but it was a lot of important background information. So you take a patch and you apply it to the skin and the patch is activated by body heat. And that was a very important criteria when I was designing these, because active electronic devices like lamps and cold lasers, they require a power source. They're big and bulky. They're not convenient. And this had to be something much, much simpler.

So the patches use the human body as a power source, and they're activated by body heat. The patches are completely sealed, and they contain only natural materials, stereoisomers of amino acids and sugars are two of the principal ingredients. Once they're activated by body heat, the patches will start to reflect a blend of different wavelengths of light that stimulate the skin. And this induces an effect called photobiomodulation. And that simply means that what we're doing is causing a very favorable change in the biochemistry of the cell.

So, if we used X39 as an example, you apply the patch, it stimulates the skin with light, and then that light will increase the energy production in the cell. That'll be kind of the first step. And if you wanted to get into the details about that, we could. The next thing that happens is you get some very favorable changes in gene expression. And in our blood and urine studies, what we found is that there is an increase in the production of something called GHKCU, which is a copper peptide. It's very, very powerful at helping the cells behave like younger cells. In our urine studies, we see upregulation of different amino acids that are associated with muscle protein synthesis and sleep.

So, in your example, and you're saying you go to the gym and you work out and you notice you recover more quickly, that's exactly what's happening. The metabolism of the cell has improved. So you can build muscle, strengthen stamina much more quickly with this technology and do it naturally and do it without any type of drugs.

Ashley James (0:55:14.219)

And I've experienced that firsthand. So I can tell you, it's pretty amazing. I'm actually wearing my two favorite patches right now, which is Aeon and X39. I know because of the FDA's new regulations around talking about stem cells, we're not really allowed to talk about it, but can you talk about the studies around it? I don't want to ask you to say something you're not allowed to say, but there's so much proven science here.

David Schmidt (0:55:41.555)

Yes, I mean, what I would do is talk about the years of research that we did in stem cells. I mean, that's completely fair game. So what happened with this was we had gone through two different evolutions in the company, two different generations. The first one was the release of the energy patches, and what soon followed about a year later, were the release of Ice Wave and Silent Nights. So I think we would be properly described as a lifestyle company.

Products that can improve energy, relieve pain, improve the quality of sleep, and that was all fine. We did great during our first few years. But very quickly after that, starting in about 2006, I started to develop products that could produce anti-aging effects. And since I've been in my teens, I have been very, very interested in finding ways to slow or reverse human aging. And this led to the development of the glutathione patch, the carnosine patch, and then the Aeon patch.

So that trio, which was released between 2006 and 2011 helped to reshape who we were as a company and the way that our products were used and also it started to create a very, very interesting path for us because I started thinking about, okay, if we can get these very dramatic anti-aging effects from these products, what's next? And where would we want to be in 10 years?

So it was at that point in the late 2000s that I started thinking about stem cells. And back then, it was evident to me that stem cells were going to be the future. Of course, we see it very, very clearly today. But back then, I already wanted to start investing money into stem cell technology and see if we could do it in a way that would be different than the way everybody else was doing it. So during that time, what people of course were doing were looking at umbilical cord stem cells, stem cells that you would harvest from body fat from bone marrow, and this was all about injecting cells into the body. And that is completely fine.

And no question that let's say over the next 10, 20 years, people will be able to go to a hospital, get an injection of stem cells, and it's going to save people's lives. But I wanted to approach this subject in a very, very different way. Instead of injecting stem cells in the body, which potentially have very harmful side effects.

What if we could get the stem cells that are already in our body and get them to behave like younger, healthier cells? So this would have huge advantages. It would be safe. It would be very, very inexpensive. And the hope was that we could create something that would be at least as effective as getting an injection of stem cells.

So that was kind of the idea behind this. And I generated well over 70 patents, 80 patents now over a course of 10 years. And these patents had to do not only with light therapy but with pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. We did this work at the National University of Ireland. This is on the West Coast of Ireland and we worked at the Regenerative Medicine Institute. We were

incredibly blessed to work with Dr. Tim O'Brien, who's one of the leading stem cell scientists in the world. And we got to do a number of studies showing that you could in fact using energy duplicate the results of a stem cell injection. So we did a study where mesenchymal stem cells or MSCs were applied to an injury site. And then we used a device that was creating this proprietary electromagnetic field.

And we found that number one, the energetic treatments were equivalent to a stem cell injection, and you could speed up healing 25, 30% over baseline. So those initial experiments that we did at the university were incredibly rewarding because it did show, in fact, that there was a way that you could have energy medicine devices that could heal and support the healing process of the body, and it be equivalent to stem cell injections.

Ashley James (1:01:10.449)

And that then you took that information into creating now you have two patches. But are we allowed to talk about that? Are we allowed to say that these patches are known to stimulate our own body's own stem cell production?

David Schmidt (1:01:28.098)

Well, unfortunately, at the end of last year, the FDA, they changed their position on this. We're regulated as a general wellness device. And so as a result, we can talk about the athletic benefits of the product, how it improves recovery, strength, stamina, how it supports sleep, how it will improve the flow of energy in the body. We can talk about these kind of things.

But what we've done since then is we've developed nutritional supplements and these nutritional supplements, we have information on our website about this, we'll co-market them with the patches. And with the nutritional supplements, they're designed to support the health and vitality of the stem cells in the body.

Ashley James (1:02:21.563)

See, this makes total sense and I'm so glad that you developed these supplements. I've looked at the ingredients and this isn't something that is going to replace all the supplements that someone takes because someone's like, oh, well, I'm already taking really good supplements so I don't need to take this, no, no, no, the LifeWave supplements that are coming out, you're going to want to try. I've looked into them. A few years ago, I had a doctor come on my show who's a stem cell doctor. That's all he does. He injects stem cells into the knees and hips all day long.

And I said to him, okay, so stem cells, not a lot of people know what stem cells are. They're like these blank slate cells, they're just a nondescript cell. And when it comes into that area, let's say the hip cartilage, it's going to help become healthy new hip cartilage. It will become what is needed in that area. And I said to him, if someone has degenerative arthritis because it's a nutrient deficiency, right? Unless this person's like some ultra marathon runner and has put too much load or too much stress onto their body because we're always under stress and to some degree, right, we're walking around and we're always trying to consume more nutrition to rebuild our body, right? We're breaking down and building up. And so people who have arthritis, what they don't know because your medical doctor's not properly trained in this, they're trained in prescribing drugs, they're not trained in teaching us how to help our body heal itself, that it's a degenerative disease because we were breaking down more than we were building up because we did not have the nutrients to build ourselves up. And so that's why there can be a 90-year-old with no arthritis standing beside a 40-year-old with arthritis, and it really is a nutrient problem.

LifeWave phototherapy patches is something I tell all my clients. This isn't a replacement for nutrition because it doesn't add nutrients. It's not molecular medicine. It's energetic. It's a frequency which has an effect because of photobiomodulation on the physical changes in the body and in the cell. So we do see physical effects, but it's not adding more glutathione to your body. It's asking your body to make produce more glutathione.

So we still need to give the body the raw building blocks. Like it'd be like asking a carpenter to build a house, but sorry, I'm not giving you any bricks, right? So what's this carpenter going to do? Like the body wants to rebuild every day, but if we don't give it the bricks, it's not going to be able to. So the fact that you've created very specific supplements that's going to be easy to take, that wil nutrify the body and give the body those raw building blocks specifically for supporting your stem cells, which then we can help to stop and reverse human aging is super exciting.

And then on top of that, use that frequency technology, that wearable technology to stimulate those outcomes further. So I can't tell you how excited I am to try the supplements. Coming from someone who's a big believer in holistic medicine and supplements, really high quality supplements changed my life, helped save my life, that and of course eating a clean diet. So I know the feeling of being fully nutrified and I know the feeling of being super depleted. And most people are walking around depleted and then self-medicating with alcohol, sugar, caffeine, because they're exhausted because they're so depleted. So I love that you're supporting us in this aspect as well.

David Schmidt (1:05:57.360)

Yes, when I was developing these supplements and I've been studying supplements for over 40 years. You mentioned your son before having allergies. That's actually how I got into nutrition. When I was about 13, I was going to a summer camp and being outside all day, I would inhale pollen and I had these terrible allergies and I had to be on medication, and I thought there has to be a natural way to deal with this instead of having these drugs and feeling tired and sleepy all the time. And that's what started me on my journey.

And then for many, many years I worked with a medical doctor, his name was Steve Halthiwanger, who's a medical doctor and clinical nutritionist. And he and I would have very, very lengthy conversations on using nutrients therapeutically to treat different types of health conditions. So it was quite an education over more than 40 years.

So when I was developing these supplements, I was looking at our line of patch products and thinking, okay, if someone wanted to use any one of our daytime products or our nighttime products, what nutrients would they need to really optimize the results and get the best results?

So the idea behind this is that you could take the daytime formula and regardless of which one of the patches you want it to use or if you wanted to use multiple patches at the same time that this one supplement was going to have all of the essential nutrients that you needed to get the best results out of the product.

So really good example is that many people decide they want to be a vegan or a vegetarian for various reasons and they are not going to get enough beta-alanine or creatine or glycine or cysteine in their diet. These are going to be nutrients which are principally associated with red meat or other meat products. So, this would be an issue because if someone wasn't getting enough cysteine, then they're not going to be able to make enough glutathione and that could compromise their immune system. And then that potentially opens them up to a number of different health disorders. So we would know, for example, that Parkinson's disease is always associated with a deficiency in glutathione.

And of course, we're not making any medical claims here. But the idea behind this is that, regardless of someone's diet, and of course we want people to have as healthy a diet as possible, they could take this supplement and it would give them the nutrients that they would need to get the best results with the patches. And of course, that is going to provide a very efficacious response, and they'll really notice this in their overall health.

Ashley James (1:09:11.805)

Now, these supplements haven't been released yet, but they're coming out soon. Do you have any studies to share about the supplements that you're coming out with?

David Schmidt (1:09:21.508)

Yes, those are things that we have in development. We wanted to let people know at the beginning of the year that this was something that was coming and it was a direction that we were going in. And so we of course, we formulated these, we have samples, we've gotten them into the stage where they're the finished product. And yes, we're putting them through all the tests that we normally would. I mean, basically what we'll do is we have a few researchers where we do our blood tests, our urine tests, and then other measures of, let's say, athletic performance. We'll look at measures of strength, stamina, grip strength, flexibility. So those are the type of tests that we would normally do.

Ashley James (1:10:05.666)

How many studies have there been in the last 20 years that have been published on LifeWave’s technology? Last I heard it was close to 100 studies.

David Schmidt (1:10:17.796)

It’s over 80. I haven't taken a look recently, but it’s uncounted them, but they're way over 80 studies. Not all of them are published but many of them are. And those studies are on all of our products.

And then for each individual product, we use different methodologies. Some products will do the blood and urine testing, such as with X39. Other products we will do infrared testing, especially with IceWave and Aeon. And then we'll use a variety of different bioelectrical tests. So with IceWave, with Energy, we've used heart rate variability tests.

We've used electro-interstitial scanning to look at organ function with Aeon Glutathione Energy patches and Electro-accuscopes to look at knee pain before and after with IceWave. So we've used a very broad array different types of diagnostics to quantify the effects that people see with the patches.

Ashley James (1:11:35.214)

So the skeptic in me and in the listeners is like, well, you own the company, but you're also doing the studies, so how do you tell the truth? I've read the studies and I've seen that. I think I've even heard you talk about it, where the scientists involved in the labs sign a contract that says, I am not being paid to give some faulty information.

Everything that's provided here is real results. And even if the results were negative, these are the results. But I'd love for you to share from that standpoint, because I think it's important that companies do invest. And it's quite a lot of money to invest in studies. And I love that you do it. And I wish that all companies invested in studies about their products, but then also how do we keep it third party or how do we keep it authentic?

Because through the years I've heard, oh, the sugar industry or some kind of Snickers bar or Mars bar or whatever was behind the study that says that it's healthy to eat a spoonful of sugar a day. And you're like, oh, really? It's like funded by. It's healthy to drink chocolate milk, funded by Kellogg's. And you're like, oh, really? There's Nestle, Nesquik or something, of course you're saying that.

So, of course, a company would say, here's all the positive studies. But but you actually have genuine results. But can you talk a bit about that to clarify for those who are a little skeptical about companies that produce their own studies?

David Schmidt (1:13:11.114)

Yes, first, this is a fantastic question. So thank you so much for bringing this up because it's such an important subject. There's an interesting phenomena in this world, and that is in order for a company to go to market with a health product, you have to be able to demonstrate to a Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, that you have proof that your product does what you say.

So you have a product and then, there's two components to this. First, how are you going to be regulated by the FDA, and in our case we're General Wellness, and then how are you going to advertise your product? What are you going to tell people? And are the claims going to be legitimate or are they going to be false and misleading?

So the FTC has a requirement that you have to have, and this has changed over the years, but the current standard is that you have to have double-blind placebo-controlled study for a product that will support the product usage and the safety and the efficacy and the claims. Now, if you do pilot studies like we do, so in other words, we'll do a pilot study to make sure that the protocol that we have for a study works before we go to our double-blinds, the FTC will accept the pilot study as part of the overall evidence.

But they want to see these double-blind placebo-controlled studies. So the immediate dilemma that a company is in is that in order to take your product to market, you legally have to have these studies. So you have to pay a third-party lab to do it. So this is a very standard practice. So for example, let's say that you had Estee Lauder or L'Oreal or any cosmetic company, and they want to come out with a new type of eye cream, well, they have to hire a laboratory to do a study. So they'll, like Estee Lauder, they've used a company called BioScreen in the past. And they'll hire BioScreen, and they'll pay them to do the study. Now, BioScreen will, as an example of a clinical lab, will release a statement.

And they'll say, we are getting paid to do the study, but we do not receive any type of benefit from doing this. We're not shareholders in the company, we aren't distributors. So we have no type of financial interest in the business, therefore we can conduct this study as a third party and present the results.

And this is the standard practice in the industry, and it is very well accepted by the FTC. So no company can rely on, let's say, a university to do a study for them, because it's simply too expensive, and you'd never get things to market. I would also say the drug companies follow similar standards. In other words, they want to take a drug to market either they have to do the research or they have to pay a third-party lab to do it, but somebody is funding those studies.

So these are the standards that companies have to live by and it's up to the companies and the labs to ensure that there is nothing nefarious happening and the results that are being presented are true and accurate.

It's also up to the consumer to decide. So for example, in some studies, you could have a company make a claim about the study which is true, but it's not really representative of the actual results that people will experience which is really against the FTC. So as an example, we were told that the COVID vaccines, the mRNA vaccines were safe and effective. Well, Moderna released this past week that the mRNA vaccines have toxic side effects. So let's say that they did a study and one person out of a hundred didn't have a side effect.

They could say, well, if you use the product, you may not have any side effects. And that'd be a true statement because one out of 100 people didn't, but it wouldn't be representative statistically. So you'll see in our studies, which are located in the back office of our website, that you can see the statistics and it'll say, okay, 86% of the people got this benefit.

Ashley James (1:18:28.290)

Love it. For the comment you just made, if it was just a year ago, YouTube would have taken this interview down. I think we're in the clear now, but for a few years, anytime I interviewed someone about anything to do with the COVID vaccines or COVID in general, YouTube was censoring me, censoring my interviews with highly trained doctors. I had one doctor, Dr. Fleming, I think multiple PhD research scientist, just a top of his field. And YouTube takes it down saying, this is incorrect and you're spreading false information. I'm like, are you kidding me? So yes, it's interesting times we live in. And now we get to look back and see what these pharmaceutical companies are saying now about the products that they said are safe. And actually I did a whole interview with an expert in the pharmaceutical industry on how they skipped the safety trials necessary to prove it was safe and then fudged the numbers. Of course that interview was also banned from YouTube.

David Schmidt (1:19:49.244)

Oh, it's ludicrous. The study for the booster, you might recall, I believe they did it on like eight or 13 mice. So before they released the booster, they didn't even do a study on human beings. They did it on mice. And then they said, okay, this is going to be fine. And it's just complete nonsense. And now today we know that the pharma was less than truthful.

Ashley James (1:20:16.120)

Right. And then to say to parents, to shame them, like, you're killing grandmas by not giving your six year old this untested, but it's safe just take our word for it. And it's just really sad. It's very sad and wrong. And this is why we need to critically think for ourselves and just don't blindly trust anything. Don't blindly trust me. Don't blindly trust anyone. Just look into things deeper for yourself, and put politics aside, put self-judgment aside, put your belief system to the side, question your own belief system, I think is the healthiest thing to do.

And that's why I come into everything a bit skeptical but open-minded enough to take on new information and not let my bias sway my judgment. So that's why it took me a little bit longer to come to trying LifeWave because at first I was too skeptical and then I caught myself and like, wait a second, I'm not even following my own rules here.

The very first day I wore your patches was such a phenomenal experience. It was so powerful and it kind of feels divinely guided because, so I lost my daughter a few years ago and I was having PTSD and I'm normally a very cheerful, happy person, but it took me a while to recognize that I was suffering from PTSD and I'd have these PTSD attacks. And the day my patches arrived in the mail, I was in an attack.

And my husband got on the phone with Trina, who was a practitioner that I interviewed about the patches. And he said, okay, what patches do I put on her? What do we do? And he put patches on me the way she has now taught me to do with my clients. And we have such great success with this protocol. It felt like someone reached into my brain and turned the knob down from 11 to like two.

I felt instantly grounded back in the room. I could tolerate light, I could tolerate noise, I could tolerate my family being around me, whereas before I just wanted to be in a dark room. And my whole nervous system came back into balance very quickly. And I was just so stunned that I had this phenomenally positive emotional experience, but also feeling my physiology come out of a fight or flight response and come back into rest and digest in that moment. And I was like, I could not believe it.

Now, not everyone has this like giant life altering, earth shaking experience, the moment they put a patch on. But I've had other situations where like I have a client who's a type one diabetic and he has peripheral neuropathy, can't feel his feet and within minutes of wearing the same protocol actually that I was wearing, he started screaming like, my feet are hot, I can feel my feet, I can feel temperature in my feet. And he was just so excited. And we've had other experiences where within minutes, people start feeling sensations or feeling a shift. And sometimes it takes a while. Like I have a client, she patched for a whole month, swore she didn't feel anything, but then she went from being suicidal, depressed, not wanting to leave the house, to going out every day and loving life and making new friends. And just that huge shift in her sleep, in her energy, in her mood through that first month of patching, although she said she didn't feel anything wearing them, we started to see results in her life. So I just thought that was really neat.

So there's a lot of studies and we obviously don't have enough time to go over all 80 studies, although you have webinars that unpack many of these studies. Do you have a study that's like your favorite or do you have kind of like your top three that you would like to share?

David Schmidt (1:23:58.269)

Yes, so I think what I'd say is that when we do our studies on a new product, the first study that we do that validates that the product works is always going to be my favorite. And in this particular case, because it meant such an incredible thing to our business, that would be the first blood study that we did on X39.

So it had taken months to work with a laboratory in Southern California and San Diego to develop the protocols for the blood testing. So we originally started with a lab in Northern California and then another lab in Southern California. And we had went back to Dr. Lauren Picart, who was the individual that discovered copper peptide and asked him for the protocols that he was using and the standards for the blood testing. And that was very helpful, but it really didn't provide all the information that we needed. But fortunately, we worked with a very talented PhD in biochemistry. We eventually developed this protocol. We set up a pilot study, and we did in fact find that within the first 24 hours of applying the X39 patch to the body, that there was a statistically significant improvement in both GHK and GHK-CU. We then went on to do several other studies.

We did one that was published in Internal Medicine Research. And In this study, it was a double-blind placebo-controlled study with X39. We used 60 people over the age of 40. And again, we found out that just within the first 24 hours and then within the first week of using X39 that we saw statistically significant improvements in levels of GHK and GHK-CU. So those studies are probably by far my favorite, because it showed that we could use light to elevate this peptide, and this peptide gives us a path to human age reversal. In other words, GHK is going to be a very powerful way to regulate and reset genes in the body.

And if we can use light to elevate this peptide, then there should be a way that we can find that we can reset other genes to a more youthful state and slow down or even reverse human aging. So I've spent the last five, six years working on that now.

Ashley James (1:27:13.555)

I'm in a secret Facebook group with my team, very intimate group of about 56, 57,000 people. And it's so intimate. Actually, it's one of my favorite places to be online. It was created by this amazing woman, Joyce, in my team of practitioners that are working with LifeWave Full Therapy patches with their clients.

And there's thousands of practitioners in this group. There's well over 6,000 practitioners, and their clients, and patients, and friends and family. And in order to get into this group, you have to be a client, basically, or a customer of myself, or one of the other practitioners in this group. So anyone who's listening, if you haven't already purchased LifeWave from someone else, and you would like to get in this group, please contact me. Go to learntruehealth.com, and in the menu, select Work with Ashley James. Sign up for the free conversation about the phototherapy patches.

So in this group, we have many of us sharing our experiences and there's a lot of personal testimonials and before and after photos and there are countless, you can scroll for well over half an hour reading about the age reversal and in photos you can see it many men and women just as an example who had bald spots, who after using the X39 patch for about a year, no longer have bald spots. They've grown back hair, a full head of hair. And I was really impressed to see men with bald spots no longer have bald spots, but even the women who had really thinning hair now have a full head of hair. And then several women have taken pictures of their roots growing back in the normal colour they were born with, like the colour they had in their teenage years because their hairs turned grey or, they have some grey hairs and those grey hairs are going away. And I thought, how cool is that? That the literally age reversing. But we have other great testimonials about people no longer having arthritis pain and just tremendous pictures you can see before and afters of like wounds healing quickly, surgery scars healing super fast, even scars going away.

I have a scar from an auto accident on my forehead that is just disappearing and I've had it since I was like three. So it's interesting to see on the outside because the body does triage work. So the body does all this internal healing first and then it works on hair, skin and nails.

So when people start saying, wow, my nails are growing really thick and strong and my hair is coming in really thick and my skin looks younger and it's tighter, my skin's firmer and the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles is going away, like all this vein stuff. But for me, even though we're talking about vanity here, but when we look younger on the outside and we're also feeling younger, we know that there's stuff happening on the inside because the body does the triage work first on the inside, on the organs that matter.

David Schmidt (1:30:18.181)

That's absolutely correct. And the type of things that we look at in our research would be not for vanity, but they ended up having a number of beneficial effects on appearance. So for example, collagen is of course the most abundant protein in the body, and it forms what's called the cytoskeleton. And most people aren't familiar with this term, but it would simply be the structural protein that holds together the cell. And the fibroblasts are what produce collagen. And the issue is that as we age, and it starts at about age 25, I'm sorry to say, for humanity, is that our bodies start to slow down the production of collagen. So you could say we really start aging at age 25.

And an incredibly important mechanism that should not be overlooked is finding natural ways to turn on the fibroblasts, increase collagen production, and what this will do is volumize, increase the size of the cell. This will increase the electrical charge on the cell membrane, and this ultimately has an effect on gene expression.

So in some of this is going to be maybe a little bit mind blowing or maybe it won't be, but we have new technology that I invented now that's capable of doing this and reversing aging by about two to three years in only ten minutes. And we're able to use light in an entirely new way now to turn on systems in the cell that make this possible.

Ashley James (1:32:12.857)

So when does that technology get released?

David Schmidt (1:32:15.733)

Well, Ashley, it is our 20th anniversary, and I feel a responsibility to our wonderful brand partners that have been there all these years to support the health and growth of the business, to do something extraordinary. So I would say that a little bit later this year, we're going to be releasing this new technology and having a very nice celebration of.

Ashley James (1:32:47.739)

I am super excited. I did hear wind of this a few months ago when you started talking about it. And I am very excited. I just geek out on this. Like we're tapping into it. It's like we're pushing this invisible buttons in the body, like asking the body to express in a way that is healthier, younger, and it's just so cool. It's just super neat.

One of my favourite studies, and maybe if you, I mean, obviously so many of your own studies, but the, could you speak to the study they did when in South Africa with the glutathione patch on 40 autistic children?

David Schmidt (1:33:32.945)

Well, that was not a study that we sponsored. And we don't make claims about treating or curing any type of disease. What I will say is that over the years, we've had people, parents, use the glutathione patch on their kids and report to us that their autistic children are much more calm.

They notice a significant improve in their mood, in their mental clarity, and of course, an improvement, overall improvement in their health. And what I would recommend, I once had an opportunity to meet Jenny McCarthy, she had worked to help her special needs child. And what I'd recommend is that a parent work with a natural health practitioner and build up the child's health from the ground up.

So that means constructing a program of eating foods that are going to be healthy, non-GMO, trying to keep the chemicals out of the body, and then supplementing as needed and then using the technology like the patches. And it is remarkable, really remarkable, how many benefits an autistic child can get from taking a natural approach. They don't have to be the victims of being on pharmaceuticals their entire lives. They can make a meaningful turnaround and of course the sooner that a child starts the better.

Ashley James (1:35:26.081)

Absolutely. Well, I'm excited. I've been seeing the results in my own son and it's super interesting. Like the other day we were working on a science project. Together we were doing a project on Mount St. Helens and he was building, like with a 3D model that he printed, was building a way for it to emit steam. So we had this little circuit board with a vibration plate and and it emits steam out of Mount St. Helens. It looks so cool, yes. And he was getting frustrated, as we do, when things aren't going our way and we're trying to get the electronics to work, and he would start getting frustrated. And so we put two patches on him that are as a protocol that we've seen work for calming the nervous system and increasing focus.

And my husband, he ran to the patches, actually put it on all of us, because, as parents, we need to calm down too, right? And so all three of us put those patches on and we all noticed for the rest of the evening, we all felt calmer and we felt focused and he, our son got his project completed, without letting frustration take hold. And it was super interesting to watch because we both looked at him when he was on the couch working on his project. And it's like his whole demeanor changed within minutes of putting the patches on. He went from being kind of distracted and frustrated to being super focused and happy and calm. And that's how I feel every day using them.

It's so wild. I'm a big Star Trek, sci-fi geek, and you are like, bringing Star Trek into my life, bringing this type of technology into our lives just is so cool. I have all these wonderful questions from my team, but before we jump into them, I wanted to make sure that we completed our conversations around stopping and reversing human aging. Was there anything else you wanted to say on about that?

David Schmidt (1:37:30.105)

Oh, well, I would say, there's probably a couple hours worth of content on that. But I think what I would say, just maybe as a teaser, and then I'd be happy to talk to you about it in full another time is remarkably, the answers to many of these questions come straight from the Bible. And I didn't find this out until studying species that don't age, that there was a numerical code in living organisms, that were not aging, and that this numerical code was also in the Bible.

And that would require quite a lengthy conversation, which I'm not really ready to talk about because I want to release that a little bit later in the year. But what I would say is, not to be a complete tease, when I started looking at the story of Adam and Eve and the tree of life, and then converting the story from English over to the original Hebrew and then converting Hebrew over into numbers. So of course Hebrew and Greek will convert over into numerical counterparts that remarkably in the story of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life, those numerical sequences convert into numbers, which convert over into numbers which convert over to frequencies and wavelengths of light. And those wavelengths of light are the wavelengths that we use to turn on mitochondrial function that alters gene expression back to a more youthful state. So what this is to say is that in the book of Genesis, in the story of creation, there is a mathematical code there instructing us on how to reverse aging.

Ashley James (1:39:42.006)

Oh, my mind is blown. Oh, that's so cool. I can't wait to hear your discussion further on this when you decide to unpack it completely. But what a great teaser.

David Schmidt (1:39:55.307)

Yes, I'm going to release that information in full. And it's not something that I want to have it stay hidden, but it requires quite a bit of time to go through it and show the mathematical proof. But I am going to do that later this year, because to me, it's one of the most important messages that people can hear is that God is real. God did in fact created the universe, created all things, and left his signature in living organisms. And that information on how to extrapolate that, that diagnostic equipment has not been available only for maybe about the past 20 years or so. And so that meaning the author of the Bible could not possibly know what these frequencies were, yet they were embedded into the Bible because the Bible's the true inspired word of God. So it's critically important that people get this information.

Ashley James (1:41:06.443)

I feel honored to be just a small part of helping spread this information. It's so neat to be part of this. I'm so excited. I'm moved to tears. This is very exciting. Well, just the fact that I've had so many clients thank me and thank you for changing their lives, for helping them in such significant ways improve their health, both mentally, emotionally and physically improve their health and end their suffering. So many of them. And then in our very intimate, small secret group of 56, almost 57,000 people, every day people are saying that their suffering has ended because of what you've created. And then they share their story and they share how they did it with your technology. It's just so exciting. Tell me how much time do you have currently? Can we jump into the questions?

David Schmidt (1:42:07.254)

Yes, sure, let's go ahead.

Ashley James (1:42:09.788)

Okay, cool. Awesome. Joyce asks, if you know Joyce. Ask him about the different electrical potentials in each patch. Which one has the highest electrical potential?

David Schmidt (1:42:20.785)

Well, it doesn't work that way exactly. It's a really interesting question. So the patches are going to stimulate the skin with different wavelengths of light, and then the patch will induce an increase in energy production in the cell. And we did these studies looking at electrical potential back many, many years ago now. I'm going to say, let's say circa 2010, 2012. And at that time, what we found was that interestingly, the SP6 patch produced the highest increase in electrical charge in the cell.

Now, I don't think we would say that today. I'm pretty certain that it would be X39 that would induce the most powerful electrical change in the cell. And I'm only basing that based on the blood and urine work that we've done and how broad the effects of X39 are. But we haven't compared X39 to SP6 in that regard, but my money would be on X39.

Ashley James (1:43:44.997)

Both of them within seconds of applying, I've had myself personally, my family and my clients have incredible results, but very different. There's two very different patches. SP6, I've seen take a cat out of heat within a minute of applying it, completely out of heat. It was so cool. It was one of my clients' cats. And several clients stop hot flashes immediately.

I do have one client though who's upset at you because she was menopausal and did not have a period for a long time and now her cycle is back. And I said, that's a good thing, your body is reversing its age. And she's like, I thought I was done with this and now I'm back to having a period. I'm like, your body thinks it's younger. This is a good thing. And there's proof that the longer we're fertile, the longer we have longevity and health and good bone health and all around. So super interesting that a phototherapy patch could take a woman out of menopause and give her fertility again.

Kristen says, any major contraindications to patching other than organ transplant?

David Schmidt (1:44:53.875)

What I would say is that what we're legally obligated to say is that if anyone has a serious health condition, they need to speak with their practitioner before using the patches. As a practical matter, identifying organ transplants as a problem, that would be quite accurate. Another thing I would be concerned about is people going through chemotherapy. And most oncologists, they do not want their patients taking any type of antioxidants. So glutathione would be something they definitely don't want their patients to be taking. And what they believe is that the glutathione is going to protect the cancer cells from the chemo. I don't think that's really necessarily true. I've certainly met many medical doctors that are using glutathione therapeutically in by IV in treating cancer patients.

Matter of fact, I met a medical doctor once from Mexico using garlic extract, which contains germanium sesquioxide along with glutathione, and he claimed to have about an 85 percent success rate at putting people into remission. But in any case, if someone is going through radiation treatment or chemotherapy, they should speak with their oncologist. What I would say they could think about as a protocol is using the patches post chemotherapy to help detoxify the body and support the health of the immune system. But there's certainly many more elegant ways to do that.

Dr. Frank Schallenberger, who's a medical doctor and probably the world's authority on ozone therapy, has a program for using low dose chemo, the minimum that would be legally required, along with natural therapies like ozone, IV vitamin C, melatonin, and megadosing as cancer therapy.

Ashley James (1:47:13.481)

I so agree with you that if someone's facing cancer, the success rates are higher often focusing on natural medicine or integrative medicine and not the traditional cut burn and poison that we're seeing just does not have great outcomes, especially when they fudge the numbers and their version of survival rate is giving you five years. Whereas we want you to have longevity for the rest of your life. We want you to have health for the rest of your life and a very long life at that.

Lisa asks, can you wear too many patches to the point of where you're wasting them?

David Schmidt (1:47:54.163)

I would say there is a point of diminishing returns, but it depends on which product we're talking about. So I would say the majority of the time, one patch is enough. When we do our studies, the studies are based on use of a single patch and not double patching. The one or two products that would be exceptions, that we know of, would be glutathione and ice wave.

So while we've done studies just using single patches, what I can tell you from patching thousands of people, that there are certain cases, let's say that if a person is in pain, where applying one set of ice wave on the bottom of the feet and then another set of patches on the upper torso, could be the lower back, could be the shoulders, depends on where the pain is, that would be much more effective than just applying a single set of IceWave. So this would be someone that had chronic pain throughout their body. Two sets of IceWave more effective than one set.

I've also had enormous success when working with people when using multiple glutathione patches, but that would be for very specific situations.

Ashley James (1:49:21.245)

Got it. I've used multiple Aeons around the specific parts of the head, we call the brain balancer protocol. And it is what I had a concussion I accidentally got kicked in the head of full force. It was last summer, it was pretty wild. My son does taekwondo and he didn't realize that I was there and he was practicing a kick and well anyways like I took it to the face of full force.

Because my nose was blowing up, I just got hit by a boxer. I put a carnazine on my nose and immediately stopped the throbbing and brought down the inflammation, which was so cool. For me, it's like the first aid patch. Put it over anything with like tendonitis or anything with like inflammation. So I put it on my nose and then the Aeons, which I put on specific points around the head, I slept with that.

And the next day I woke up and my concussion was completely gone. I was back to normal. And it was just the coolest thing. But I've seen this in other people in our very intimate secret Facebook group of 57,000 people. We have several people who have recovered fully from concussion, even post concussion syndrome. They've shared their experiences. Again, not making medical claims, but they've shared their experiences, no longer having the symptoms of concussion after using specific patches.

Now you said you don't need more than one patch and what you were referring to is that one type of patch but if someone were to wear a few types of patches, like you can wear an Aeon and a glutathione and an x39 at the same time and that's fine right?

David Schmidt (1:51:03.800)

Yes, we haven't had any issues with that. So for example, on a regular basis, my typical protocol would be X39 on the back of the neck, X49 below the belly button, and then a set of energy patches.

Ashley James (1:51:24.336)

Nice. Love it. Sherry says to piggyback on Lisa's question, if someone wears several patches at once, can they feel sensations of overstimulation? Like if they decide to wear 20 patches, is there a point where it's not a great experience if you put too many patches on?

David Schmidt (1:51:44.812)

Well, you could have someone that let's you had someone that was a heavy smoker. If you applied even one glutathione patch, they may go through a rapid detox. And then you would just remove the patch, drink plenty of water and it's fine. So a rapid detox might be like a headache or fatigue. Other than that, yes, I would say that could be one of the effects of using too many patches, would be a rapid detox.

Ashley James (1:52:22.884)

Got it. Out of 160 clients, I've only had two situations where they decided to put on quote unquote, “too many patches”. And they kind of just felt out of it. And then I said, okay, well take some off. And they said, okay. And then they're like, oh, I feel better. I feel fine again. So sometimes people like to do, and I'm guilty of this, if a little is good, then more is better. And the good news is there's no damage, it just not like drugs that have a negative effect on you that last a long time. If you don't feel well, like you said, you're having detox symptoms, then just take the patch off, drink some water and you'll feel fine.

Let's see here. Lisa's friend asks, where does he feel the body receives the light energy the best and why?

David Schmidt (1:53:13.693)

So this happens in the cell, and this would not be an opinion, this is based on clinical studies. It starts in the electron transport chain. And interestingly, this happens with a copper-based compound called cytochrome c-oxidase. So cytochrome c-oxidase is a chromophore and it is light sensitive. So what's been shown, is that there are certain wavelengths of light that will turn on production or activation of cytochrome c-oxidase and this is in the final stage of the electron transport chain and electron transport chain biochemically is what is going to help us turn our food over into energy. So if we upregulate cytochrome c-oxidase then what in turn happens is we increase energy production in the mitochondria and then the result of that is a number of things but very importantly we can make more hormones, we can increase proteinsynthesis and improve the tissue conductivity so pain goes down. There's a variety of beneficial effects that occur, but basically it starts with chromophores in the body and the example of that is cytochrome c-oxidase.

Ashley James (1:54:44.346)

Love it. Lisa's friend also asked, and I just love this question, what would you say to a child to explain the patches, just explain how they work or just explain them in general?

David Schmidt (1:54:57.790)

What I would say is that our planet and our bodies depend on light. So we know that we need the sun for life on this planet, and that includes our bodies because we live in harmony with nature. So the patches work with this system. The patches use light the same way that nature does to improve our health. And of course, how it does that is more complicated, but basically the patches are stimulating the body with light and improving the flow of energy and this is completely in harmony with nature

Ashley James (1:55:42.266)

Deb asks, is it beneficial to always have patches on if they are always in different locations or does the body require a rest from them?

David Schmidt (1:55:52.328)

Body should have a rest period. And in phototherapy, this is called attenuation, where if you stimulate the body with the same wavelengths continuously, eventually the body stops responding. This would be similar to when people drink coffee every day and they keep getting a hit of caffeine and they have one cup of coffee and then all of a sudden it doesn't wake them up and now they need two cups, the body is accommodating or attenuating. And same phenomena with drugs and then the same phenomena with light. So what we found in practice is that if people went through a cycle where if they used let's say X39 during the day and then they removed it at night, they come back the next day and they still respond. But we do need to honor the natural way the body works and so that means an on cycle and an off cycle.

Ashley James (1:56:50.816)

Di has a follow-up question, which I thought was great. She said, what are the strategies we should use to avoid attenuation? For example, if we're having daytime protocols and nighttime protocols, she wants to know what's the best way to do that. Because some people want to wear, for example, X-39 during the day, and they want to wear silent nights at night. Is it okay to always have a patch on you, as long as it's in a different location? Or should you have times where there's no patches on you?

David Schmidt (1:57:18.480)

I think what I'd say is what we found in practice is that there are daytime patches and evening patches, basically. There's some exceptions to that. But let's say as a general rule, if someone used X39 during the day and SilentNights at night, there is no issue with doing that daily, and you would not want to apply them to the same spot. And this is really for the practical purpose that you don't want to irritate the skin by stimulating the same point. So X39 behind the neck or below the belly button, SilentNights on the side of the neck or the temple, and it's completely fine.

Ashley James (1:58:02.962)

Barbara asks, does wearing the energy enhancer patches raise cortisol levels?

David Schmidt (1:58:10.038)

Not that we've seen. I'd have to think back to if we've done a study with energy patches elevating cortisol, we've done an Aeon study where we measured that Aeon balanced cortisol. For most people it would be lowering cortisol, but I can't think that we've done that with the energy patches. But the mechanism of action is that energy patches are turning on beta oxidation.

So it's turning on the process by which we convert fat over into energy. So this is not at all like a stimulant. That process doesn't put any type of stress on the cell. But we've never done a study to look at cortisol with energy patches.

Ashley James (1:59:00.114)

I like that you said the word balance, because I've noticed both in myself and also with my clients with adrenal fatigue that we're feeling more balanced now, and whether that's for some people that they needed more cortisol because they were exhausted, or like they had exhausted their cortisol levels and it bring them back into a state of balance, or for others who are having too high cortisol levels, we noticed it bringing them back down because it's helping the nervous system in the body just regulate, just come back into that state of balance. So that's what I've personally felt and noticed with my clients. It would be cool to see future studies on that.

Sarah says, ask him what type of case he puts his patches in. So like, for example, I have patches upstairs in our office so that I have easy access to them upstairs. I have some in our bedroom. I have a case of patches downstairs, all the patches. Every single one in the house, upstairs and downstairs, and in my purse, but in my purse, I put them in a Faraday bag, so I can travel with them and not like accidentally activate them if the purse is close to me. So when you travel with your patches, how do you travel with them?

David Schmidt (2:00:11.348)

Yes, so I always travel with my patches. I think I would panic if I didn't have them with me. And yes, I always take them, I never put them in a checked bag. I always take them with carry-on. And then I have kind of like a separate sleeve in my travel case that they go into.

But they just stay in their sleeves that we ship them in. I haven't found that it's really been necessary to put them in anything lined with nickel or copper or anything like that. And yes, so I don't do really anything extraordinary with them other than just keep them in my travel bag. I never put them in anything where they're going to be up against my body.

Ashley James (2:00:56.224)

Right, right. And that's why because my purse is right up against my body, that's why I put them in a Faraday bag just to be on the safe side. But so far it's worked. It doesn't use up the patches to have them be that close to me when it's in the Faraday bag.

Lisa, who is one of my dear team members and an amazing holistic practitioner, she says, my husband is an overhead power lineman. Would wearing patches act as a conductor or is he safe to use them while working?

Also, I had read somewhere that X-39 can act as a Faraday cage for 4G and 5G. Could wearing them near high voltage power lines help him at all?

David Schmidt (2:01:37.842)

Well, that's interesting. Now, I would have to speculate, but what we've seen is that X39 improves the electrical potential of the cell.

And when we're talking about things like high voltage, EMFs, essentially what those things are going to do is create oxidative stress on the cell. So anything that we can do to improve the electrical integrity of the cell is going to help us resist things like 5G and electrical power lines.

Jerry Tennant has done quite a bit of research into this and he's certainly an authority on the subject. So, but yes, I would say the other side to this is I'd recommend people supplement with copper. Copper of course is what's used to create a Faraday cage and supplementing with copper orally, we know that there's a high concentration of copper in the skin.

So oral supplementation of copper and then of course elevating copper binding peptides certainly you would say has the potential to reduce the impact of things like 5G wireless power lines on the human body. it's all relative to the level of exposure. So I can't say with this specific case but if it were me I would definitely be supplementing with extra copper.

Ashley James (2:03:15.320)

Love it. And I learned a long time ago that copper should be in a 50 to 1 ratio with selenium, selenium being the 50 and the copper being 1, that they really work well together. And I also saw that those two nutrients are part of your upcoming supplements being launched, which I'm really excited about.

Di asks, I've never seen or heard this be said, but she has. She says, why is it sometimes that Alavida patch is the second most powerful.

David Schmidt (2:03:46.856)

Alavida, the design philosophy behind that, it was I was looking for a way to elevate epithalmine. And epithalmine was discovered by Vladimir Kovinson, a Russian scientist, and he has been specializing in extracting peptides, naturally occurring peptides from the human body that have anti-aging effects along with some other things, but principally anti-aging. And epithelmine is found in the pineal gland and he certainly found that it'll do a few things that it probably shouldn't talk about here.

But what we found with the olivita patch, looking in that direction, is that we could reduce oxidative and inflammatory stress. And the idea became, well, if we can protect the collagen matrix in the body from damage, we could improve the health of the skin from the inside out. And that way we could put together a system where you apply nutrients for the health of the skin and then the patch benefits the skin from the inside out. So that's how Alavida came about.

Ashley James (2:05:08.544)

I love it. Again, my husband's favorite patch. And every night when we're going to bed, we turn off the light and he goes, do you want an Alavida? And then in the dark, he reaches over and places it on my forehead. And it's so sweet the way my husband takes care of me. It's this little ritual that we've gotten into in the last year. And he never forgets to reach over and put Alavida on my forehead. It's just, it's so sweet. I know, I love it.

Now, Dai also asks, how can patches be used to support libido? I just want to give a little testimonial that your herbal spray, which is phenomenal, smells amazing, that it delivers medicinal herbs into the body and that you have information about how it does in men raised testosterone. And I want to let you know, thanks to you, my husband, after three days, just three days it took to spray this, you just spray it on your wrists and rub it and then smell it and it's absorbed into the body.

Three days of using the herbal spray, once in the morning, once at night, he was chasing me, literally chasing me around the house. So talk about increased testosterone in men, increased libido. That would be my answer to Dai's question, but if you could step in, what patch would you say supports libido?

David Schmidt (2:06:28.595)

Yes, well the patch, we don't have a patch specifically for libido. And this is getting into some claims that where we could talk about that for herbs, but not necessarily for light therapy or even for essential oils because of the FDA. But certainly, the good news here is that there's a number of herbs that for men that are getting older. They're experiencing lower sex drive lower performance.

There's any number of things that they can do to elevate nitric oxide, elevate testosterone naturally, and not have to resort to drugs. So, Tongkat Ali is certainly one herb that has been studied quite extensively and been shown to elevate luteinizing hormone, which is going to turn on testosterone. And then with nitric oxide, of course, you have amino acids like citrulline, which have been shown to be very, very effective at increasing nitric oxide. That subject of course is very broad and there's a number of very interesting ways for men to improve sexual performance naturally. But maybe leave that for another time.

Ashley James (2:07:54.031)

And you do have an herbal spray that if a listener was interested in trying that on their husband or themselves, I happen to like it. I feel calmer and happier. I'm already a calm, happy person, but I definitely noticed a shift from using the herbal spray, so I thought that was cool. But then what was really cool is my husband literally chasing me around the house. Sometimes I have to hide the spray from him because it's a little much. But how sweet is it that he kind of feels like he's 18 again, and then I feel like I'm 18 being chased by an 18 year old.

The SP6 patch, I've just seen in so many ways help people come back into balance with their hormones. It's been pretty amazing. So that would be my answer to her question. And finally, we have Kellyann, a wonderful nurse and a holistic practitioner up in Canada and she can't wait for all the patches to be available in Canada. I'm sure she's going when when. But in the meantime, she's using the patches that are available in Canada with all her clients and getting amazing results, both on herself and her husband and all her clients. And she says, what lifestyle habits accelerate the benefits of using the phototherapy patches? What's the best way to use the patches for maximum results?

David Schmidt (2:09:13.459)

Yes, well first I'd say from a lifestyle perspective, diet is going to be so critically important. You just can't get around it, maybe 70%, 80% of a person's results are going to be based around what is their nutrition like, are they eating junk, are they eating healthy food, are they supplementing where they need to. That's always going to be critically important. I also just recently did a podcast or webinar rather on the importance of sleep. And sleep deprivation leads to any number of different health disorders.

This always comes back to the foundation. If people are eating healthy, getting proper rest, exercising regularly, drinking enough water, staying away from the things that we know aren't any good, that foundation is going to serve that individual for their entire life. Then, when you have new technology, like the patches, the benefits are going to be so much better, as opposed to when someone is not eating healthy and not exercising.

So I would say to anyone if you want to use the patches that you really want to make sure that your foundation is there. You don't have to be perfect but you want to make sure that your diet is in place, you're supplementing where you need to, you're exercising regularly, you're getting proper rest, you're drinking enough water. If you're doing those things you can expect that your results with the patches are going to be great.

Ashley James (2:10:53.347)

And this is a point I'd like to add to what you're saying, not contradict what you're saying, because I absolutely agree with you. And I've had clients who put the patches on their husbands who just like eat takeout and drink beer and they don't do anything for their health. And so I didn't know what kind of results we would get, but it's like, it's worth it, just give it a try. I still have seen people who don't live necessarily a healthy lifestyle, still get pretty good results from wearing the phototherapy patches, which just goes to show that even if someone isn't fully-nutrified and living a healthy lifestyle, they do get results.

I have had several clients who didn't have the capacity, like emotional capacity, the mental capacity, the energy to cook healthy food, to exercise, to do the healthy things because they were in absolute overwhelm. And so I had them wear the patches for a month and they, through that month, their capacity to do things for themselves grew because they became calmer and they became more grounded and they got more energy and their inflammation came down. So, I use the patches for people who like, they want to be healthier, but they just don't have the capacity to do the things to get healthier. The patches have been such a powerful tool to help my clients get to that level where now they have the energy to cook healthy food and now they have the energy to go to the gym. And I've seen it on so many people. So regardless of where you are, whether you're just today or just starting out today or whether you've been a health nut for a long time, regardless of where you are, it's worth trying the patches. And then, as you progress, you can continue to work on healthier and healthier ways of eating and moving your body in a way that brings you joy and increasing your depth of sleep.

I love that the Silent Nights patch is just proven on so many levels to be phenomenal for people, for sleep. And I'm so grateful for what you do. Kellyanne has this beautiful question that just really sums up our wonderful interview. And she says, what is your global vision for LifeWave's future? What impact are you creating in the world?

David Schmidt (2:13:06.835)

The vision for the company is it's on a number of different levels. The first thing is we want to bring awareness that people have many natural options for improving their health and their quality of life. And that's really critically important because many people today are indoctrinated with the idea that they have to use drugs and that's the only way that they're going to improve their health. And we're seeing now. the backlash from people that are using Ozempic as a way to lose weight, and of course, the side effects from the vaccine. My daughter has a friend and she's in her 20s and this young lady listened to her doctor got Ozempic and it blew out her gallbladder and she had to remove her gallbladder.

And now the quality of her life is severely degraded now for the rest of her life. And when she could have used natural methods, but she let her doctor convince her that Ozempic was safe when it clearly is not. So we want to help to bring awareness that there are natural solutions for improving quality of life, improving health. That, I would say, would be incredibly important.

The other thing that we want to do is provide people with new technology to empower them so that when they face challenges in their life. It could be something as simple as not having enough energy, not getting a good night's sleep, or something more serious. That they have tools at their disposal to support them in their healing journey. And they don't have to panic. And they don't have to feel powerless.

That's an incredibly important part of what we're doing because, unfortunately, the medical community has seemed to thrive in an environment of fear and getting people to respond that way. And that would be the complete opposite of how we want people to live. In our community, we want to bring hope, we want to bring light, we want to bring solutions, and we want to put power into where it should be into the hands of the individual. So those are very, very important goals for our business.

Ashley James (2:16:01.987)

I love it. I'm so thrilled to be part of this and to see LifeWave. I'm in it for life. I got to tell you, after we used the patches, this is over a year ago, we used the patches in a first aid experience and got such a fast result. I just started saying to everyone, I will never be without these. Knock on wood, I will never be without these. They will always be in my medicine cabinet.

I'll take breaks. I'll go to bed and not have a patch on unless my husband throws an Alavida on my forehead. I wear them every week, definitely taking breaks like you said, not wearing them for 24 hours every day. But I will take breaks. But I will always, always have them in my medicine cabinet. And I want them to be in everyone's purse or suitcase or medicine cabinet. When you can reach for something that works so quickly.

I'll give one example, head cold. In the last year and a half, I've had three head colds. It doesn't sound like much, but when you're whole life is talking, you don't want head colds. And especially trying to go to sleep with a head cold, it's your sinuses get stuffed up. I take a pair of IceWaves, put them on my sinuses, and in the height of a head cold, my sinuses will never be stuffy. I'm able to breathe through my nose and I did this on one of my friends who we were at the playground, we homeschooled and our children were playing together and my friend sounded really stuffy and I said, oh, do you have a head cold? She goes, yes, I'm super stuffy. Both my sinuses, I just can't drain them. I said, here, put these on. Because I always carry my patches with me. Put these on your sinuses. And two minutes later, like I'm talking to another friend and she's carrying her baby. And she just yelps. She goes, Oh my gosh. I can breathe through my nose. This works. I looked at her, I'm like, yes, of course it works. And she goes, I didn't expect it. I thought maybe in 20 minutes I might have some relief or something. I didn't expect it to be this fast. I didn't expect it to actually work. And for my son also, anytime he gets a stuffy nose, immediately put on the IceWaves and it just drains it. How cool is that? And if we get a sore throat, we immediately put a glutathione on it, it blows it out of our system.

It's so cool to have that available in the medicine cabinet and not need to reach for drugs. Of course, I don't normally reach for drugs. I normally reach for like essential oils and homeopathy. And this is more powerful tool than any other therapy. And I have those therapies too. I have all those kinds of medicines at my disposal, but this, your technology is my, single-handedly my most powerful tool that I use on a daily basis and with my clients. So thank you David for everything you do and I would be honored if you'd come back on the show at some point because there's just so much more to unpack and explore with you.

David Schmidt (2:19:03.517)

Oh, thank you. It's been a pleasure. I really appreciate you having me and yes, I'd be happy to do that.

Ashley James (2:19:08.929)

Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been great. I know you said so much, but I just want to make sure is there anything else you'd like to say to wrap up today's interview?

David Schmidt (2:19:19.881)

Oh, I think what I would say, well first thank you very much for having me on. And I think what I'd say is that we're all going to go through situations in life which are going to be challenging and difficult, but there's always hope, pray, turn to God, look for direction, look for the greater good. And there's always people in our community that just want to help. And, there are answers. And I think that's something that's incredibly important.

Ashley James (2:19:49.043)

I love it. Thank you so much, David. It's been such a pleasure. I cannot wait to have you back on the show.

David Schmidt (2:19:53.919)

Thanks Ashley, appreciate it.

Ashley James (2:19:57.322)

Wasn't that an amazing interview with David Schmidt. I am so excited that you got to hear the entire interview and hear all the answers to the questions from the wonderful practitioners that I work with. If you have any more questions, I'd love to help you get the answers to them. I can talk to you myself. You can email me ashley@learntruehealth.com. You can sign up for a free chat. Just get on the phone with me. I promise I don't bite.

I know some listeners were like this is so weird. I listen to you all the time and I feel like I know you but you don't know me and I'm like I get it. I did the same thing eight years ago. I was listening almost all the time to this one podcast and then I reached out and had a conversation with him on the phone. I'm like this is really weird, because you're like in my car with me all the time and I feel like we're best friends, but you don't know who I am. So this is like weird. So I really appreciate that. So if you jump on the phone with me, I promise I understand. It's a little odd when you know more about someone and they know nothing about you, but I promise I will make it not awkward to talk to me on the phone.

I do it all the time. I help people all the time, help my clients. I have phone appointments from around the world and so book a free session. Let's talk about your health, let's talk about your goals and see how I can help you. I can point you towards the right resources, whether it be phototherapy or other resources that I have. I'd love to help you. Go to learntruehealth.com in the menu, click on Work with Ashley James and then the very first option at the top is sign up for a Free Phototherapy Discovery Session. If you're too shy to talk on the phone, please feel free to email me, as I would love to help you either way. If you do have experience to talk on the phone, please feel free to email me, as I would love to help you either way. If you do have experience with the phototherapy patches, or when you do, come join the Learn True Health Facebook group, share with the other listeners what your experience is like.

One of the testimonials about the phototherapy patches was actually in Episode 500. I have one of my clients had 100% of her symptoms go away after starting to use the patches, and she shared that in Episode 500. But I have dozens and dozens of really amazing testimonials. In fact, I have one I want to share with you right now. I just recently came across this testimonial in our group and it really blew me away, and there are just thousands of really cool testimonials.

This one, though, blew me away because it has to do with liver disease. This woman shares that she has had liver disease for many years, that it runs in her family. She has several family members who have succumbed to this disease. It's NAFLD liver disease. I had never heard of it, and she was in touch with a surgeon who specializes in this liver disease and was recommending that she get a liver transplant, as some of her family members have had to get liver transplants. All her scans and blood work showed that her liver was at its end and the next step was transplant or death. So she was sent home to go buy a plot of land for her burial, to get her will in order, and she started using these phototherapy patches.

She was incredibly skeptical and actually she kind of jokes about how she wanted to use them to prove that they didn't work, and then she used them for a while and what she saw was pain, insomnia got better, several health issues got better. She couldn't believe it, but she wasn't necessarily expecting her liver to make a full recovery or anything like that. And she went back to the doctor who was helping her, got her on the transplant list and was helping to get her to the point where she could hopefully receive a liver transplant. That was their goal. She goes in for another scan that they do every one or two years and blood work, and the doctor couldn't believe it. The doctor thinks the scan's wrong, even though the blood work backs up the scan. He is in complete denial. Her liver is fully functional within a year of since using the phototherapy patches. She's beside herself. But her, her blood work is normal, her scans are normal, her liver is functioning normally now and she's just so happy. She invested the time it took a year to use them and time it took a year to use them and just to see what would happen, which is so incredible.

And, of course, you know doctors who don't believe in natural medicine or believe the body can heal itself. They're not going to even see it, even when we show them proof, they're not going to see it. Again, I'm not saying that we can cure or treat anything. The body does the healing. The body heals itself and if there's anything we can do to support the body's ability to heal itself, we should do it. We shouldn’t also get our own way. So, there are times when we’re putting things in our body that are harming us or we’re having health habits like going to bed late or drinking too much alcohol or coffee or sugar, or stressing, arguing. These little daily activities or lack of activity. They lead to a diseased body, and the body is constantly trying to heal itself, constantly trying to come back into homeostasis. So that whatever we can do in our diet and lifestyle and supplements and alternative medicine, whatever we can do to just support the body to do its job, which is to heal itself, then we should. And that's what I love about this is that our body is constantly wanting to get back into that homeostasis and this is something that pushes it there faster, which is so beautiful, because that's all we want. We want that quality of life, we want a longer, healthier life.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being a listener. This has been wonderful sharing this with you and I can't wait to hear from you. I hope you reach out and book a Free Discovery Session with me by going to learntruehealth.com and clicking the menu and selecting Work with Ashley James, or reaching out to me, emailing me, ashley@learntruehealth.com. I can't wait to hear from you. Also, join my Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, which is different from the patching group. Join us and ask questions, start discussions about this episode or other episodes. We'd love to hear from you. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day.

Get Connected with David Schmidt!

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My Book Is Live! Addicted To Wellness Is Here! 0

Feb 13, 2024

Hello True Health Seeker!

I am thrilled to announce the launch of my book, Addicted To Wellness: The Healthy Addiction: 12-Week Workbook for Creating a Lifelong Love of Well-Being.

You can find it here on Amazon: https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

As part of my book launch celebration, the first 50 readers to post a selfie with my book on their social media will receive a fun book launch gift bag from me filled with limited edition goodies and my favorite health products!

Once you have purchased my book and received it in the mail, take a pic of my book in your hands, post it to your social media and tag me (@2learntruehealth on FB or @learntruehealth everywhere else), and then send me an email with a screenshot of your post and your mailing address so I can send you your gift bag!

I have a big favor to ask those of you who are fans of my show. After you go through my book, please consider giving it a 5-star written review on Amazon to help me promote it. The more 5-star reviews my book gets, the higher Amazon will rank it, which will help it reach more readers! With your help, my book reaches more people so that together, we can help more people Learn True Health!

THANK YOU!

To Your True Health,

Ashley James

Integrative Health Coach, Podcaster, Anxiety Cessation Expert & Author

PS. Want to know what my book is about? To sum it up, It's about developing cravings for wellness by experiencing fun health habits that build you up and give you more energy, mental clarity, better digestion, deeper sleep, joy, and more!

You can buy my book here: https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

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516 Ultimate Mold Fix: Brandon Faust’s Insider Tips for Transforming Your Home Into a Health Sanctuary with Mold Eradication and Prevention Techniques 0

Feb 1, 2024

The Launch Of My Book Is Finally Here! Launching in February!
https://www.learntruehealth.com/addictedtowellness

516: Brandon Faust’s Ultimate Mold Fix: Essential Tips for a Mold-Free Home

https://www.learntruehealth.com/brandon-fausts-ultimate-mold-fix-essential-tips-for-a-mold-free-home

Our homes should be safe havens, but hidden within their walls, a silent foe like mold can lurk, posing risks to both human and pet inhabitants. That's why I'm joined by Brandon Faust of moldsolutions.com, who sheds light on the health effects of mold and offers sage advice on prevention and proper remediation techniques. We dissect the complexities of mold in various environments—from conventional homes to RVs—and the importance of vigilance in maintaining a mold-free sanctuary. With Brandon's expertise, we navigate the delicate balance between awareness and alarm, providing you with the tools to safeguard your living space.

Highlights:

Addicted to Wellness Book Launch
Mold Solutions
The Impact of Mold on Health
HVAC Mold Remediation and Prevention
Mold Remediation and Prevention Best Practices
Warning Signs of Mold Remediation Issues
Impact of Mold Exposure on Health
Preventing and Managing Household Mold
Preventing Mold in Humid Climates
Early Warning Signs of Mold Damage
Preventing Mold Growth Through Understanding Humidity
The Dangers of Mold Exposure
Living in Vehicles
Importance of Mold Prevention and Detection

Intro:

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I am so excited to announce the launch of my book. It's finally here. How exciting is that? It's going to be launching February 1st, so be sure to check that out. If you go to learntruehealth.com in the menu, I will have a link right there to take you straight to buy the book on Amazon.

The title of the book is drumroll Addicted to Wellness, and it's funny because some people go, oh, that's such a perfect name. And other people go, ooh, isn't addiction a bad word? And it's so interesting how people perceive it. And then, as it sits with them, they go actually, I really like it. So the whole premise of the book is no matter where you are in your health journey, whether you're just starting out, or whether you are a health nut like me that still has some ways to go before they feel like they've achieved all their health goals. Or maybe you have achieved all your health goals and you're looking to just maintain the health that you've worked so hard to achieve. There's no easy way to just coast through perfect health right. We're always working on it. It's a nonstop. Everything's moving and life constantly changes and moves and as long as we make sure we maintain those little daily steps, we can maintain and grow our health. And so, Addicted to Wellness, the book that I spent the last few months writing. I locked myself in the office and my family waved goodbye to me, didn't see them for a few months, just locked myself in and I poured out everything I've learned from over 500 interviews and working with clients for over two decades.

I poured it into this book and the concept is no matter where you are in your journey, let's make these little health challenges, make it fun to push ourselves, to stretch ourselves just a little bit. Something, for example, I always say kale because, like I remember when I didn't like kale and now I crave kale, and I know a lot of people roll their eyes like, oh, how could you crave kale your body actually can get to a point where it craves healthy things, where it desires, where you wake up desiring moving your body in a way that brings you joy, like I love weightlifting, and if you said to me, we're going to go walk on a treadmill for an hour, I'm like that sounds gross. But if you said to me, let's go to the gym and pump some weights, I'm like, yes, I'm right there with you, so I crave it and I and if I don't do it I kind of miss it. And the whole premise of the book is to help you get to that point where you want to. You're driven, you're compelled and you're pulled towards these little easy steps that make huge strides in maintaining health and in growing health and in getting us further away from a disease state, and closer to optimal health. And there are things that you can do even in a busy lifestyle.

I'm a working mom. There's so many things that we do or we're juggling many, many roles, right, we're a chef, we're a chauffeur, we're a maid, we're everything to our families and we have very little time for ourselves. And this book is perfect for you. It's perfect if you're a busy person, no matter what age. It's perfect for anyone, men and women. I didn't want to exclude men there. Anyone could pick up this book, plug into it.

And it's a workbook, so it's actually interactive. It pulls you through these beautiful lessons where every week for 12 weeks, you choose between one and four challenges and then you get to journal about it. And the journaling, I promise you is not tedious, it's not arduous, it's actually quick, insightful, it's fun, it's light. I make the whole thing fun. It's not bogged down, it's not super heavy, but I do bring in the beautiful science and results that people see clinically from incorporating these things. But I do it in a way that's light. So there'll be a little bit of reading every week and then there'll be interactive things you do with the book every day. But it is done in a way that even a very busy, like working mom, for example, can do it. Ash long as you make that commitment, I'm going to pick up that book and spend five minutes with it in the morning, five minutes with it at night. You can do it, you can absolutely do it, and it is so much fun. And some people will do all 12 weeks back to back. That's three months. And, by the way, there's a bonus, 13th week. So it's officially a three-month journey. Or you could choose to break it up and do one week a month or two weeks a month. It's up to you, it's up to how your life is, how your schedule is, but by the end of the book you’ve the opportunity to incorporate thirty-three beautiful health habits that build the foundations of the strong body- mentally, emotionally and physically.

So Addicted to Wellness is my book. I'm very excited to have it launch and I just I can't tell you how thrilled I am to provide it for you, my listeners, as a gift to you guys. I wanted to do a launch party, right, we can't all get together, unfortunately, in the same room. We can't all fly to Las Vegas or something and meet, maybe one day. But we're not going to do a physical, in-person launch party. What we're going to do is a virtual launch party.

So for the month of February, the whole launch party month for the first 50 listeners who purchase the book and share, if you're in a Facebook group, take a picture of yourself with the book or holding the book, talk about if you started your journey with it. You can talk about your impressions about it and give me your mailing address and I will send you a gift bag with some goodies. So it's for the first 50 listeners who buy the book and share that you've gotten it, share it on your social media, or you can just share it in our Facebook group. You then email me your address so that I can send you my gift bag to celebrate with you as to be part of the launch party.

If you're not on Facebook, don't worry about that, just send me an email and I would love to send you that gift bag as being one of the first 50 listeners to purchase the book; and, of course, for everyone that purchases the book, if you love it, please leave a five-star rating on Amazon, because that is the gift that you could give back to me. That would help me so much to help build this book, make it a success on Amazon, which will then promote it to others who are looking to seek true health, and that way, you're helping more people actually to find true health through my book.

There's plenty of resources in the book. It's very interactive and there's QR codes that'll link to resources. So, even though it's a physical book, I decided not to go digital because you're writing in it every day, so that you get to hold it. You get to sit down with a pen and write. Several points along the road in the book point to different interviews or different recipes or different resources, and so you can use your QR code, just scan it with your phone or your tablet and it takes you to those resources.

Can you tell I'm excited? I'm so excited. I already have ideas for the next few books I'm going to write. This is my first book, so I learned many, many things. So if you're ever going to publish a book, just write me an email. My email, by the way, is support@learntruehealth.com. Shoot me an email if you have any questions, because I've learned some pointers to make the journey smoother and maybe one day I'll write a book on how to write a book. I'm sure there's a lot of those out there, but I learned some interesting things and I can't wait to implement them in my future books.

If you buy the book and you have a positive experience which I know you will but when you do, when you have a positive experience with the book, I'd love to hear about it. Please write me an email, support@learntruehealth.com. Jump into the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, and you can find that by searching Facebook for Learn True Health, or you can go to learntruehealth.com/group and that'll take you to the group. I'd love to hear about your journey through the book and how it has helped you and the things that you've learned. There's going to be a lot of stuff. I think that people already know, because I had to cover the foundations, but I do in a way that's fun and I do it in a way that even if you've been a health nut for many years, you'll be surprised at what you learn in the book. So I make it fun. I add new information that I think it'll still surprise you. For example, I know it's good to drink water, but I had no idea that when you drink 5% less than your body needs, you have a 25% reduction in energy production. The body can't produce enough cellular energy, enough ATP. So simply by drinking five ounces less a day than your body needs you can. For example, if that's 100 ounces is your daily requirement, then five ounces less or sweating five ounces more than you normally do can lead to a significant drop in energy production. And then people go to the coffee and the energy drinks, which further dehydrates them, leading to these swings, especially those a lot of those drinks have sugar in them and it leads to inflammation and just like these energy swings where you wake up exhausted or you're exhausted and hungry at 3pm and then that affects cortisol and the whole thing kind of tumbles downwards, right.

So the book and the little daily challenges is meant to get you back on course with every area of your life health and happiness and fulfillment in every area of your life not just physical health, also every area of your life. So I'm really looking forward to you checking it out and reading it and please share, as you go through the process, what you were excited about learning. Share with me and also with our whole Facebook community, the Learn to Health Facebook group community, and I'd love to hear your impression and your experience. I'd love the feedback.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing my book with your friends and sharing this podcast with those you care about. This episode in particular, I'm very excited to publish because I think it is a silent epidemic.

Many households across the globe, not just the United States, have hidden mold and mold is a big, nasty voodoo daddy of a problem for many people and they don't even realize it and they'll go so many doctors because you don't see the mold, because it's in between the floorboards or wherever it is. It's hidden in the house. By breathing in the mycotoxins that we can't see, we can't see them. It can cause respiratory problems, skin problems, nervous system problems, immune problems, digestive problems. And in the United States, how many people are going to a medical doctor and being put on drugs, drug after drug after drug, to suppress symptoms and continue to be exposed to the mycotoxins and the mold which continues to cause the problem?

Think about how many people are sick in the United States and don't know why. And that's one of the reasons why I do this podcast is to help people who the medical system has failed them, and we want to help them find the answers. And these wonderful doctors and experts that I have on the show are those kind of people who help us navigate this crazy world and get to the root cause of our problem. And so many people don't realize that the root cause of their problem is mold in their house or their car or their business, their place of work.

So let's dive in and thank you so much for being here and sharing with those you care about, because we've got to help as many people as possible to Learn True Health for my book. Go to learntruehealth.com and look in the menu at the very top of the website and you'll see a link to go buy the book. And please jump into the Facebook group as well, as I would love to hear from you. Enjoy today's episode.

Ashley James (0:12:38.935)

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 516. I am so excited for today's guest. We have with us Brandon Faust, who's the founder of moldsolutions.com. First of all, you got a pretty awesome URL. When did you buy that? Back in the 90s? Like, how did you get moldsolutions.com? That's a really easy website to remember.

Brandon Faust (0:13:09.453)

You had to ask. So my original website was actually moldsolutionsusa.com for that exact reason, because mold solutions was a very expensive URL. I didn't even know if I want to tell you how much I paid for it, but it was definitely.

Ashley James (0:13:26.797)

Oh no. I'm going to guess $25,000.

Brandon Faust (0:13:29.560)

It was $20,000.

Ashley James (0:13:31.409)

Oh! That was my first thought and I was like, no, that sounds too little. Well, it's worth it. It really is, because who's going to remember to type USA? That kind of reminds me of all the URLs from the late 90s, early 2000s, where you had to type in so many extra things.

Brandon Faust (0:13:53.687)

Yes, so that's exactly what happened. So the original name of the company was mold solutions usa because of that exact point. And, at the end of the day, people were remembering moldusa. And that's definitely not the message that I want you to remember. Right. So we had to ante up and, invest in mold solutions. So here you are. That's the back story.

Ashley James (0:14:17.029)

I think you should own moldusa.com and moldsolutions.com If you still own all those and just redirect them to your main website. But it really does make a difference, especially for podcasting. And then my listeners who are like driving or walking their dog or whatever, it's like, they're not writing this down. Like they're just listening. So you've got to make it easy so we can remember, two hours from now when we go to look you up. Especially because you've got some cool stuff on your website. You got a free book. And mold is a big topic. So we have a Facebook group for listeners. We have over 5000 listeners in our Facebook group. We have way more listeners that download, but just the hardcore Learn True Health listeners come to the Facebook group and to discuss health topics and mold is like a regular topic. We should just have a pinned post all about mold because it's such a common topic because most areas in the United States can be prone to mold and especially with the weird weather. We've been having like floods and stuff like that. It's very common. I live in the Pacific Northwest where our houses grow mushrooms for fun. And you're down in Florida and you've probably seen mushrooms grow out of the corner of toilets. I just saw a post that's going viral right now about how if you ever grow mushrooms in your house for fun, like in your kitchen, you could actually end up growing mushrooms like out of the floorboards of your house. And you've got to be really careful about what you bring home because you don't want to inoculate your house with spores.

Brandon Faust (0:16:01.190)

And that is definitely fungus 101. There are spores, and they will spread.

Ashley James (0:16:06.926)

Yes, the fun side to fungus. You could have a substance come and digest your house for you. So we don't want that. And we don't want mold in our house because it really drastically affects our immune system. And it's something that people can kind of put off and say, that's not such a big deal, whatever that weird black stuff by the tub or by the window and no big deal. And, oh, it's just mildew. It's not mold.

And then wonder why two years later they have autoimmune conditions. They have their kids have hives, their kids have rashes, they have asthma. Everything from skin conditions to cancer. You're wearing down your immune system. And we've had guests on the show, holistic health practitioners talk about how a single mold exposure could actually make mold grow inside you and stay inside your body. And then you have to do a mold detox. And so this isn't something like just get rid of the mold in your house and you're fine. It can actually still exist in you years later. I had a practitioner tell me that I had a mold in me and I had a moldy basement. This was 30 years ago. I hadn't lived in that basement for 30 years and yet I still had some mold in my system. God forbid, you broke your arm or you broke your leg, it's obvious you take care of it. But with mold, it's something we can overlook, something we can put our blinders on and just go about our day. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a friend say, oh, I just threw bleach on it. I'm like, you can't do that. That's super bad for you. And I so I want to talk to you about this, Brandon. I want to talk about you have 15 tips to prevent mold in your home. We weren't going to talk about improving your indoor air quality. We're going to talk about the impact mold has on our health and on our pets.

If you don’t care about your health, why would you listen? You definitely care about your health because you're listening to this. Anyone who has a dog or cat will put their pets first. I've never met a dog owner that wouldn’t immediately go and take care of their pets health before they took care of their own health. So it's even worse for your pets to have, because they're living in that environment. Like you leave your house, they don't, right? They leave the house much less than you do. And so they're smaller bodies, but they're way more exposed to the mold mycotoxins. And so we're going to talk about all this. And also a lot of times people have mold in their house. They don't even know it. Super scary. So thank you for coming on the show and thanks for having such a cool URL. So we could, , ooh and ah over it.

Brandon Faust (0:18:48.889)

Oh my goodness, you're a woman after my heart. Everything that you just said was completely resonating with me. I was like, oh my God, I can talk this girl's language. So a hundred percent, everything that you just went over, I'm highly in agreement with and it's true. It's one of these things that goes misunderstood, underestimated, and there's extremely different sort of takes on it. And you have your people that are, it's no big deal. That's nothing to worry about. It's a scam. It's this, it's that.

And then some people that are wanting to go into a home with a spacesuit and are super concerned and highly concerned. And to some degree, there's validity in their concern. So I try to on this subject because it can be so scary, but it can also be one of those things that people completely ignore. Try to take somewhere in the middle, maybe a little bit over, hey, have a healthy respect from old and don't ignore it because it can actually cause some serious health issues, but also providing answers and solutions, which is why we have mold solutions. That's really what it's all about at the end of the day is how to solve this problem that can cause a lot of issues. It's not just an unsightly thing. It's the indoor air quality aspect of it, which is the most important.

Ashley James (0:20:11.197)

Right. So we could have hidden mold. I don't want to say invisible. We can have hidden mold. You don't see it, but it's in the walls and it's affecting your health. So in the ducts, right there, if you have a furnace, there can be hidden mold in a building. One of my doctors, I go see her whole office smells like mildew. And I mean, if it wasn't for the fact that she's just like a world-class, amazing chiropractor, I would not be going to her and I feel bad for her, but this is the office she's in. And I just think to myself, like, if you can smell mildew, you're inhaling mycotoxins. Like you're inhaling some level, your body is having to process some level of stressor.

And so we can have hidden, but you don't see it. Like I'm in her office is super clean. It's just the whole building. Again, living in the Pacific Northwest is very moist here, but I can smell it. And I guess a lot of people don't notice because they're not as aware as I am. And so it's not visible, but it could be in the walls. Right. And then there's visible mold. My friend has an old car that is ancient and barely functional. Somewhere has a leak and she goes to get in the car after being away for a few days. She's at the airport. She gets in the car and it's like fuzz. It's like an inch of fuzz. The entire car is mold. There's a hole inside has grown an inch of this moldy fuzz, but she has to get home. So she opens the windows and she drove home and she goes halfway home, she has the world's worst headache and she's one of the healthiest people I know. And so with her already, she's a healthy immune system, a healthy liver, like she's healthy at processing stuff. She was sick for days, just feeling completely out of it, like hung over her body had to deal with all those mycotoxins. So there's times when people just suck it up and go, Oh, I'll just be in this mold for a few minutes. Like, Oh, It's okay, I'm just going to go down into the moldy basement. I'm only here for a few minutes. And the fact is that it's affecting you in an acute situation, affecting you for days, but if you have even a small amount of mold that's not visible over time, it's wearing you down. So I want to get into, why mold solutions? What happened in your life that went, I know what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to crawl around people's ducts and fix their mold problem. Did you have something that happened to you that made you passionate about getting rid of mold?

Brandon Faust (0:23:06.321)

I did. That's a great question. Because I was not in this industry initially. I was a headhunter, I was a recruiter, and I also had done a lot of sales type stuff, marketing. But believe it or not, I even did the New York Institute of Photography course. So I was a professional photographer as well making money in that arena, which I still love today. I think it's fantastic as a creative outlet.

But the thing that really hit me hard was I had gotten involved in another company because my good friend of mine asked me to come on board with this mold company and initially I turned him down. I told him, look, I'm not interested in being a mold guy and I felt it was almost like a step down for me. And he approached me on the concept of having equity in this company. And at that point, my wife was pregnant and with the baby on the way, I was like, no, that might be a good way to go with the ownership. Let's build this. I felt like I could do it, but I wasn't 100% sold, although I was like, okay, marketing, you can market a product.

But it wasn't until my son was born and a month into him arriving, he's like a one month old, infant newborn, he starts having almost like an asthma attack three days in a row. And we were so concerned. And my wife after the third day, she's like, I'm taking him to the emergency room.

And I said, well, look, I've just done all this training and certification. It could be environmental. Let's just take a look. Let's see what's going on. , so I started to do a deep dive in my own home and got to the bedroom, which just happened to be the same room where the furnace was located. It was in a closet there, the air handler. And I moved this one shelving system, this dresser drawers, and there was two feet of mold on the back of it and two feet wide. So it was literally four foot, four square feet of mold on the back of this shelving system. And my eyes got big. I couldn't believe it. And it was just like your friend's car. , it was fuzzy on the back. And at that moment in time, I was like, Oh wow. So started checking the moisture. There was a leak behind that wall that on the other side was a shower. And my mom had come to visit because of the baby. And every time she was showering, there was a pinhole leak. So it was basically soaking that floor in that wall. And then it was wicking up the furniture. So that sort of cheap panelling on the back of the dresser drawers was just covered in this growth. It was being sucked into the air handler and distributed all throughout the house. So what we did was fix a leak, cleaned up the contaminated material and did a whole home sanitization using a non-toxic product, which filled the volume of the home with a product that would actually break down spores and mycotoxins. And the result of it was, my wife and kid were back in the home, about three hours after we were done with everything.

And he slept an hour longer and he had no trouble breathing the next day. So that was really for me where the light bulb went off. Because I started thinking about what would have occurred if I would have taken him to the emergency room? And how many tests would have been done on him? What would have that been like for him in terms of like a traumatizing occurrence? Whoever knows what other tests would have taken place and they wouldn't have found the actual cause point, the thing that was making it happen to begin with. So that was sort of the big moment for me.

Ashley James (0:27:12.083)

I would say one thing to that because I love holistic medicine and I've been deep into holistic medicine for many years. It saved my life. It saved my husband's life. I have seen where if we didn't have holistic medicine, I wouldn't be alive. So my husband at the same time, so we've got that. We have Children's Hospital here in Seattle and my son, not as a baby, but as a toddler. Actually, I don't know if you call 18 month old still a baby, but there was about three different separate times where we had to take him because he had respiratory distress.

So the first thing they did, which would surprise you because I was on guard asking the doctors, like, what are you doing to my son? What are you doing? Like I need an informed consent. And that's a first thing you say to the doctors, I need an informed consent. Before you do anything, I need an informed consent, which means they have to turn around and tell you what they're doing and what the negative impacts are. And so they started putting an IV in my son. He was very young. This was like 18 months old young. And she turned to me and she smiled when I said it, because I thought she'd get angry, because some doctors do. They don't like you advocating. And I was so fortunate that she actually appreciated me asking. And she said, okay, great. This is magnesium. We're doing an IV magnesium because magnesium is the first thing we try with respiratory distress because it asks the lungs to open up it and stop spasming. And I'm like, Oh, magnesium. Great. Go ahead. And I thought that was really cool. And then the second he didn't recover. He was so bad. His oxygen was going down. His lips were blue. Like this is dangerous. Right.

So I would say, if a child has respiratory distress, you don't want to wait and you want to get that handled. And they're not going to find the root cause in the first visit to the ER. And that's not the point. The point is to get them stabilized. But don't ever expect an ER doctor is going to be like, I found the root cause to your chronic health problem because it's very unlikely. They're there to like just stabilize you and then you go see your PCP and hopefully you find a holistic doctor that can help pick through every aspect of your life, including your environmental home health, to find what are the stressors and what's going on, and even do genetics and do nutritional testing and do everything, right? But if a child has respiratory distress, my thing is get it handled and then we'll figure out what caused it. But I'm really glad your son recovered so quickly because he didn't have a chronic exposure to it because he was so young. So it wasn't like years and years of exposure. But I'm so grateful you figured this out. It just seems like God set it up, like it's just such divine order to have you just go through this training and then have this problem with your son. And imagine if you hadn't gone through that training, what would have happened to him? What would have happened? How many, like you said, tests and medications? And when we medicate, we're just suppressing, but we're not addressing the root cause. And he might have lived his entire childhood exposed to mold and his body fighting that. And then on top of that, suppressing his body with steroids and medications and then, just what would have happened then to his life?

Brandon Faust (0:30:42.430)

That's exactly right. And that's really, for me, what did it, was just kind of thinking about that and potentially having missed the boat and not knowing that this was something that could cause that big of an issue because I look back and I was on the West Coast for 30 years, so this was a pretty dry, arid climate, but I was helping on a project with these old files, and they were musty and you could smell it and it was like this sort of mildew smell. But at the time, I had no idea. I was in my late 20s and we didn't have masks on, we didn't have gloves on.

And I was waking up every morning with my feet on fire, my lower legs on fire. And my hands would start swelling up when I would start walking. And I was wondering what was going on. And I never determined what the cause was. But now looking back on it, I know exactly what the cause is because I get the same sensation when I go into a home that is full of mold. And even though I have the mask on, I also have a beard, so there is some exposure that does take place. So I have to take the proper binders and things like that to help detox and pull it out of my body on a daily basis. But while I'm driving back, I get the same burning sensation in my legs.

Ashley James (0:32:13.783)

And you take the binders on a daily basis because you're exposed on a regular basis, unlike the listener who hopefully gets the mold, if they have any mold, they get it properly mitigated and then they're not living in an environment exposed to mold on a daily basis. But if you have mold in your body or you're exposed to mold, then taking those binders is essential. Can you give us the list of the binders you take or is it in your free book or can we talk a bit about that?

Brandon Faust (0:32:43.727)

I try to stay away from that to some degree because I'm not a medical professional. I really work on the health of the home.

But there are definitely certain brands or things that I take that do work. Obviously there's an activated charcoal element. When I got sick in 2019 where I was really pretty impacted by mold, I was taking Spanish black radish on a daily basis. I take glutathione is another one that is not a binder, but it definitely helps with mold exposure. So a lot of these things would probably speak to it would be more like hey go to your functional medicine doctor or your integrated medicine doctor your holistic medicine doctor and find out what they are would be recommending or referring.

Ashley James (20:51.331)

Nice. I've got some good interviews about that also. So listeners can type in mold in learntruehealth.com. And I do have some interviews where we talk about that. But I appreciate that you're sharing a bit about that. I don't know if I've ever heard of black Spanish radish. So I'm going to look that up. So here you are. You have your child, you've just mitigated your own home. Was that the first house you ever worked on? Because you had just gone through your training?

Brandon Faust (0:34:15.497)

No, I mean, I had worked on probably 20 or 30 homes up until that point. There's a lot of mold in Florida, let's put it that way. So, it's a very humid climate and there's no shortage of growth. So it was really fortuitous in terms of like this career path. And then what happened with my son was not fortuitous, but it was serendipitous. It was something that like you're talking about the , the divine entering in and letting me know because for me if I'm going to talk about something or promote something. I feel so much better about it if I have belief in it and if I know that it's going to help somebody or make a difference and just six months earlier my wife had approached me on getting a mold test done in our own home. And I said, I don't want to spend the $400 on a mold test. Like, what's the big deal? Why would we need that? So I had this other end of the spectrum sort of viewpoint on it. And now, fast forward seven years and 3,500 homes later, and how many people that I've helped that have been patients of functional medicine clinics or integrated medicine clinics, and the difference that it makes in their life in terms of actually having a mold-free environment, it's tremendous. And everything that you're talking about with your friend and what she went through. I've gone through that personally and I've seen other people that have gone through that as well. So it's not a joke. It's not something to ignore or to brush off as a potential problem.

Ashley James (0:36:05.603)

So with all the homes you've worked on, have you ever seen a negative mold test for a house?

Brandon Faust (0:36:16.976)

Well, this is an interesting question, right? Because the air sampling is not a good yardstick. It's not a good measuring tool at all. Have I seen homes that I would say are safe and healthy? Of course, absolutely. But the most important test of all is the people test.

How is a person doing in that home? Now that's not an end all be all test either because you can have acute reactions or you can have long term exposure problems that you may not even notice are actually coming from some hidden mold in your home. So I think that you have here in Florida there's like a saying especially amongst realtors, well every home is going to have mold. This is Florida.

Don't worry about that, that's just this old Florida smell, right? Oh, that's just the old Florida smell, no worries. And it really, you should be concerned about it, because if it's musty, it's moldy. But there is truth in the fact that almost every home is going to have some mold spores floating around. It's a naturally occurring thing in our environment. If we didn't have mold spores, imagine what the landfills would look like.

I mean they'd be overgrown, over packed. You would just have that decomposure element is crucial to life on planet earth. So mold has a time and a place. But the problem is that when it gets into your home, it's like putting a car in the garage and keeping it on and closing up the garage door and closing the doors. And then what happens?

So if you have an airtight envelope and you have carbon monoxide going strong, it can be really disastrous for the people that are cohabiting that space. And that's the same thing with mold. When you have mold in your home and it's hidden and it's off gassing and it's releasing spores, it can cause a serious issue. So one of the things that you brought up is this concept of mycotoxins. A lot of people, even in the mold world, even professional mold remediators don't know what a mycotoxin is.

So myco is a Greek word for fungus and toxin something poisonous, something that can do damage to your physical well-being. So the fungus poison is what colonized mold releases. So not all molds have as a potent of a mycotoxin. But I think that the more advanced we get in this study and in the subject, we're going to find out that most of them do release a mycotoxin. So in a lot of times, a lot of cases, and I've heard this one as well, Oh, it's not that dangerous mold. It's not black mold. It's you shouldn't, it's nothing to worry about. And I've even had mold inspectors tell clients or homeowners, Oh, that mold on your vents or that mold in your HVAC. It's no big deal. It's common.

Every home in Florida is going to have it. And these are professional mold inspectors. And then you do the research on it, and you find out that particular mold that is in the HVAC unit that tends to basically infiltrate a HVAC system is called cladosporium. And when you start doing a deep dive or deeper study on cladosporium, you find out that it is highly toxic. It does release a mycotoxin. It can cause skin issues. It can cause a host of physical problems, upper respiratory problems.

And when I go to a home and I hear the entire family is sick, the first place I'm going to is the HVAC. And I wouldn't be surprised if your friend who is the doctor or the chiropractor is dealing with that exact situation. It could be behind the walls, but the first place I would actually be looking is in the HVAC system, in the ducts, in the furnace, the air handler, because the amount of infestation that I have found in the entire system alone is, it's amazing because the materials, especially down here in Florida, they use a porous duct board for the box that connects the air handler or the furnace to the ducts. So these long tubes that go through that attic or,go through the home, the central heating and air conditioning, the outlets, So those ducts are connected to a box that is, it's basically a fiberglass board that's about an inch thick. So it's extremely porous. So you can imagine, when you're turning on your air conditioner, the coils are getting cold enough that water droplets are attracting to the actual coils. So that's wetness, that's water. And then you have this wheel that is spinning super fast and blowing that moist air up into this box that's porous. And what do you wind up with? A Petri dish that is supplying the home with air.

Ashley James (0:41:51.216)

I've heard of these HVAC systems or these add-ons that you can add to your system, in the ducts in your house if you have a furnace, that it's like infrared light or some ultraviolet light, something.

Brandon Faust (0:42:05.430)

UV lights, yes.

Ashley James (0:42:06.306)

Yes, UV, thank you. I was like, it's light, they put light in there. And it kills! It kills all the bad stuff.

Brandon Faust (0:42:15.184)

So, again, there's truth in it, for sure, 100%, but it's also what are the limitations of that technology. So, you have whole home purifiers that can plug into the box, which is called a plenum. So you can basically insert one of these purifiers. There's different technology that goes along with it. There's UV aspect of it. There's ionization technology, some of them have ozone, although I don't particularly recommend having a continual ozone exposure, but you can get these different technologies and add-ons, as you call them, put into your furnace or the plenum box.

So in the book that you talked about, it's moldebook.com, and that's a book that I wrote after going through 3500 homes and it basically has 15 action tips in that particular book, it goes over the sort of the setup which I would recommend when it comes to your air handler. And it's actually Chapter Three, Achieve Fresh Air Through Filters: UV Lights and Purifiers. And it goes over what would be a good setup. So I recommend a sort of a multi-facet approach on purifying your air conditioner.

So a UV light on the blower wheel and potentially one on the coils. So they look like lightsabers when they're on, but I highly recommend you not look at them. You can look at a photo of it, but the UV will burn your eyes.

So it goes on, you have it on the blower wheel, and then a UV light on the coils, and then the purifier in the actual box on top. So those things work in conjunction to ensure that your air quality is kept clean. But let's say you have an HVAC that is already infiltrated and infested, it's not going to handle that situation. It's like taking a slingshot to a battleship. It's not going to solve all the problems. It's not a silver bullet.

Ashley James (0:44:25.890)

So it's more for prevention, but if you already have an infestation, you need to take more specific actions to clean out the infestation.

Brandon Faust (0:44:34.372)

That's correct. Because when it comes to mold, the solution is always first and foremost, removal. You want to remove the mold from the contaminated material. And in most cases, you want to remove the contaminated material. So there is a difference between mold removal and mold remediation. So the technical difference is when you're remediating, you are removing the contaminated material itself. And in some cases, you can get away with mold removal where you're actually like vacuuming up the mold from the surface. So let's say it's a non-porous surface like glass or metal. You can get away with cleaning it and removing the mold from that particular item.

Ashley James (0:45:25.984)

So something that mold is growing on top of, but not growing roots into.

Brandon Faust (0:45:29.520)

Correct, that's exactly right. And that's a big difference because if it's porous, the roots can get deep into the material and in a lot of ways, that's very difficult to actually fully handle because the roots are now in the item itself. So that's where in many cases, if you're dealing with colonized growth on like a sofa or an item that is porous, shoes, purses, things along those lines. You don't really want to take chances with it. And I always recommend throwing it out. So similar to that with the HVAC system, the best solution is always going to be actually removing and replacing the contaminated material. The only problem with that is that's a pretty expensive endeavor. So when you're talking about replacing all the ducts and replacing the HVAC system itself, that could be 20 grand.

It's a massive expense and some people are not in a position to do that. So what I would recommend at that point is doing a deep cleaning or a remediation of the actual HVAC system itself, where you're actually like taking the blower wheel out and removing the mold from the blower wheel, cleaning the coils, cleaning the plenum box. And in some cases you can't clean it, especially if it's porous fiberglass duct board. You can't brush that because it's going to make a bigger problem with the fiberglass and disturbing that. So what we do instead, if we're not able to replace it, is we encapsulate it with a fiberlock antimicrobial paint after we've treated the mold itself. So we do a lot to try to actually break down or kill the mold, then we encapsulate it with a antifungal fiberlock paint.

And then if it's flex duct, which looks like that, almost like an accordion. Metal is always the easiest to clean. The flex duct is hard to clean, and the duct board itself is pretty much, you cannot clean it if that's what's running through your ceiling. So you can only encapsulate it. So it's not ideal for sure. But when we do the duct cleaning, end of it, we run a brush through the ducts and then we sanitize the ducts. And then a key element when you're doing any sort of duct cleaning is also doing a whole home sanitization. Because if you've had mold in your ducts and you've now disturbed it and agitated and it's a living, breathing organism. And that's, I think, one of the most crucial things to understand when you're talking about mold is it is a living, breathing organism that does want to survive. So when you attack it or you agitate it, you actually are putting it into defense mode and hyper replication mode. So it's going to shoot off more spores and more mycotoxins to defend its territory, to defend itself, and to also make sure that it as a species does not die off. So it sends off little babies, which are the spores, and you have almost like a mold explosion that takes place.

So you really, if you're going to do the duct cleaning, you should have it for sure where it's under like a negative air. You can also call that like a massive vacuum, where you have a vacuum system outside with a massive ability for suction, pulling that dirty contaminated air, but even that is not absolute. So you might want to have like a HEPA filters, placed around the home, helping to catch those little microscopic particles, and then doing a whole home sanitization where you fill the entire volume of the home with a product that helps to break down and almost like dissolve or disintegrate mold spores and mycotoxins. So we call that a dry fog, and there's certain companies that do it and do it extremely well. So you want to find a company that knows how to do that.

Ashley James (0:49:47.199)

I want to bring something up, but I just want to say, I'm sorry if I mentioned a competitor of yours. I interviewed, just to be polite, I interviewed Green Home Solutions. I don't know if you guys are friends or if you guys are competitors, but I interviewed them and I thought their whole system was really interesting that they have an enzyme that digests the mold.

I hope you guys are friends and I didn't just mention a competitor of yours, but it sounds like you guys do similar things.

Brandon Faust (0:50:22.877)

Honestly, I've heard of Green Home Solutions and I think that one of the things that I admire, I don't look at it as competition, right? Because there's not enough of us that are doing it the right way. And as long as they are getting a great result and they're creating safe and healthy homes, then fantastic, because there's not enough of the remediation industry that has that as the end result and what they're going for because you have medical clinics that are more inclined to treat what insurance is going to cover versus medical clinics that are more inclined to treat and not even treat but locate, find, and remove the cause, they're looking for root cause.

So if you have a clinic that is operating on finding the actual root cause and trying to handle that, then that's your colleague, that's your brother in arms, it's somebody that is trying to accomplish the same goal, which is making people truly healthy.

So it's a colleague, somebody that you can talk to, it's a contemporary, it's somebody that you can bounce ideas off of. And that's really, for me, anybody that's in the industry that is going for addressing the holistic side of health for the home is the type of person that I want to actually associate with and talk with and discuss best practices, because that's really the end goal, is to make homes as safe and healthy as possible.

So if somebody knows how to do it, better than I or I can learn from, then great. And I think that Green Home Solutions is one of the ones that is doing it correctly.

Ashley James (0:52:19.367)

Well, they didn't talk specifically about the HVAC system, but I really appreciate they say that, well, the first thing is finding out what caused the mold. Like, is it the vapor barrier isn't correct? So I'm sure you do this too. You're looking for, well, why did this happen? Like, yes, we have spores in our environment. And yes, mold is natural because vegetation is supposed to be broken down and we do unnatural things to prevent our homes from breaking down because most homes are made of porous material that some of it comes from nature like trees.

I want to talk about this too with you, there's a certain environment that you can create within a home and it doesn't matter if it's the Pacific Northwest or Florida or Nevada desert, we got to create airflow and make sure the humidity is in check and make sure that the whole home has good airflow, right? Because you don't want like something getting trapped in the basement or in the crawlspace underneath or the crawlspace above. And so again, this is not my area of expertise, but my understanding is if you have healthy circulation and you have healthy throughout the whole house and you don't have any moisture building up anywhere, you are more likely to prevent mold.

So I do want to talk about mold prevention with you, but before we do that, because it's still on my mind, can you warn us, like without calling out any specific company, can you warn us on like, what are the red flags when we're hiring a mold mitigation or mold removal company? What are the red flags that just, you want to run the opposite way? So like if they're come out with their bottle of like, bleach in a spray bottle, like, run the other way! What are the things you've heard of that you in this industry that are just really, really bad, bad practices that we should be aware of?

Brandon Faust (0:54:30.261)

Well, I think the first and most important thing is proper containment, because if you're going to be doing any sort of remediation, you need to prevent that area of exposure from cross-contaminating the rest of the building envelope. And although there is the potential of there already being some sort of cross-contamination.

I'll just talk about a job that I recently did. So, a friend of mine, her father, we had done work on her house. She was pregnant at the time and had a baby on the way. So she was pregnant and had a young baby. So her daughter, I think, was a year and a half. But they had been chronically sick. They didn't know what was causing it. And she asked me to come take a look. And sure enough, there was infestation in her HVAC. And we handled it. And it completely handled her breathing issues and the sickness immediately. Her story was phenomenal. And it gave me a lot of pride. I felt good, let's put it that way, of being able to help a friend of mine who was sick.

So she recommended my company to her dad, who was not doing well and had just kind of hired another company to come handle his mold problem. So when I walked into the house, there was a little bit of a musty smell, and then I got to the master bedroom and it was like Mike Tyson punching you in the face.

So it was so strong. And then I looked at what was occurring, and they basically had put fans on the wall where the mold was located. And they didn't build proper containment. So number one, first thing, you don't put fans on mold. Number two, you always build containment to section off that area of the home. So those are red flags.

And the result of that was, he is still not doing well. He had a massive migraine, headache, brain fog, and he's 92 years old, although he's doing incredibly well for 92. This was something that really set him back. So it's important to know that the actions that you're taking could result in somebody getting sick. And that's something that I would absolutely be making sure is in place if you're going to hire a mold remediation company is that they understand the health aspect of mold. They understand what mycotoxins are. They understand what that means to the health end of it.

So when it comes to insurance, you have sometimes preferred vendors that work for the insurance companies, but they don't necessarily work out deals where the preferred vendor may get less money. So unfortunately, that could result in them taking actions that are less detailed. And when that occurs or they're potentially cutting corners, the person that is not a benefactor at all is the homeowner. They're the ones that are getting negatively impacted by a cut corner.

So, what are the things that you look for? Somebody who has great reviews, that understands the health end of mold, that they know what mycotoxins are. They may be difficult to find, but that they also are not testing their own jobs pre and post. I would always get an independent inspector as long as they really knew what they were doing to come and check what are the levels of the home and then be able to cross check, did the remediator accomplish the goal of getting this home as free and clear as possible?

So there's a whole topic of testing that is a whole subject and topic in itself, but you want somebody who is not just going in, finding that there's a big situation and then charging a huge amount of money, because maybe the results get skewed.

So now at the end of the day, if you have somebody who has a moral compass and is doing it for the right reasons, you really shouldn't have to worry about that, but sometimes it does occur. So just to have sort of checks and balances, I would recommend having an independent inspector do the testing and then write a protocol. But also that goes hand in hand with finding an inspector that really knows what they're doing. They know where to look.

They know what to look for. They're using not just air samples, but they're using direct samples. And ideally, if you have a high-end inspector, you have somebody who's doing like VOC testing, they're doing bacterial testing, they're doing mycotoxin testing, they're doing air samples, they're doing direct samples. And they are building an indoor air quality profile on the home. Now, with that said, that can be a pricey endeavor.

So, there are sometimes ways of doing a thorough job, maybe not as thorough, but still a thorough job at a much more economical rate. So for listeners that are like, wow, that sounds intense, they could go with like Immunolytics, which does almost like Petri dishes, and they do Petri dishes, and you put them in different areas of the home, and as long as you follow the instructions, you can get some concept of the levels that are in your home. And that may be your first step.

There's also like mymolddetective.com where you can do some of your own testing and they give you cassettes, , and doing swabs. You can do some of the swabs and send them to a lab. So there's like different screening partnerships that you can do with people as well. Like I offer that system to some of the people that call me up that are at a distance that they want me to consult them on a project and they're not necessarily wanting to pay a huge amount of money for one of the top tier testers. Because a mom on a mission is sometimes your absolute best inspector, because she's going to overturn every possible place that there could be mold, right? And you want to make sure that what you're looking at is actually mold. So I had a friend of mine who's an actual nutritional health coach and she was talking to me about all the mold that she had in her home. And she was close by, so I said, well, let me come and take a look, see what's going on. And it turned out that what she thought was mold was white rims around her plants, but that was actually efforescence. It wasn't actually microbial growth. So it was just a salt material that was coming through the clay that she had her plants in.

So sometimes you may think something is mold and it's actually not. And that's why testing it is so important. So back to this point on the red flags, if they are putting fans on mold or talking about putting fans on mold, that's number one. If they're not talking about locating the source and locating where it's actually coming from, that's number two. If they're talking about just sanitizing or fogging the home and they're not doing the actual locating of the problem in itself and not looking for the actual mold growth itself, that's number three.

Having somebody that is not understanding of the actual health ramifications and doesn't know what a mycotoxin is and doesn't understand the actual topic, like that's probably number four. So and then somebody who's not, somebody who's trying to test and clear their own mole jobs is number five. So I probably could make a whole list, but I think that probably gives you a concept to start with.

Ashley James (1:02:37.591)

That's a good list. Yes, those are the red flags we've got to look for and then run the other way. I have an interview with a woman in Florida, actually. I think, pretty sure it's Florida. It was a few years ago. I mean, if you type mold into my website, learntruehealth.com you'll find this interview and she's a holistic health coach. And they had mold in their bathroom.

And the first company that came in, which was one that now, after hearing this, she would have run the other way and found a better company, found moldsolutions.com to help her. But the company she found, or maybe I think actually I think it was the company that her insurance was going to cover, they had mold in their bathroom. So they put up a vapor barrier around the door of the bathroom while they're doing whatever mitigation. But there's a fan, like exhaust for the bathroom and they had it on, they're thinking it goes to the outside, but they didn't do any crawling around the space. Like if they had gone up into the crawl space and the attic, they would have identified that whoever built this house was high as a kite because the exhaust does not for the baths. Like so when you're taking a shower, the exhaust does not go outside. The exhaust blue into between the walls and was coming out into the living room. And so she was with her kids in the living room while they're doing mold remediation in the bathroom. And they start feeling sick and sicker and sicker and they're getting dizzy. And it's, it's because everything was just blasting into the living room. So they ended up having to live in a motel for a while, while they found a better company.

And that was just massive problems with home insurance and stuff like that to get a different company. And then the new company figured out what was going on and fixed everything. But she had chewed that, her and her family was sick from it. Now, sometimes one family member gets really sick and the other ones don't. And it's hard to say, okay, this is mold in the home. Cause we've got different genetics, we have different loads in terms of stressors, right? So stress load, emotional, mental, spiritual, physical, whatever your stressor is. Maybe you have a histamine problem, maybe you have MTHFR, and you're just you're not as good at detoxing, right? So I've often heard this well like, I get really sick when I'm near mold, but my husband he could roll in it, he can roll in it and be fine. So it's not always the case where the whole family gets sick or presents differently. Like asthma in one person, sleep problems in the other, a third family member could always have a runny nose, dark circles under the eyes. Another one could have immune problems or skin problems. They could present with different symptoms. So we don't always present with the same symptoms, which is really, we have to be aware of the fact that if you have if people in your household have chronic issues, this is not because of your age, your genetics, your ethnicity. Everyone could be having the same external stressor, but it's presenting differently because of how our body works. Everyone's unique.

So that's just something to consider because I think there's so many listeners who can't figure out, why is my scalp itchy or why do my hands swell or why is my son have asthma. And they keep taking supplements and doing microbiome tests or just doing lab tests or going to holistic doctors. They can't quite figure it out. It might be the air quality in your home.

Brandon Faust (1:06:45.982)

100% and the point that you just talked about where there's potentially a genetic predeposition to mold or in actual fact it's the inability to detox at the same speed as others, right? And I believe if memory serves me it's the HLA DR gene where those people that are exposed to it is like 20 to 25% of the population that are going to have more of an issue than others.

Now that doesn't mean that, let's say you have a perfectly well individual who does not have that gene mutation. If they walk into a moldy home, they still could have an acute reaction, but the person that has this particular gene issue may actually have a much more difficult time detoxing and it may stick with them that much longer.

So I've seen that so many families, I can't even tell you, where one person is sick and it almost seems like they're being told it's in your head, you're crazy or whatever, right? And it turns out, no, in actual fact, they really do have an issue in that once you get the mold out of the home, they get better.

Ashley James (1:08:03.188)

Can you run down the list of here's your sign. If you hear a symptom, you think we got to check mold. Can you run down the list of all the symptoms?

Brandon Faust (1:08:17.136)

There's the respiratory issues, there's the allergic reactions, the hives, headaches, fatigue, skin irritation, even like neurological systems, difficulty concentrating, memory loss, dizziness, brain fog, there can be joint pain and inflammation that goes with that. But some of it is even like mental health issues, like anxiety, depression, sudden mood swings.

You can have nausea, vomiting. Some listeners have probably heard of mass cell activation syndrome or chronic inflammation response syndrome. So when you take a mold spore and you're inhaling it, it's a foreign invader into the body. So similar to like when you get bit by a mosquito or stung by a bee, what tends to happen?

You can get a swelling or an inflammation of that particular area. It gets itchy. And it's a similar thing. You're taking in this foreign invader and the body can have that same sort of histamine release. Where you now are experiencing this inflammation or pain or itchiness or what not. But the mycotoxins are different than the mold spores. They're an ultra fine particle.

So, the unfortunate part with the mycotoxins is they tend to be fatty in substance, so there's a natural affinity to the fattiest part of the body, which is the brain. So there is the interruption of communication in terms of the nervous system as well. So some of these things are more long-term. And again, I'm not a health practitioner. I've just interviewed a lot of the professionals in the area in terms of the impact that mold can have on the body. Mosaic Diagnostics, they are doing a mycotoxin panel and an oats panel But their mycotoxin profile it shows what different mycotoxins have been linked to which physical issues So you have like Alzheimer's? Parkinson's dementia and even a carcinogenic aspect of mold toxicity.

If you look at Dr. Jill Carnahan, she was talking about one of the things that they're finding in tumors, cancer is a fungus. So I think that it's one of these subjects that there's so many different potential ramifications. It's hard to pinpoint one, but there's no question that the exposure to mold, mold spores and mycotoxins it’s not good. That's why I tell people there's no mold that's a good mold to have in your home. So, if somebody tells you oh, that's not a mold that's concerning. It's no big deal that's a huge red flag, especially if there's somebody in the Industry is considered to be a professional.

Ashley James (1:11:29.587)

Got it. Yes, it's okay that you're not a doctor. You've been around this so long. You're sharing from your experience and we're here to listen. After 3,500 homes, you've heard, 3,500 stories of how mold has impacted people's lives and how removing it has helped their lives. So you're an expert. You don't have a degree. You're not medically treating anyone, but you're bringing your plethora of knowledge and experience to show like it's without a doubt removing mold from someone's home makes a huge difference to the quality of the life of everyone in that home and even people who visit that home because like even visiting someone's home with mold has an impact on you for a few days like we really need to take this seriously.

I told you about this off air, but I interviewed Andrew Pace, who's like a world leading expert on non-toxic home materials. And we talked about why is it that some homes are prone to mold? And it's because of the quote unquote green practices of making homes more energy efficient. In doing so, they forgot that we need to have constant circulation and get the moisture out. And so these newer homes are actually mold manufacturing, like they're just mold factories because they're more green, especially like up in the North where we need it to be warmer. Like when it's cold in the winter, we need to keep the house warm. So they've sealed it off and there's not enough circulation.

And then he talked about how certain states have had to go in and implement a law that in building, they have to provide this ventilation so it doesn't create mold. But that still doesn't help you if you happen to buy a home that was built during the time when they weren't making homes drafty, right?

If you buy a hundred year old home it’s better than a 20-year old home in some cases, because 100-year old homes are going to be drafty. And that is kind of like natural mold prevention. But it's a little hard to heat. But it's back then we heated with fire, which is it's drying for the house. And then the whole home was kind of drafty. So we might have had mold like less 100 years ago than we do now. It's just funny to think you think everything's getting better. But in some cases, we made it worse.

Brandon Faust (1:14:11.699)

Well, that's absolutely correct in that ventilation is such a crucial element to making sure that your air quality is excellent because when you think about it to your point, you're never going to live your best life. You're never going to have the best quality of life if your air quality is subpar. It's just not possible. It's one of those things, that in order to live your best life, you need to have clean food clean water and clean air. It's just part of your overall health. And if any one of those are contaminated, there's going to be a much higher chance for illness, for disease, for sickness. So, when you get to sort of what is the actual cause of these problems? Why is mold now all of a sudden becoming a big issue where 40 years ago it wasn't? Well, it may have been an issue 40 years ago and people just didn’t know what it was and now more and more people are starting to realize that it is an actual cause, it is a situation, but there also is a point that just like you're talking about these energy efficient homes that are more airtight. It is like putting that car in a garage and sealing it up. And if there isn't that cross flow of fresh air or ventilation, it can be really bad for the people that are living in that particular building envelope.

So there's another factor, which a lot of times, there's a couple factors, but one of them is the lumber or the timber itself that the homes are being built with. So that old timber, the actual makeup of that wood was much tighter, it was much stronger, and it had an antimicrobial factor in itself, where the new lumber is far more cellulose. That young lumber is something that mold tends to feed off of. And then not only that, there's some of these composite materials that have more glue in the material. And that's also going to be more prone to microbial growth because mold loves anything that is organic. Paper, wood, leather, so it will feed off of it. So if you have glue in the material, and it's a composite material that's also wood or paper or like drywall which also has a paper on it, yes mold's going to love that. So and if you look at the building material that many homes used to have, plaster, the acidic nature of plaster it was at a different level on the pH scale and mold actually does not like plaster for that reason alone.

So, there are certain materials that we build with now that are far more prone to mold exposure. And then there's another element that is one of these ones that many people will not think with or not thinking with at all, which is the EMF exposure. So you have the electromagnetic frequency and electromagnetic fields. So that output is something that actually is disturbing to colonize mold so it makes it replicate faster. There was a study that is, go ahead.

Ashley James (1:17:35.883)

Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. This is huge. My mind is exploding. Are you saying that electronics like electromagnetic field, which is basically of wires in your home, you have a cell phone, you have a wireless printer, you have wifi, you have a smart TV, you have a microwave, it's like crack to mold and it increases the strength and the growth of the mold.

Brandon Faust (1:18:06.668)

That's exactly right. Yes.

Ashley James (1:18:10.080)

So I was right. So like if we had a house a hundred years ago, we would have less mold problems than we do now. That is crazy. So you're saying that modern building materials, more recent changes, are like just feed mold. The mold loves to eat it. The more wireless we get, the more mold loves it. Just wants to come and digest our house. This is insane.

Brandon Faust (1:18:40.470)

Well, you're agitating it, right? That's what's occurring. So if there's an interview from a doctor in Europe, Dr. Klinghardt.

Ashley James (1:18:48.696)

I've had him on my show. He's great. I love Dr. Klinghardt. I had him on my show. Sorry.

Brandon Faust (1:18:50.665)

That interview is all about EMF and what that can do. And the actual frequency, like that EMF exposure, there is a connection between EMF and mold and that it grows 600 times faster. So he had one of those, Faraday cages, right, that was protecting one set of books and another set of books that didn't have it.

So that exposure set it off and it grew and was put that much more toxic. So yes, it is an issue. Look, that sounds kind of way out there, but based on my understanding of mold, and if you just think about it, mold is so sensitive that if there's another mold in its territory, it puts out more mycotoxins. So mold is very territorial. So if you look at like a Petri dish that has two different types of mold in the Petri dish, you will see a distinct dividing line between the two molds until the one that is stronger starts to get more and more of its spores into the other territory and then it starts feeding off the other mold. But it actually, the whole point of mycotoxins is to prevent other molds from encroaching on its territory. So it literally is like gang warfare in the Petri dish.

So if you have something that is sitting there and agitating and disturbing the mold, like the EMF waves, you can actually set it off where it's growing that much faster.

Ashley James (1:20:29.889)

That's just wild. Okay. I want to address the subject of home remediation, home mold killing. So people go, oh, there's mold in my bathroom. I'm going to spray it with whatever, like, hydrogen peroxide. I'm going to spray it with bleach. I'm going to go on Amazon and buy something that says it kills mold.

What are your thoughts on this? Because I have never seen it actually work. And from my understanding, does more harm than good. But so many people think that they can just buy something on the shelves and then take care of it themselves.

Brandon Faust (1:21:12.167)

Well, it goes back to this point of mold being a living, breathing organism. It doesn’t matter what product you use. Look, bleach has its own toxic element, which I strongly don't recommend using. It's going to take the color out of it, but it's also going to add more toxins to the home. But even if you're using something that I appreciate and I like a lot as a product, whether it's a concentrated vinegar or hydrogen peroxide or in some cases, let's say you're using thyme oil as an antimicrobial, any of those products are going to create an agitating effect.

So like if you've ever had mold in the shower and you hit it with this product and you go to scrub it away and you come back three weeks later, four weeks later, and now it's in places that it wasn't before, like why is that?

Well, you've just agitated it and now spread the spores and now they've had a chance to germinate and grow and they're starting to colonize and spread their roots. So you've basically helped to transport it. Same type of thing if you have mold on the ceiling of a particular area and you just hit it with a product and go and wipe it down, you've just aerosolized those mold spores. Not to mention, set it off in terms of producing more mycotoxins. So that's why it's so important that when you're doing mold remediation or mold removal, that you are cutting out the contaminated material in a way where you're removing the actual source itself. And the less agitating, the better. So when you have like a general contractor that tends to really think mold is no big deal, it's like a very common theme amongst general contractors. They just go and smash it, tear it out, and rebuild it and call it a day. Well, they didn't.

Maybe they thought they were doing a good thing by tearing it out, and to some degree, that is the right thing to do, but that tear out action is basically like setting off a bomb on a mushroom. What's going to happen? You're going to like, the spore explosion is now going to spread those little babies to other areas of the home. So you want to do it as delicately as possible.

Ashley James (1:23:25.321)

Exactly. What are your main tips for preventing mold in the first place?

Brandon Faust (1:23:31.797)

The most important element of all is that your home is clean and dry and proper ventilation. Those are the most basic sort of advice I could give to prevent mold. It's keep your home as clean and dry as possible. So, now dry as possible, maybe let me rephrase that. You don't want your relative humidity to at 60% relative humidity, mold will start to grow.

So now you also have to keep in mind that, for example, we have a higher RH every day in our bathrooms. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to have mold growth, but you have to dry it out. And I always, always recommend having like a fan go on to help dry the air in the bathroom because I can't tell you how many homes I've been in where there's been mold on the ceiling and they hit it with bleach and scrubbed it and it keeps coming back and they don't know why. Well the reason why is that they don't have proper ventilation, they don't have a fan, the humidity stays high and then the mold starts growing and then they make it worse by scrubbing it down. So having a dehumidifier on hand if your home continues to have like over 60% relative humidity is not a bad idea making sure that your HVAC unit is properly calibrated ensuring that you do not have an overgrowth of mold in your HVAC.

Definitely, when you're dealing with HVAC professionals, a lot of them like in Florida an HVAC guy, it's actually against the law for them to say that they handle mold. They cannot say that they handle mold. So they won't even call it mold. So the only person that can handle mold is somebody who's got a mold license. And ironically, a mold guy cannot go into an HVAC unit, per law. Yes, they are against, it is against the law for them to go into an HVAC unit.

Ashley James (1:25:44.655)

Wait, so hold on, hold on, okay. So you have mold in your HVAC, but HVAC professionals can't treat mold, and mold professionals can't treat HVAC. How is that? Does that even make sense?

Brandon Faust (1:25:57.391)

Welcome to Florida. So this is a huge issue. And the only way I was able to get around it was getting a license for both. Because for me, the air quality is so crucial and that HVAC unit plays such an important role in your air quality that as a mold guy, if I was not properly addressing that, I was not fully solving the problem for my clients.

So in some states that may not be the case, but it is the case here in Florida. So, when I'm seeing mold growth on the ceiling of a bathroom or in the grout, the first place I'm going to is actually the HVAC, believe it or not, because that's where it's actually coming from. That's the source is in that plenum box and it's now spreading and finding places to grow where it's wet. So mold loves water, and that is back to my point that if you want to prevent mold, it is keep your home as clean and dry and properly ventilated as possible.

So one of the places it will find mold that often gets underlooked or overlooked is the behind paintings or behind photographs. And, for the snowbirds that go out of town, they come home and they see a little bit of mold and we start moving paintings or pictures off the wall and it's covered in mold behind those paintings. Why? Because it's dark, it's damp, and there's not a lot of ventilation. There's not a lot of airflow behind them. So thinking with that in terms of having proper airflow, and that's why it's so important that you have your fans on. And if you look at tropical areas, that's one of the things that fans do, is that they circulate the air. We've had homes where they have a vaulted ceiling, and they're 12 feet high or 13 feet high or 15 feet high, and there's a ton of microbial growth at the top of that vaulted ceiling, and they're trying to figure out why.

Well, the reason why is because hot air rises, and your central heating and air, the vents are at like eight feet. So there's this space that there's no airflow. And of course, it's just staying there. So it's that hot, humid air is lingering. And once you get the mold starting to grow, it grows faster and faster, similar to like a pool with algae in it. Like once it starts turning a little bit green, if you don't jump on that fast, right?

It's going to get greener and greener and be much more difficult to handle. So that's why the prevention is so important. That's why this book, The Mold-Free Living, How to Prevent Mold in Humid Climates, that's the book that your listeners can download at moldebook.com. It goes over each of these points. It really was developed to create an action plan to prevent it in the first place because it's so much less expensive to prevent it than having to deal with it once it's overtaken your home. So we've seen these snowbirds that do come back and literally everything, similar to your friend's car. Imagine walking home to that. Walking, you've been gone for four, five months, you come home and that's what you're seeing, is a white-green growth over every item. And I can't tell you how many times I've seen that here.

Ashley James (1:29:48.279)

So I love that you give us a free book. Thank you. I joke about how like our bodies didn't come with a manual. Like God didn't say, welcome to the world. Here's how your body functions and here's how life works. Well, we're here to discover. We're here to learn. Unfortunately, we learn more lessons from our mistakes. But let's learn from other people's mistakes. And that's why I love hearing stories, because let's just learn from other people's mistakes. I'd rather not have to live through everything. It's funny.

My son, I can't wait to see the man he becomes, because he's so intelligent like, he observes things that blow my mind. And he is very communicative and he is a negotiator. I did not sit down and go, here's how you knew. He's a shrewd negotiator. I think there's some kind of DNA memory passed down because he is like a carbon copy of my dad. He's like a salesman, but in the most beautiful way. He's so great. When I see him communicate, I'm really impressed with that. He observes things that I cannot believe what I learned from him, but he's one of those personalities that he has to learn by doing. You could say, don't touch the stove, it's hot. You could say that to him a million times. He's got to burn himself to learn the lesson. And there's just certain people out there that they have to learn by going through the bad experience. I hope that by saying this, I can warn every listener. Let's not wait until you have mold problems and health problems because of the mold. Let's not wait. Let's not be one of those people that has to learn firsthand from your own personal life problems. Let's learn from the 3,500 homes that Brandon has worked on. And those are families. Those are 3,500 families, right, that you've helped.

And those are lessons that we can learn. So let's learn from other people's really negative and sometimes the darkest moments in their lives. Cause it is not just a weekend like, oh, let's get rid of the mold this weekend. Okay. I'll go to Disney world or whatever Disneyland or whatever. And I see Universal Studios. I'm going to go to Universal Studios in Orlando and I'll be back. And then my house will be done. It's usually six months to a year or more of health problems

before figuring it out and then talk insurance, testing, dealing with insurance, finding a good company, then you're on the wait list for the company and then finally they're doing the work and it could be weeks and weeks of work.

One of my guests who I've had on the show twice, Trina Hammack and it's a great interview. The first interview she gave was about how they bought a house in California and they moved in and she proceeded to get so sick because the house had hidden mold that she had to buy a tent and for six months she lived in a tent. Can you imagine having to pay a mortgage but you're like you're homeless? She could not enter the house. She got so sick but all her belongings were now covered in mold spores until she found this. That's how I learned about Green Home Solutions because they came in and they removed all the mold and then they sprayed the enzyme that breaks it down and everything.

Then it took her six months. So for her, it was six months before she could enter her home again, because that's how long it took for her to find the company. But mold problems, when you have it, isn't just like get rid of it in a weekend. And it's health problems that could last for months or years. So let's learn from Brandon and all the past experiences. Let's prevent it. So let's get the free book. So that's moldebook.com. Let's get the free book and learn.

This is the manual. You should print it out, give it to your friends. This is the manual that all our homes should have come with. This is the manual that, real estate agents should give this ebook to their clients. Because it's like, we weren't born with these manuals, but like, let's learn from the past. Let's learn from the experiences of others. And that is the manual that houses should come with.

And builders should have it, contractors, real estate agents should have this, should go by these tips and also teach them to their clients. I think that would really go far to have a real estate agent hand this to people and make them aware. And that would really give them credit. So that's a free book. So thank you for gifting that to us. Now you have a course that you created and it is less than $40, which so worth it. Tell us about your Healthy Home Guide Course and that is found on your website moldsolutions.com

Brandon Faust (1:34:48.988)

Correct, so it's moldsolutions.com/healthyhomeguide. And it gets into the importance of air quality and what are some of the products that you could be using in your home that are also going to be a lot safer and for cleaning and products that are effective but are not having that same chemical makeup that could expose us to various VOCs. But also how to keep the home clean and dry because at the end of the day that's what causes the trouble. So that's the healthy home guide is basically that sort of experience of what products to use to keep the home as clean and healthy as possible.

So yes, there's the free download and then there's the course aspect of it as well. So it's about two and a half hours. You go at your own pace, of course, but I, it's definitely eye opening in regards to really what products to use and how to keep your your indoor air quality in your home as safe as possible.

Ashley James (1:35:50.866)

So those are both for like prevention. If someone suspects mold in their house, would they also benefit from that course?

Brandon Faust (1:35:58.402)

Of course, because at the end of the day, if it's there, you have to handle it and you have to handle it the right way. So I do not consider mold to be a do it yourself project, really. And even with people that are certified and professional, it's still the wild west. It's still something that you have to really vet your people.

And another resource that I like to talk about that is a free resource is a Facebook group called Mold and Toxins Healing Your Home and Body. In this Facebook group, it's got probably 25,000 people in it at this point in time. It's pretty big, but the lady who started it, she is not a professional remediator, but she ended up taking the same class that I took. So there's only about 50 of us nationwide that have done this class. You would have thought it would have been a lot more, but it really, this kind of goes to show that the number of remediators that really are taking this to heart and taking it seriously, it's not that much because I can tell you there's 50 mold remediation companies and, Pinellas County alone where I'm located, but nationwide there's not even 50 that have done the course on remediation for sensitized individuals. So this is a course that was put together by the president of the National Organization for Remediators and Mold Inspectors in partnership with a fellow by the name of Michael Pinto, who's an absolute genius when it comes to proper remediation. So they did this certification for remediation for sensitized individuals.

And the lady, Kendra, who runs the mold and toxins healing your home and body, that group, although not a professional remediator, really knows her stuff and has put together a ton of free resources for somebody to make sure that if they do have mold, how do you properly handle it? How do you vet the company? How do you vet the mold inspector? What are your options?

And I think that it's an infinitely valuable place to go if you're wondering like, okay, how do I prevent mold? And then if I have it, how do I get rid of it? And how do I find the right company, the right inspector, and the right team to really ensure that my home is free and clear as possible from mold and its byproducts?

Ashley James (1:38:47.104)

Nice. So tell us, because obviously listeners are all around the world, but if they happen to be in Florida, what areas do you serve?

Brandon Faust (1:38:55.510)

So we really primarily focus on the greater Tampa Bay area. So of course, Tampa, Clearwater, Sarasota, we'll go as far south as Sarasota, but I've gone all the way down to Miami for a remediation project. Just depending on the scenario, depending on the situation, we have a lot of some of the best clinics, really in my opinion, some of the best clinics in the world for treating mold toxicity here in the, Pinellas County, Tampa Bay area. So a lot of times they have people that fly in and we have flown out to homes to help them with their mold issues.

So, it just kind of really depends on the scenario but you want somebody who really does know their stuff and is going to do a very, very thorough job, especially when it comes to anything like if you're mold sensitive and it's debilitating, you have to have to have the right team working together to get your home up to a point where it is free and clear. Now, that same level might not be necessary for everybody. But at the same time, I would not underestimate the impact that mold can have.

Even if it doesn't seem like you're impacted or your family is impacted, there's still potentially long-term problems that can result from mold exposure. So you also really need to think with that as well.

Ashley James (1:40:30.988)

How do you know you have mold? What would you say are the early, early warning signs? Besides like, wow, what's that black stuff on the wall? Like what are the early warning signs? Like headaches for me are a big thing. I guess the smell of what people call mildew or it's musky. I'm sorry, that's mold. So if you think something smells musky or mildewy, that's mold. But what early warning signs that we don't necessarily realize early warning signs.

Brandon Faust (1:41:04.866)

Well, let's say you're starting to wake up with joint pain and you're not used to that. Even if you are 65 or whatever, if you didn't have these environmental triggers, how long could we live? How good could you feel if you weren't overloaded with toxins? So, I would say you have to really know yourself and know your body and what are the non-optimum sensations that are starting to take place and there's no real explanation as to why that is. Because that's really what's taking place is there is some sort of an allergic reaction, and in some cases it's similar to a poisonous reaction, like if you get bit by a snake, you can definitely tell the pain of getting bitten, but then there's a poison going through your body.

So that's the type of thing that you have to be aware of, is that you could be exposed to a poison. And if there's a rapid degeneration, or there's a rapid decline, that's something that I would absolutely be looking to, an environmental trigger. Or let's say you are in your home, you're feeling one way, you go on vacation and you're in a different place and your body is starting to feel better and it's starting to recover, and then you come back home and now all of a sudden you're not feeling well again.

Well, that's another massive sign. So, of course, there's the visual aspect of it and knowing what to look for in terms of the pattern. A lot of people, when they see the beginning stages of mold, they say it looks like little mold spores, right? They call it, oh, look at those spores. Well, if you're seeing mold you're not looking at spores you're seeing the beginning stages of colonization or germination. A mold spore is seven microns. The human hair is seventy microns.

Ashley James (1:43:09.449)

Yes, you're not seeing spores. But you're inhaling them and they're getting into your bloodstream, they're getting into your brain, like that's mycotoxins. If you're breathing in spores, that's unhealthy.

Brandon Faust (1:43:24.731)

So the mycotoxins are 0.1 micron. So you literally could fit 700 of those on the tip of a human hair. So you're absolutely not going to see them. And that's why I'm such an advocate of, air sampling is a very small slice of the pie when it comes to building an indoor air quality profile, because the current system for testing the air is using a spore trap. So they basically take this little circular device, they put it on a suction pump, and they run it for five minutes, send it to the lab, and the lab tells you whether or not there's elevated levels of mold spores, right, compared to an outside air sample. The problem with that is that they are only collecting spores. They do not collect mycotoxins, and if they do collect them, the microscope doesn't pick up the mycotoxin. It requires something far more sensitive to determine how many mycotoxins are present.

So it is one of those things where it gives you data that can be valuable, especially if it's elevated. If you have like 4,000 aspergillus penicillium in your home, and I really don't care what the outside air sample says. Let's say the outside air sample is 10,000 and you have 4,000 in your home. Somebody might say, well, the 4,000 is not that big a deal because outside is higher. No, if you have that much aspergillus penicillium floating around in your air, it's going to make you sick, it's going to cause reactions, it's not good for you.

So you want to do something to, number one, the source may be outside, but you still need to figure out how to detox your air if it's inside at those levels. But there's other spores where even if there's like one or two, those spores are considered to be of a more toxic variety, but that is a little bit misleading because let's say you do have black mold, which is Stachybotrys, and you have one or two of those spores. That could call for, well we need to locate where it's at and actually properly remediate it. Now the biggest reason why is because that type of mold comes from a water intrusion issue. So there's most likely a leaky pipe. There's most likely some sort of continual water source coming into your home. So you need to find out what the actual water source is for that particular type of mold.

Whereas aspergillus penicillium is what would be referenced as a dry mold, meaning it can form without a continual water source, the water source being the humidity alone.So a wet mold requires a certain moisture content in the material, like 90%, whereas a dry mold can start growing at just 60% relative humidity which is the amount of water droplets that are in the actual air. So a lot easier for it to start growing and contaminating your home.

Ashley James (1:46:26.067)

Yes, and with the fan on in my bathroom, I got it on Amazon years ago and I absolutely love it. I highly recommend everyone get one. It detects humidity in the air and the temperature and I have that in my bathroom and it gets into the 70% and this is with the fan on after a shower. It's in the 70s humidity.

If I didn't turn the fan on, it stays that way all day. Like you turn the fan on before you even turn the shower on and leave it on for a good half an hour or longer after you've had your shower or open the window and leave it open for a while because you want it below 60%, like you said, 60 or lower. You don't want to create the environment in your home for mold. Like, a slow drip under a sink, that could cause black mold where there's a water leak somewhere. But it is more scary to think about those molds that aren't so obvious, right? It's just, you've got an area in your home and it could be a crawl space. It could be the attic that is like moist, warm, and not circulating air. It's just accumulating.

Brandon Faust (1:47:43.803)

Actually, I had a guy, professional golf player, who was sick for over an entire year and was basically not able to function and operate. His game was off and he thought he was just declining at a very rapid rate. So I said, Bob, let me come and check your home and see what's going on. And I got to his master bedroom and started looking around, got a flashlight going, and every surface in his master bedroom was covered with a thin white film. And that's actually Aspergillius at its beginning stages. So he didn't like it cold. He liked it warm. So he didn't turn his AC on and didn't realize that he was basically poisoning himself because of his humidity levels and the amount of microbial growth. He came from the West Coast of Florida and didn't really understand the climate and how much of an impact that it has. So similar to that, like I had another lady that I helped another family, one of the top ranking doctors in all of Florida and I won't say his name, but one of the top ranking doctors in all of Florida and his wife was completely sick, like debilitated sick. Three boys, they had moved to Florida from the West Coast and she was living in an older home and there was something about the home that wasn't sitting right with her, which is probably the HVAC. So, in her nature, she opened up the doors and windows in what she was doing without realizing it was making the problem so much worse because the mold that was there was now getting enough water from the humidity levels outside coming into the home because hot will move to cold, just like wet will move to dry. So depending on your climate, when you open the windows and doors, you might be inviting a bunch of moisture and mold spores into the home.

And then you end up with overgrowth where it's all over everything. So they didn't realize that. So we had to get them out of that house, because they were renting that house at the time, but it actually came from her actions. And not knowing, like it may have started with some of the stuff in the home, but she was exacerbating it by like a hundred times by opening the windows and doors in the summer

It really is so important to understand the climate that you're living in and what will contribute to microbial growth. So when you have the wet mold, yes, that's a water intrusion issue. When you have dry molds, that's a humidity issue. Being able to understand the difference, because if you have a bunch of microbial growth on shoes, purses, clothes, couches, that pretty much tells you it's a humidity-driven mold. Otherwise, why would it be on these different surfaces?

Now, you could also have a little bit of a curve ball where it's because you have let's say you have a pipe that is broken and adding moisture to the environment. So now you have not only a wet mold, but you now have set off a dry mold explosion because of that moisture level remaining high, even though the source may be a broken pipe that's leaking, it's adding to the relative humidity. So that would be kind of the worst case scenario, right? But these are all things that your mold inspector or your mold remediator really should be aware of.

Ashley James (1:51:44.829)

That really blew my mind, the idea that opening the windows can make it worse, just depending on the humidity, because that's my first go-to instinct, like open up the windows, like let the natural air in, hopefully the air quality outside is better than the air quality inside, and let's all air it out. But depending on where you live, that is the worst thing you could do if you have the beginning stages of a mold somewhere in your home.

You got to keep the humidity down. And again, it depends on region and time of year. I remember being in Chicago in the summer once, it was sunny and it was a hundred percent humidity. And I was like, this is insane. It was so muggy. And then again, I was in like August in Orlando and it was beautiful skies and it was a hundred percent humidity, not raining. It's a hundred percent humidity. I'm like, I feel like I'm breathing water. It can get pretty intense.

And then there's areas like Nevada where I used to live and there was carpeting in the bathroom because it's so dry there. Doesn't mean you won't get mold. There's definitely mold everywhere. But you just have to know especially when you're moving from to a new area where you're not you're not used to or you don't know these things. You've got to ask around. You got to learn about how it works in your area. Talk to locals. How do they prevent mold in their homes? What do they do? And I love the idea of just having that simple $20 device that reads the humidity levels so that you can keep watch of it. And maybe you do need to get a dehumidifier. That makes a huge difference. It also raises the electric bill, so you've got to be vigilant to get the fan on whenever you're cooking, whenever you're in the bathroom, anytime there's something that's increasing moisture in your home. Even if you're doing the laundry and it kind of gets moist in the laundry room, turn the fan on, get that out of the house.

Brandon Faust (1:53:46.307)

And let me throw you another little curve ball, right? So putting on the fan is a huge plus point. It's something that you should do, right? It's absolutely a positive. But if you leave it on for too long, it can be detrimental. Why? Because you're actually putting the home under negative air. So if it's properly done, it should be ventilating outside. So if that fan is running too long, and that's where most people don't realize this, that if let's say you're cooking, you put on the vent hood, or you are in the bathroom and you leave it on, you've now created a negative air situation where the air inside is being blown outside, so air needs to be pulled from another location. Well, let's say you have mold behind the walls and you don't know it, then you can bring it into your house. And that's exactly what, that's what happened to me.

When I was in 2019, I had a pain in my chest that would not go away. I had fatigue. I was having a fever at least once a month. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I took an air sample in my master bedroom. It was totally fine. It was clean. I had sanitized my house earlier. The levels looked great. I had popped a baseboard in one of the areas of the master bedroom that I was a little suspicious of. Nothing, no problem.

Okay, still sick. I took a physical mycotoxin test with at the time, which was Great Plains Laboratory. Now that's Mosaic. Did the mycotoxin test, came back at a high level. So high was like five to 50, and I was at 1,240. So at least my body was detoxing. So it was getting rid of it, but I couldn't keep up. So the amount of mold that I was being exposed to, I couldn't keep up with the level of detox needed.

So that's when I was taking the Spanish black radish, like popping them like candy. So I thought, it's from going into other people's moldy homes and it may have played a factor, but then six months later, my AC overflows and I had continuous flooring throughout my house. So I'm removing all the continuous flooring, get to the master bedroom, pop a baseboard on the other side of the room. And I knew exactly what I was looking at. It's a mold called Ketomium. It's a highly toxic mold.

So then I started to look behind the wall and sure enough, two feet up was another mold called Aspergillus penicillium. So these two molds were literally fighting it out in my master bedroom. I thought I was in a safe zone and it was literally a biological warfare zone. And once I got rid of it, did the full remediation process, did the micro cleaning, did the sanitization, did all of that, within three weeks, all of my symptoms went away.

Ashley James (1:56:36.989)

So whenever you had a fan on, like in the bathroom, is the bathroom like off the bedroom? Was it like, so yes, master bathroom. You're doing the good thing you're supposed to do, but it creates negative pressure. And so it's going to pull from the easiest source. The easiest source happened to be through the floorboards and the wall and your, the cracks in the master bedroom. And it was pulling it right into your face.

So maybe we open a window somewhere in the house, open a window, a crack, so when we're turning the fan on, it's pulling clean air, hopefully from outside, rather than from somewhere in the home where there's mold. Bad that you had that experience, good that you figured the root cause. And think about how many people who don't have your knowledge base live years in that suffering. And then they go to doctor after doctor after doctor, put on drug after drug after drug and get sicker and sicker. And this is so common.

Brandon Faust (1:57:47.528)

I went to three doctors myself, right? One of them said I needed EKG. Another doctor said I had lyme disease. Another doctor said I had an autoimmune disease. And hey, maybe there was truth in some of that. Fortunately, my heart was great, but I had a pain in my chest. So that was the first place that they were directing me. But it didn't solve it. And I was literally like six Spanish black radish at every meal popping it, and that was the only thing that would give me any sort of relief at the time, so it was a serious situation and it was like stopping me from being able to work, especially when the fevers were coming and I thought I was sick and the fatigue. So there's a lot of this type of stuff that, you just don't know what's actually causing it.

Ashley James (1:58:39.882)

And this is in the home of someone who is highly knowledgeable about mold, right? Like this happened and you're very diligent and it's kind of scary to think that this happens in the house of someone who is highly, highly diligent, knows what they're doing. And just think about the people that don't know what they're doing, right? Like how much mold is living in the floorboards and living behind the paintings and behind the walls and in the HVAC. It's pretty creepy, but if you're experiencing health problems and doctors can't figure it out or every doctor says it's a different thing. The thing with those doctors though is like every hammer looks like a nail. They're going to hear the symptoms and go, oh, it must be this thing that they're an expert in like lyme disease.

Sure, it’s a swer of weird symptoms so we could kind of say, okay, lyme doctor says it's lyme disease, autoimmune doctor says it's autoimmune disease, heart doctor says it's heart problems, right? And that's the problem with mold exposure is that it mimics a lot of other chronic health issues.

Brandon Faust (1:59:50.002)

And that's why the testing is so crucial, but it's also understanding and knowing how to read the test because let's say a person's in a moldy environment and they take a mycotoxin test, right, which is normally a urine test, and then they don't show up with any sort of mycotoxins. Well, that's actually not a good sign, that's a bad sign, because most likely they're not detoxing. So their body is holding onto it.

So you need to actually know somebody that understands the way it works. Find people that are knowledgeable. And how do you read it? How do you interpret it? So that's also a crucial element is really knowing what to look for.

And also same thing goes with mold inspectors. Like for example, there was one place, I remember it was early on, where I was experimenting myself wanting to get an understanding of these different tools that I had in my tool belt. And I did an air sample in a room that was full of stachybotrys chartum, that's black mold, that's a technical term for black mold, and I put the pump on a ladder and was running it for five minutes, and then I took a swab just to verify a direct sample on the black mold, did that on the roof, came back with like, 100,000 mold spores of stachybotrys on the swab, and the air sample came back completely clean.

Ashley James (2:01:22.046)

That's my fear. Someone's going to pay $400 for air samples and it comes back clean, but they still suffer. We're like, well, we rolled out mold. I don't know. I guess it's an autoimmune condition. So put me on all these autoimmune suppressants and steroids or whatever.

Brandon Faust (2:01:38.452)

That's why it is so important, truly, to know the different testing methodologies and know that there's not one that is absolute. So there's combinations that help to cover all the ground. One of them, which I've actually heard a lot of good things about, is like a mold-sniffing dog, believe it or not, which happens to be the cutest of all the solutions of all. But they come and they go through the points and it's got probably twice as effective or three times as effective as the air sampling. Air sampling's like 70% inaccurate where a mold sniffing dog is like 90% accurate. So, that's where knowing kind of what are the different testing methodologies and modalities that are available.

There's the direct sample which is probably the most effective if you know where to look and where to find it because you're putting the actual swab to the growth and you're getting a clump of it, sending it off to the lab to confirm that it's an issue. The mold sniffing dog is a great way to go. The immunolytics, the Petri dishes, they have a time and a place, but keep in mind every place is probably going to have some mold spores, so you really have to follow the instructions. You have some of the more sensitive testing, like the dust sampling, et cetera, that gives you a good idea of whether or not there's mold in the house or there has been mold in the house and the mycotoxins. Real-time lab does a mycotoxin test, that you can do a urine sample, and also a Swiffer sample on the dust of the home, as long as you're following the instructions. And then there's nothing that really beats an experienced inspector that is health-centric that knows where to look, what to look for. Is going in the attic. If you have crawlspace under your home, going in the crawlspace. Is willing to do like cavity samples where they are testing behind walls. If there's any sort of area of suspect water intrusion. They walk the perimeter of the house. They're looking all around for any sort of water intrusion issues where the water's not flowing outside.

So all of these things have to be taken into consideration when you're trying to determine whether or not mold is an issue because it can be hidden. It can be in places that you wouldn't normally look. But, if you or somebody you love is in a home and they feel poorly in the home that they're living in and they go away for a couple weeks and they start to feel better, I immediately would look into mold as a possible cause.

Ashley James (2:04:22.300)

This has been truly enlightening. I really hope that this interview helps just thousands and thousands of people. Cause if people who listen to the show are wanting to get their health taken to the next level. And a lot of people wait until they have some symptoms before they start, they're motivated to listen to two hour long podcast about holistic health. So I hope this reaches everyone that needs to hear it.

And what you're doing is amazing. This level of education needs to get out there. Like it is ridiculous how this is the hidden epidemic in our homes so that most of our homes are on some level poisoning us. And whether it's off gassing of formaldehyde. I have several interviews about that but my favorite one I think is with Andy Pace, it's episode 453. Where we go into some pretty crazy stories and understanding just how toxic our air quality is. And this is without mold. Now, mold is a big issue in any area, in any climate. It can happen. And it happens even in the homes of the most knowledgeable people we see with Brandon. Now, I'm curious, though, in 2019 when this happened, your health was greatly affected. What about your family? Did it impact their health at all?

Brandon Faust (2:05:49.742)

It was very minimal and I think it goes back to that concept of like, let's say you have a cup, right? And you're emptying it daily. But once you get it to a point where it's overflowing and it's not emptying or the water is going too fast into that cup, that's when you have the mess, right? So I was never getting a chance to detox. So I was going into moldy homes by day. In a moldy home by night, right? Sleeping and being exposed and not realizing how much of a toxic load I was taking on.

Ashley James (2:06:31.084)

Yep. We had an RV, a really nice one. And it's really hard. This is kind of a movement. I don't know if you've noticed the last five years, like it's kind of a desirable thing to live in a van down by the river. It wasn't when we were younger. But now, those are some life goals, like just own a van and live down by the river. A lot of people are living in various types of vehicles by choice, and it's a lifestyle, whether it be a van or a 46-foot RV. Mold is a huge issue as well, because it is a vehicle. I learned very quickly.

That it is not a home on wheels. It is a car. The temperature changes rapidly. Moisture accumulates on the windows and mold grows almost immediately on every single window sill and you have to constantly have dehumidifiers running and fans running. And that mold can grow in the corners and it takes over. So a lot of people are living in RVs and not aware of the things that they need to do. Do you have any advice for those who are living on the road?

Brandon Faust (2:07:51.449)

Ironically, we have an RV as well, right? And it was sitting for probably three or four months. And then I went inside to take it on the road. I had a mold bloom in the RV. So it was pretty intense to kind of walk into that and see it, you have to kind of don your proper personal protection equipment, PPE, face mask, HEPA VAC the whole place, wiped it all down. It had a air scrubber going while we were doing it. And then at the same time, after all of that was done, I did the whole home sanitization process with the fogging, the dry fog, and it was fantastic afterwards, and it didn't come back.

So it's really a matter of like making sure that you are taking the proper approach. And you may be able to do a certain slice of that pie, but for example, the dry fogging is something that requires special equipment and special product, but there's a company out there that is actually pretty economical and they do a sanitization process, it's called pure maintenance, and their fogging system is superior. It's a phenomenal fogging system.

And the thing that it does is it replicates the actual meth

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