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494: Why Rx Drugs Are Destroying Emotional and Mental Health
We've been conditioned to believe that emotional and mental issues are the result of chemical imbalances, but that's a myth. An overwhelming number of people are taking prescription medications for emotional health problems, and the numbers are growing at an alarming rate. That's because, in many cases, pharmaceutical drugs fail to address the root cause of emotional issues. The drugs we take to treat the symptoms of a condition could be causing more problems than they are treating. Join Dr. Michael Biamonte and Ashley James as they dig into why this is the case and how you can cure your emotional and mental health problems today!
Ashley James And Dr. Michael Biamonte
Highlights:
- The relationship between gut health and emotional and mental health
- The chemical imbalance myth
- Neurotransmitter testing
- Hormonal imbalance
- Heavy metal toxicity
- The madness of marketing
- Panic attacks and anxiety
Intro:
Hello, true health seekers, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today, we have back on the show Dr. Michael Biamonte. He was in episode 486 and 488 where he taught us all about candida and how you can get candida back into balance. A lot of people say get rid of candida, kill candida, but what we learned from Dr. Michael Biamonte is many people have candida overgrowth and we need candida but we probably need 90 percent less candida than what we have and when it runs rampant in the body, it affects our brain, it affects every organ, it affects every system. It just kind of takes over and everything dominoes in the body. So, you could have bad sleep, you could have cravings, you could have weight gain, you could have hormone dysregulation. You could have brain fog. The list goes on and on and on. Of course, there’s digestive issue that happen like diarrhea and bloating and in some cases, constipation, and we see it affecting our ability to focus. So, those who have ADHD symptoms. Right? Our ability to learn, our ability to concentrate. Motivation, our motivation in life. Our feeling of drive, our feeling of sense of purpose, sense of fulfillment from life. This can get actually very existential. When we see the body as a whole, this is a holistic podcast – welcome, if you're new to Learn True Health podcast – this conversation is that the body is not broken into parts. Modern medicine, when you go to a regular doctor at any given clinic, a medical doctor, their education has trained them to see the body broken into parts. So, you go to the liver specialist over here, the heart specialist over here, the endocrinologist over here, the brain doctor over there, and it’s great that we have specialties. You know, if you have a broken arm or need to be put back together after an accident, God forbid, I’m so thankful that we have this type of medicine. However, what we do see, if you get a 30,000-foot view, is that modern pharmaceutical-based medicine is horrible, has an absolutely horrible track record for helping us to heal from chronic illness, for helping us to get the body back into optimal health.
How often do you see people actually get off of drugs, get off of pharmaceuticals and get so healthy they don’t need them and get even healthier before they went to the doctor? In most cases, they get put on more and more and more medications the older they get. Not less and less. This is the unfortunate truth, is that it is a for-profit industry and it’s a big juggernaut. But when you come to holistic medicine, you come to the side of holistic medicine, now of course there are good and bad… I don’t want to say bad doctors. There are far more competent doctors and far less competent doctors just like there are more competent mechanics. We are fallible, we are humans. Right? Don’t put anyone on a pedestal ever. We have to understand in holistic medicine, let’s assume we are seeing and referred to very competent and experienced holistic doctors, what we’re seeing is, the philosophy that guides them is completely different from Hollywood portrays as medicine. They look at you as a whole. So, when we talk about mental and emotional health, we have to also see that physical health plays a role in that. Because something like candida in those past episodes, 486 and 488, with Dr. Michael Biamonte, we talk about how candida overgrowth and in other episodes where we’ve had experts on small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and fungal overgrowth, parasites, all kinds of stuff that affects the gut, we’ve had many. I have at least 20 episodes that you can go back to and check out when you go to Learntruehealth.com, scroll down from the homepage and you’ll see Choose Your Own Adventure and you can find the digestive stuff and parasites, and all wonderful fun things to dive into. That all these very physical, tangible things, have an effect on the intangible like our emotional being and our mental health, our sense of who we are and how we are right now in the moment can actually be affected by what’s going on in our gut.
So, we look at the body as a whole and we look at your whole life as a whole. We look at everything impacting you. I think it’s so gratifying to have a practitioner look at you and wanting to see all of you and saying “hey, I know you’ve expressed to me that you’re feeling a lot of stress, you’re feeling a lot of sorrow, or you’re feeling grief, or you feel anxiety,” and not discrediting those emotions and also not discrediting that there’s other aspects of your life like the role you play, the roles you play in your life and everything in your environment, and all of that, looking at your life as a whole and including your physical health. Let’s get some lab work done but let’s also talk about your spiritual health, your spiritual life, your mental and emotional health. Let’s talk about your environment, let’s talk about your relationships. So, looking at everything as a whole.
That’s what Dr. Biamonte is here to discuss today, this wonderful viewpoint—looking at mental and emotional health from the holistic standpoint. Some of what he has to share today is going to rock your world, it was absolutely fascinating. I think I said the word “fascinating” 20 times in the interview because of how fascinating it was. I feel like I’m Spock, “That’s fascinating.” He shares some crazy statistics. I want you to really let them sink in. He kind of pulls us out of the matrix today in this interview. He shares with us stuff that we just let slide like the effects that certain drugs have on the human psyche and have on suicide rates, and yet, we just let these pharmaceutical companies slide, we just let it all side like the status quo is fine, everything is fine; meanwhile, everything is burning down. And I so hope that what he shares with you today helps you, gives you another piece of that puzzle that helps to direct your life so that you can learn true health, create true health in your life.
My husband has actually started working with Dr. Biamonte on a personal level doing the candida protocol. We’ve done some labs with him. First of all, let me tell you. I am as impressed with him in my interviews as I am working with him as a doctor, because my husband lets me in on their telemedicine calls. He’s a very caring, fantastic doctor, right to the point. Functional medicine, I should say. He really does deal with functional medicine. I’ve enjoyed the labs he’s had my husband do and the analysis of those labs, really interesting. And now, my husband is starting the diet and the supplement protocol, so I’ll keep you guys posted on how that goes, but so far, working with him has really been great. Definitely give him a call if you’re called to, if you find he’s interesting because so far, I’m really impressed and, well, the proof is in the pudding so we’ll see how my husband does after a few months on the protocol. I’ll let you guys know.
There’s a few resources I want to make sure that you are aware of. Especially if you're new to the podcast or newer to the podcast, I haven’t mentioned it in a while, but I have this great resource I built out with some of my favorite holistic naturopathic doctors. You can go to Freedoctorcourse.com. That's Freedoctorcourse.com and I filmed a 7-day beautiful free course, less than 10 minutes a day kind of thing but it gets right to the point, the foundations of health. These are fantastic naturopaths and they have some great advice. This is actual steps that everyone will benefit from no matter what health issues you have – mental, emotional, physical, spiritual. It deals with the foundation of things that we should absolutely be doing to build our health no matter what. So, definitely check that out. Freedoctorcourse.com. Every day I email you one of the videos we made along with some great homework and tools for you. These are things that I often remind myself, “Oh yeah, I need to go back and do these things.” These are the basics but if you're missing one, it’s like missing a tire on your car. Your car’s not going to go anywhere. So, you have to have these foundations to have fantastic health.
The next thing I really want to make sure you know about. Because so many of my listeners end up becoming holistic health coaches, either for their own personal growth and their own health goals, or they’re just drawn to it and they want either add this to their career, have it as a hobby side career, or they want to completely transition into doing full-time holistic health coaching. Check out Learntruehealth.com/coach. That's Learntruehealth.com/coach. You get a sample class from Institute for Integrative Nutrition. That's where I went. It’s an online program designed for very busy people. So, if you're like, for example, full-time job and a mom or a dad and you’ve just got a lot on your plate, you can still graduate from the program. It takes a year. You do about 20 minutes a day. Sometimes if I was really busy, I would just accumulate all of my lessons for that week and do them all on a Sunday. Oftentimes I’d listen to them where I was cooking, doing laundry, driving. So, if you listen to a podcast, you could absolutely a year from now, be a holistic health coach. If you want to become more of a full-time student, it’s about 40 minutes to an hour a day. They have a six-month accelerated program. So you could check either one of those out, but I love that they designed it knowing that usually, it’s not someone’s career, you jump out of high school and go, “I’m going to be a health coach,” boom. You know, 17, 18, 19 years old taking the course when you have all the time in the world. Usually, it’s not your first career and it’s something that you already have an existing career, you're super busy and you have to somehow fit it into your life. What I love about the IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition’s health coach training program, is your life gets transformed while you're doing it. You learn from amazing… it’s like if you love my podcast, it’s like my podcast TED Talks, like each week is digesting 3 or 4 amazing TED Talks on health and then they give you homework that you get to apply to your own life. So, each week you're adding almost like the foundations of health but you're adding more and more to your life.
Holistic health coaching is looking at your life holistically. It’s not just dietary theory. Yes, you do learn a hundred dietary theories in that course but that’s not even important. As a health coach, you're really helping people to get to their health goals by listening to them and drawing out of them the answers that they’re most of the time already in them. Then you help them crowd out their plate when it comes to eating, helping them bring joy into their life in every area of their life, so helping to identify what areas are missing joy. If you in your life are missing joy in certain areas of your life, you should definitely check out the sample class and consider “could I bring joy to every area of my life through this program?” Because that’s what I loved about the program, is it really helped to unfold and bring forth joy in each area of your life. It has you look at under a lens in a different way each area of your life. So you end up at the end of the program feeling much more fulfilled, satisfied, and joyous in your life as a whole in your body, but also in your world, in your relationships.
They say almost half, I think it’s like 47 percent of people that do the program just do it for their own personal growth, so I thought that was really cool. Right now, IIN’s having an amazing sale. I don’t know when it’s going to end, it’s going to end soon so you should go to Learntruehealth.com/coach and just check it out and see. Right now, they're offering a big discount and they are offering to sign up for I think it was $49 or something just to get started just as the down payment. Sometimes, a few times a year, they do these sales so it’s great to check out. But if you're checking this out and that sale is over, what I want you to know is that when I took the program, I asked them if they would give a discount to all my listeners because I talk about it so much and I’ve actually interviewed many of their teachers. So, they do give a great discount. Make sure you mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James and say, “Hey, Ashley James said I’d get a discount. Make sure you give it to me.” So, yeah, check that out. Let me know if you have any questions. You can always ask me questions in the Facebook group, in the Learn True Health Facebook group. I’d love to see you there and answer questions. Every day I’m in that group answering questions. Not just me but there's other holistic health professionals in the group.
Every day when someone asks a question, there's a bunch I was jumping in to help and give our feedback. Feel free to join the Learn True Health Facebook group. You can go to Learntruehealth.com/group to join the Facebook group. Make sure you check out the free sample class from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition for their health coaching program. You go to Learntruehealth.com/coach. If you want the free class that created with some of my favorite naturopaths, you can go to Freedoctorcourse.com and you’ll be given the 7-day class. It’s absolutely free. Something that I created out of love for you guys because it’s so needed. This is the foundations of health. Everyone listening should do those things that you learn in the 7-day course and everyone sees a benefit from doing it. So, I want all of you guys to have that benefit. I love you. I know you and I personally don’t know each other or maybe we do because I’ve actually met several of my listeners. But if you are struggling and you need help, please join the Facebook group because I don’t want to struggle.
What I want you to know, especially if you're a new listener you might not know this, I suffered for many years. I cried myself to sleep. I’d burst into tears often at how much I suffered. I had major chronic illnesses throughout my 20’s and it was very difficult. I know what that feels like. I don’t want you to suffer. If you're suffering, I don’t want you to suffer anymore. I have seen people recover from so many conditions they were told where “unrecoverable.” I believe in your body’s ability to heal itself. I believe that you can improve your situation no matter what. It has to start with you believing and so I want to let you know I believe in you and I believe in your body’s ability to heal and take these resources, take the free sample class from IIN and see if you get something out of it. Definitely take my free course and come join the Facebook group, ask for help. Pore through the answers. You can use the search function in the group. You can also use the search function on my website Learntruehealth.com to find many resources. There are so many resources out there in the holistic world. You have to dig for them. But we’re here to help. The Learn True Health Facebook group is here to help you because we’re a whole community. We’re actually a community of over 5000 listeners and we’re here to help each other.
So, suffering is needless and suffering is optional. This is what actually a few of my guests have come on the show and said. Suffering is optional, let’s make it optional. Let’s make it optional by discovering the tools, sharing the tools. As I constantly am uncovering these amazing holistic tools, I bring them to you because I know that they're going to help.
Now, what I’m planning for episode 500, and it’s been on my heart for a while now, is I’d like to do a testimonial episode. I received so many testimonials of people who have shared that through this podcast learning from the guests and from me. Their lives have been transformed, their health has been changed. In some cases, they actually saved a relative’s life, which is huge. There's one woman who saved her mom’s life. Her mom would not have lived if it wasn’t for this podcast. How big is that? So, if you have a testimonial listening to this podcast, please send it to me. You can send it to me. Support@learntruehealth.com. Come into the Facebook group and share it. I’d love to see it there, and other listeners would love to see it there too. You can message it to me on Facebook. I’d also love to include it. I don’t have to include your name if you're uncomfortable with that. I’ve been collecting testimonials so I can create that episode.
I think it’s so important. I know when I was suffering, hearing testimonials really helped. When I lost my daughter last year, I think the biggest thing that helped besides my connection with God was hearing testimonials of women who had lost their children and they're living, they're living their life, they’re happy, they were able to heal from it because at the time, I couldn’t see a way out. I couldn’t see that I could heal from it. So testimonials have, even though you might discredit your testimonial like “oh, who am I, my story is not so big,” but if you were suffering and now you're no longer suffering, sometimes that right there, that little story you have, is actually huge to someone else. It’s lifechanging to someone else. So, when I heard, my midwife was sharing with me some other women that she had worked with who like “oh yeah, this mom’s third child diet and now she has three more and she’s so happy.” Just those kind of stories, those type of testimonials might not seem like a lot but for those who need to hear them, it really helps. So please, if you have any kind of transformation, any kind of story of healing, please reach out to me because your story, even though you might not think it’s important, it could be lifechanging for someone else. And that's what I’m about. That’s what this podcast is about – it’s about helping as many people as possible to learn true health.
So, thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about and thank you so much for sharing your testimonials with me so I can create that episode, episode 500. Whatever holidays you celebrate this month, you know, can be stressful a lot for many people. I recognize that you might not be listening to this episode in December although I’m releasing it in December. I want to wish you peaceful, gentle healing and loving holidays. Since I do celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas for those who celebrate Christmas and for those who celebrate anything else. I wish everyone to have gentle, peaceful, loving season to let the stress go and replace it with love and peace in your heart and in your life and in your environment around you. Because we don’t need stress. That is not healthy for any of us. So, I love you all and enjoy today’s episode.
[00:19:23] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 494.
I am so excited for today’s guest. We have back on the show Dr. Michael Biamonte. What I love about today’s interview is we’re going to do some major myth busting. This is like pull you out of the matrix. We’re going to take you out and show you that you’ve been raised in a system that teaches you that you need drugs to suppress, to change, to manage your brain chemistry, your biochemistry. And when it comes to mental health and emotional health, the word “health”, they shouldn’t even be allowed to use the word “health” because it is so far from health. When it comes to emotional and mental health and prescription drugs, and I’m so excited to have you on the show to talk about this topic today. Dr. Biamonte was in episode 486 and 488. In those two episodes, we really did a deep dive into candida and gut health. Now there's a large correlation between gut health and brain health, and I definitely want to touch on that since that is one of your expertise. But you did mention in episode 488 that one of your favorite things to do is to take your patients or your clients and to help them get so healthy that they're off all their meds especially when it comes to mental and emotional medications. So, looking forward to doing a deep dive there. Welcome back on the show.
[00:21:03] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.
[00:21:05] Ashley James: Excellent. Now, listeners can go to your website which is health-truth.com and of course, the links everything that Dr. Michael Biamonte does is going be in the show notes of today’s podcast at Learntruehealth.com. I’d love to know because your expertise has largely been around gut health or getting candida back in balance in the body instead of having an overgrowth of it for so many years. At what point while you were practicing and working with people and helping them, at what point did you go “Wait a second. I can help people get emotionally and mentally healthy” to the point where they're no longer on all these meds?
[00:21:47] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Probably in the late ‘80s when I started to see a correlation between several things. First was constipation. I had so many patients tell me “Gee. Since my constipation is handled and I’m no longer constipated, I feel so much happier. My mood is better. I feel lighter as a person. Not physically. They were speaking about more of their own being. They just felt lighter and happier.” So I started researching this and it also was part of my research into candida. I found the correlation between neurotransmitters and the digestive tract. I didn’t know that the body shuttled neurotransmitters and hormones in and out of the bloodstream to the digestive system and back and forth. Sort of like the body will the digestive tract as a holding tank for neurotransmitters and hormones and then pull them back into the bloodstream when needed.
When I understood the mechanism, it made sense as to why these people were now telling me that since they're not constipated, they feel so much happier and quite a few of them went off their antidepressants as a result of that. Some of my colleagues said “Well, that’s probably because their thyroid function improved.” But I actually did find the reference. Unfortunately, I forgot which book it was, but I think it might have been a book by Dr. Whitaker where he went over the fact that the body does pull these neurotransmitters and hormones back and forth in the digestive tract and out of the digestive tract, and you can’t do that if you have dysbiosis. So, you have to have a normal functioning digestive system in order to be able to do that. The other correlation I started to see was in people who had very high copper levels, and that goes back to Dr. Pfeiffer’s work at the Brain Biocenter in Princeton, NJ where he had cited that schizophrenics were very high in copper. He basically laid out that if he detoxed a schizophrenic from copper, his schizophrenia would go away and a lot of his mental health issues would go away that a lot of this was copper toxicity.
I started hearing more and more from these people who were copper toxic about their mood swings, about how they try to sleep at night and they had racing thoughts and they just couldn’t shut it off and couldn’t go to sleep. It matched a lot of the, well, not a lot but some of the data that I was seeing in psychiatric books, of course they had no idea it was being caused by copper toxicity. But sure enough, when these people were detoxed from the copper, these symptoms would go away.
So, I guess that was probably the initial thing that set me off on this. But once I armed with that knowledge, I knew there was a lot more. I knew I was just basically scratching the surface. I knew there was a lot more and that’s what led me to dive into it much deeper. I read a book in 2015 which really helped put this together for me. It’s called Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial by Dr. Peter Getzsche. He presented data suggesting that psychiatric drugs kill about half a million Americans and Europeans over the age of 65 per year. He also pointed out that in terms of long-term outcomes, people in less developed countries have far fewer problems with mental health and problems with drugs. Obviously, the answer is because they don’t have the availability. As you and I were saying once, on one of the podcasts, people nowadays, their availability to just go to a psychiatrist or even their medical doctor and say “I’m depressed, give me a pill,” they can do this very easily.
We were discussing also that our grandparents growing up had tough times. You’d come to this country and back in those days, times were tough. They had to struggle and bring themselves up by their bootstraps. They couldn’t just go to a doctor and say “I’m new to this country, I’m having trouble getting a job. Give me a pill.”
[00:26:07] Ashley James: I have family members, I have friends who they're struggling and their doctor very quickly got them on multiple meds, depression, anxiety, and sleep meds and just thinking back to my grandmother who had to bury several of her siblings while escaping the war in a train with no heating, Just like the horror stories, right? And she was never on any psychiatric meds. She lived a full long life, a beautiful life. Kids, grandkids. Our grandparents and great grandparents had, in some cases, much harder times than we’re going through, not to belittle the struggles that we go through. But they didn’t have access to these drugs and these drugs, in many cases, are band-aids. I’d rather have someone, if a drug could stop someone from committing suicide, I’d rather have them be on that drug. But what we’re seeing is actually the opposite. We’re seeing that in a lot of cases, going to the drug ends up being that band-aid that then doesn’t let them go through and do the emotional and mental healing.
[00:27:14] Dr. Michael Biamonte: And the growth. Their own personal growth at the same time.
[00:27:20] Ashley James: Right. And then, we’re still seeing the suicide rates go up and in our youth right now, I believe suicide is the first or second. Either the first or the second leading cause of death in ages I think it was like 12 to 25. It’s very scary and sad how rampant this problem is becoming. I can’t help but think that, obviously, there's gut issues. We have an over toxic world. There's 80,000 new man-made chemicals in the last 40 years. The environment, the milieu, the day-to-day existence is toxic compared to what it was one generation, two generations ago.
So, we are facing a different world. Our biology is facing a different world than our grandparents. But at the same time, we have to look back and go, how is it that for many generations, we could live through the tough times and grow and learn and support each other and create an ecosystem of support and growth? Then now, we are more isolated than ever. We are more depressed than ever. We have incredibly high suicide rates. The first thing we’re given when we go to a doctor is a drug that has a bunch of side effects.
[00:28:38] Dr. Michael Biamonte: That's the swing that we’ve had in the last 50 years where instead of self-reliance, we have entitlement—and entitlement also offers people these drugs, unfortunately.
[00:28:50] Ashley James: So, the purpose of having you on today isn’t to make people who are on these drugs feel guilty. That's the exact opposite.
[00:28:55] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No of course.
[00:28:57] Ashley James: You help patients all the time to get so healthy that they’re no longer on these medications and that they also feel freedom and they feel amazing again emotionally and mentally. I want to clarify something you talked about before we move on to how you go about doing this. When you said around the world 65 and older, I think you said, what was it, like 2 million people die of psychiatric drugs.
[00:29:23] Dr. Michael Biamonte: What I was referring is that in the developed world, and the developed part of the world as opposed to the underdeveloped, you have so many more people dying from psychiatric drugs than you do in the underdeveloped parts in the world. It’s primarily because the drugs are unavailable in underdeveloped parts of the world. The book I was talking about before was Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial by Peter Gøtzsche. He talks about psychiatric drugs kill approximately half a million Americans over the age of 65 every year. That's horrifying!
[00:29:55] Ashley James: Wow. What is killing them exactly?
[00:30:01] Dr. Michael Biamonte: What’s killing them is a combination of things. But it’s in part the side effects of the drugs. The drugs cause various side effects in the cardiovascular system and completely damage the gut health. So, then you have whatever problems you then want to postulate from gut health coming from that. You also have mass suicides that have occurred in these people. The FDA trials for Prozac, they covered up. And I know they covered it up because I have the actual reports from Eli Lilly. They covered up so many suicides that occurred in people on the Prozac trials. Why that occurs, you still hear it nowadays on TV. You turn on the TV and the big joke is the pharmaceutical commercial goes on and it lists a hundred million side effects that you could have. They have children playing in the park on the background, you know.
But it’s understanding how the drugs works, gives you a better understanding of why people die from them and why there are suicides. The typical antidepressant, your SSRI, which is an uptake inhibitor of serotonin, it doesn’t work by boosting your serotonin. It boosts by restricting it. Prozac actually stops your brain’s reabsorption of serotonin in order to make the serotonin receptor sites in your brain more acute and more excitable. So, it’s creating a deficiency to try to make something create like a sparring effect. The idea behind the drugs is that if you block the brain’s ability to reabsorb serotonin, then the brain has to do a much better job with the amount of serotonin it has. That works in some people. But in other people, it doesn’t work. It causes a crashing serotonin deficiency which is why of the side effects you’ll hear them talk about when they discuss Prozac or SSRI side effects is suicide or extreme massive depression.
[00:32:08] Ashley James: If you're stopping, blocking the cells from uptaking the… I mean, could see maybe if they did that temporarily like give you Prozac for a week and then take you off of it to try to resensitize the cells, but to keep you on it, how would keeping you always on it resensitize the cells to uptaking serotonin?
[00:32:29] Dr. Michael Biamonte: It doesn’t. Which is why these drugs ultimately are a failure. It’s in part a lot of politicians and bureaucrats that work in the industry have allowed this go on. There's the chemical imbalance myth. I call it a myth. But you hear these for years. You’ve been hearing the doctors quote that this chemical imbalance exists. Well, I can tell you about the chemical imbalance from the viewpoint of really scientific viewpoint of someone who tests. But in big pharma and psychiatrists, they for decades have claimed that the mentally ill have this chemical imbalance but yet, there has never been one single test or one single study that’s ever confirmed anything that they’ve said. In the British Psychology Society, there's a report in there, very interesting. It goes on to say that the chemical imbalance of neurotransmitters such as serotonin has remained unproven.
Now, I can tell you, however, from the viewpoint of someone who actually tests people that when I test people who come to me who are on these drugs or who have these issues, we will occasionally find a person who does have the serotonin deficiency. So, I can say, I am at liberty and I can say with authority that I can find a chemical imbalance in some of these people. But I’m testing them and the difference between myself and other practitioners, particularly psychiatrists, is they never test anyone. They don’t even know that these tests exist. But I can occasionally test someone and find their serotonin is low or their cortisol is too high or I can find some type of neurotransmitter imbalance and thank God for the work of the late Dr. Gottfried Kellermann from Neuroscience Labs who formulated an entire line of nutritional supplements that are all based on some of the patterns that you find in these neurotransmitter urine tests that are available by Functional Labs. His nutritional formulas are aimed at normalizing these imbalances. If your dopamine is too high, your dopamine is too low or whatever, your serotonin, he developed formulas which you can use on people that actually would balance it. He’s not doing something that’s hokey pokey where he has supplements and they’re starving the brain of these nutrients. He’s actually giving the person the precursors of these nutrients. He discovered that there are many herbs that work to excite those neurotransmitter receptor sites. So, he can accomplish with his formulas a natural way of going about what these drugs are doing in a destructive way.
[00:35:28] Ashley James: Fascinating, what you just said. You said psychiatrists don’t test.
[00:35:33] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No. I dare anyone to email or call in on this show who’s had a psychiatrist, not a functional medical doctor. I have never heard of, and if you go through all the psychiatrist data, if you go through the DSM-V, you look at all these books, you're not going to find any mention of any testing that's recommending or any protocol for testing. It doesn’t exist. They don’t do it.
[00:36:01] Ashley James: So they go based on your symptoms like “oh yeah, I can clearly see this person’s depressed,” or, “I’m diagnosing this person with bipolar based on what they’re sharing with me and their behavior,” and then they just put them on drugs and they don’t test them to see could there be a different imbalance.
There's one of my naturopathic mentors often find some people who are misdiagnosed with bipolar who have out-of-control blood sugar swings.
[00:36:26] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Or hormonal imbalances. That's another huge one in women. In women, PMS. They're constantly putting women on all these psychiatric drugs for PMS. Where the woman would be better off taking zinc and vitamin B6. She would get more relief from her PMS doing that than taking these drugs.
[00:36:45] Ashley James: Fascinating. Yeah, since the last two years, I upped my zinc and I have noticed that I don’t have any symptoms. I always get surprised when my period comes because I have zero symptoms.
[00:36:59] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, zinc and B6 are cofactors to progesterone. They help mobilize progesterone. Normally, when you think of PMS, you think of high estrogen to progesterone ratio or estrogen dominance. And B6 and zinc help smooth that out. They help bolster progesterone.
[00:37:16] Ashley James: Wow. That's just fascinating. So, when comes to you and they have depression, what’s your first few questions for them?
[00:37:30] Dr. Michael Biamonte: My first few questions is why. Why do you have depression? What’s the situation? Who’s involved in this situation? A lot of times, they’ll rattle off names immediately. “Well, I’m depressed because my business partner is doing this.” “I’m depressed because my spouse is doing this or my child does this or my neighbor does this…” A lot of times they’ll just ring it right off. In that situation, I encourage them to handle the real-life situation they have and not take a pill and go hide in the closet.
When a person can’t come up with what it is, then we will do different testing if that's their main problem. A lot of times you get patients with candida come in and they talk about depression very often. So, if that’s the case, we’re going to treat the candida and see if the depression goes away in that line. But let’s say the person just comes in, he’s depressed, he doesn’t know why, he doesn’t really have any other outstanding physiological symptoms. Well, sure, then we’ll go ahead and we’ll do a neurotransmitter test. We’ll check out his blood sugar, check out his hormones, and 9 out of 10 times we’re going to find there’s a physiological reason which flies in the face of the gene finding theory that for years, psychiatrists have been saying that genetic factors have a substantial role in mental illness and even says in the DSM-V but yet, in actuality, there's no evidence that this is true. As a matter of fact, what was his name, David Kupfer several decades ago said we’re still waiting to discover biological and genetic markers for mental illness. They still haven’t found this. That was in a taskforce that I think he was the chair of.
So, they throw these things out, these things become catchphrases. Chemical imbalance. Genetic defects that lead to mental… they throw these things that they become catchwords but when you actually pull the string and look into them, there is no evidence behind them that they exist.
[00:39:42] Ashley James: Tell us a bit more about the neurotransmitter testing that you do when someone has depression and you're suspecting that there might be an imbalance.
[00:39:53] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, we do a urine test that they're available through several labs. I believe Great Plains, Doctor’s Data, and Genova Labs easily offer them. Those are the bigger labs. They offer, it’s a urine collection. The urine collection goes to the lab, the lab looks for the neurotransmitters. There’s a certain amount of interpretation skill needed because sometimes, high levels of neurotransmitters in urine can indicate a loss of the neurotransmitter. So, let’s say you find a high amount of serotonin. The high amount of serotonin may not mean they have a lot. It might mean they’re losing it. But there's usually a pattern involved in that. Like very often, you’ll see the person has high cortisol which blocks serotonin, so you can see they have high cortisol and then high serotonin. Well, in that case, you know that the high cortisol is blocking the serotonin and causing a loss of it. So, that's what I mean by there's a certain amount of interpretation skill. But for the most part, when you do that test, it lays out all the neurotransmitters and show you the ratios between the ones that are very important that work together. It lets you see what’s high and what’s low. So, then you have an idea if there’s any actual evidence and reality that the person has an imbalance with the neurotransmitters. More often than not, when we find these imbalances and we put them on the right nutritional support, they feel better.
[00:41:17] Ashley James: Interesting that high cortisol blocks serotonin. I’m just trying to think of why that would be because your body needs to be in fight or flight mode and not in like super happy mode.
[00:41:27] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No, it’s a matter of the receptor sites. Cortisol jams up the serotonin receptor sites.
[00:41:33] Ashley James: They fight for the receptor sites.
[00:41:35] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah, cortisol blocks the receptor sites so the serotonin then can’t go and attach itself to the receptor site that easily. So, it’s not being utilized so it then builds up and then it’s excreted in your urine.
[00:41:48] Ashley James: So, someone who let’s say have high cortisol because they’ve been chronically stressed out and it doesn’t have to be emotional or mental stress, it can also be physical stress like the body’s fighting let’s say a chronic candida infection. Their body is in a state of stress, they have higher than normal cortisol levels. Maybe they're also not sleeping well at night, maybe they're using alcohol to manage their “stress”, so they're doing things that increase cortisol and then they go to a doctor and they say “I’m really depressed and I have sleep problems” and the doctor puts them on an SSRI. Their body is making enough serotonin but maybe even trying to make more serotonin, but the cortisol is blocking it and then they take a drug because the doctor did no testing at all to figure out the root cause. Then they're taking an SSRI that’s then blocking the serotonin further, pushing them further into being out of balance.
[00:42:46] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, this is true. I’d give you one from the backdoor. There was a patient I had for years. She finally moved away, she moved to California but for years, I was treating this woman. Every September, her hormone tests would start to go out of balance. I asked her millions of questions as to what’s going on and she never came up with the answer until finally, I asked her, well, what’s different about this time of year than any other time of year. Then she suddenly blurted out the L’eggs Mini Marathon. So I said, “alright, tell me more.” She says, “Well, every year I run the L’eggs Mini Marathon in New York City, so I start training for it in August and the race is in October.” That was exactly coincidental with when her cortisol and other hormones started to go out of balance. So, from the training she was doing, the running she was doing, which you could say an excess of what the average person would do, that was raising her cortisol. So you see, it could be something that innocent.
[00:44:01] Ashley James: You need to do the deep dive. This is why it’s so dangerous at times to go to a traditional medical doctor or go to a head doctor and say, “I got depression” without doing the deep dive. These band-aids are causing more damage than good.
[00:44:23] Dr. Michael Biamonte: A colleague of mine wrote an article called Why Your Insurance is Making You Sick. Backtracking on the whole thing, he was pointing out that people will go to their doctors their insurance will cover. A lot of these doctors don’t know what they’re doing, so by engaging in the doctor that's going to be covered by their insurance, they're actually getting sicker because they're not going to the doctor who would find out what was really going on.
[00:44:48] Ashley James: Ha! That is so sad. So, we talked a bit about depression. What other mental health situations have you been able to help resolve to the point where they’ve been able to get off all their meds?
[00:45:02] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, we can go down the list of the names—bipolar, schizophrenia. They're all basically, as someone like you who’s read the DSM, basically these are all made-up situations for the purpose of being able to find a drug to sell. If someone really wants to get into this, there's a video you can watch called Marketing Madness. If you go to the website CCHR.org, you’ll find this video. It’s maybe 3 or 4 hours long and it rips apart the entire scam of psychiatric medications and the whole scam of psychiatry, it breaks it all down to the point where you appreciate the title, it’s Marketing Madness. They’re marketing insanity and the solution they have for you are these drugs. As the old saying goes, the two worst things you can ever do is number one, kill the patient, and number two, cure them. Because if you cure them, then he’s off your list to sell the drugs to.
But to answer your question, you know, I don’t like to get into the terminology. The terminology is only good for recognition. Everyone can agree upon a recognition of a set of symptoms perhaps. But one of the major things that I’ve practiced as a clinical ecologist, because I consider a lot of what to do to be clinical ecology, we work with a lot of children with autism. There is a definite set pattern in what happens with autism. It’s very simple. In fact, it’s too simple. It’s so simple that people can’t believe it. But the components of autism start out with a child who’s born, who’s genetically compromised as far as his ability to detoxify. Then you put that child in an environment that’s toxic or you give him silver amalgam fillings in his mouth. Or you vaccinate him with thimerosal. So, you then make this child whose detoxification is compromised toxic. He can’t detoxify. It affects him neurologically.
A lot of these things like thimerosal and the vaccinations, and then if the child is repeatedly put on antibiotics, he develops candida. Now, from candida he develops leaky gut. So, now he’s autoimmune, he’s got candida. Now, the parents are wondering, “Gee, he reacts strange to foods, this child. He’s got this autism, he has this neurological… but he reacts crazy to different foods.” And it’s not all the time. So, now you mix candida in there, which candida is the big wild card, you never know what’s going to happen next. And it’s that the formula for it is that simple. The child develops candida, develops leaky gut, he becomes chemically sensitive. He becomes allergic. And here you have your standard profile of the autistic child. And it can be reversed, and it has been reversed.
I worked for many years with Jenny McCarthy. Jenny McCarthy was a patient of mine for years. As a matter of fact, Jenny McCarthy wrote the liner chronicles on my book The Candida Chronicles. She wrote the back page. We find as we found with many children, you find that they’re either mercury toxic or copper toxic. Because thimerosal, it’s an alloy, it’s a combination of copper, mercury, and zinc. Now, zine is more of a nutritional element, so the body has a better chance of using up the zinc that might be in the metal. But it’s not true of mercury. Mercury has really no biological functions at all. It’s strictly a toxin. Copper can have biological functions. It’s an essential element. But when it rises to high, it becomes just as toxic as any other heavy metal.
You start with that. It’s right there. You have loads of trouble. But that explains why. See, years ago, this is the thing that only thinking people can arrive at if they sat down and mudded over this a bit. A hundred years ago, the environment, as you were stating earlier in the show, was much cleaner. You didn’t have the environmental challenges that we have nowadays. So, maybe 150 years ago, something like that, children who were born with these problems detoxifying weren’t challenged by their environment. They weren’t vaccinated. They didn’t have amalgam fillings in their mouth. So, their poor detoxification abilities were not being challenged. That's why these new diseases developed. That's a little microcosm of why it happens. That's why we have illnesses now we didn’t have 100 years ago. The environment is more toxic. And instead of coming up with new drugs to cover up the symptoms of these things, what the people should be doing is they should be taking companies like Monsanto to test for developing all these harmful chemicals that really haven’t been tested and their safety has never really been assured or guaranteed, and they throw them on the market and they're all over the place. Anyone who’s done any weed killing with Monsanto products is going to know that by now.
Soldiers, people coming back from Vietnam, I can’t tell you how many vets I’ve had who were exposed to Monsanto’s Agent Orange, who came back with all types of problems with their lungs and their heart. We had to develop an Agent Orange detoxification program for these people so we could detox them from this chemical. When they start to detox from it, it’s amazing the changes they go through. It’s really amazing.
But eventually, they start to feel better and their chemistry is improved. That's the thing. Anybody can feel better. You can shoot up heroin and feel better. The real bottom line is, do you get healthier? Is there scientific evidence in your bloodwork that your chemistries are improving? That's what we look for. That's what should be done. What I’m talking about should be the industry standard. And it’s not.
[00:51:21] Ashley James: There's another thing that Monsanto did, and my friend is involved in a lawsuit. It has completely destroyed her life. It’s left her in a wheelchair and left her daughter incredibly sick as well. This is just a small town outside of Seattle. There was an alternative school called Sky Valley, and there was an old building maybe built in the ‘60s or ’50s or ‘40s, something like that. But it was an older building. Children were dropping dead, children were getting cancer, teachers were getting cancer. One of the teachers entire jawbone just died suddenly. Crazy horrific things happening. In this town 40 minutes away from Seattle, what they come to find is that Monsanto made these chemicals, construction chemicals for the ballast, for the cocking, it’s through the entire building and it’s very hard to clean up. They said that they cleaned it up but the school board did a coverup. Then, they said, “Okay, it’s safe to come back into that school.” It wasn’t safe. Now, there's a huge lawsuit going on, massive lawsuit, and I think the teachers, they have several different lawsuits. The teachers have one lawsuit, the parents have another. And the teachers won. But they settled that at court or something.
Anyways, it’s all messy. It’s been going on for years. But what I discovered, and I’ll find the article and link it in the show notes. The Associated Press did an amazing… it takes like an hour to read this article. It’s so well-researched. They did this amazing expose where they traveled around the United States and discovered that these dangerous older school buildings, very dangerous for the health of the children because it is killing the children, mostly still exists in impoverished areas now. Monroe isn’t impoverished, it just is an outlier, but most of these buildings that are full of these toxic chemicals that are causing horrific neurological damaging cancer to these children, but the children were susceptible because they're smaller I guess, but also the teachers, most of it is in impoverished areas, most of it is areas where there’s larger groups of people of color, and they know that the buildings are toxic but they don’t have the budget to do anything about it. Because they all feel very powerless in this situation, no one is stepping up to fight back.
So hopefully, with these lawsuits, it’ll be enough to sort of get everything rolling. But here’s the thing. We walk around trusting the building we’re walking into is safe because we live in the United States or we live in Canada or we live in England. You live in a country where you expect that the building you work in, the house you live in, the car you drive, the food you eat, the air you breathe, the water you drink, we expect blindly trusting that this would be safe for us just like the medications we take. We have so much trust. Sometimes I guess we’re very naïve in that. Without living in constant fear because that wouldn’t be healthy either, we need to do our own due diligence. I have a whole episode on toxic construction materials and how to have a nontoxic building versus toxic buildings. It’s all very fascinating. Same with food and how to have healthier food, how to have healthy water.
But when it comes to when you already have the toxicity in your body and you have these symptoms, you don’t even know. You don’t know that you have high copper. And that could be why you're feeling depressed or feeling off or feeling lethargic or having the brain fog. Then we go to the wrong doctor. They don’t do the test, they just rattle off some symptoms, they put us on whatever drug the drug rep told them is good for those symptoms. And we still have the toxicity. We still have the underlying problem. We get worse and worse and we end up feeling guilty and shame that we’re broken, and a lot of times, not all the time but many times these people feel like they're a burden on their friends and family and the world would be better off without them.
[00:55:54] Dr. Michael Biamonte: And unfortunately, I can never leave a conversation on this subject without mentioning this because it’s something that really, I took very seriously. When President Obama was running for office, his New York campaign summit was right next door to me. We helped them out in the beginning, we offered them, you know, they needed a table, they needed a chair, they needed this and that, we very easily gave it to them. The people there asked me about what we did. I asked them, what is the senator’s viewpoint about Monsanto and about GMO foods. I was told quite overtly that he was intending on outlawing GMO foods and getting rid of Monsanto and blah, blah, blah. This was great. Then several years later, while he was president, he signed the Monsanto Protection Act. The Monsanto Protection Act, if you look it up, limits the liability that Monsanto has. So, when you're talking about these people suing Monsanto, there's only a limited amount that they could get because this act kicks in and it reduces the liability Monsanto has. Monsanto has no liability at all. You can’t sue them and say that any of the GMO foods that they make made you sick. You can’t do that. In terms of all these chemicals, there's limited liability.
So, when we start looking at who we’re going to vote in office, we also have to really take a look at this. Who’s going to protect people like Monsanto? Who’s going to protect the person on the street that you're talking about?
[00:57:37] Ashley James: My church has become very politically active, which is unlike a church, right? Lately, churches have been silent. Something my church has brought up is, you know, the churches that were silent in Germany, the Nazis actually went after the churches first. Not everyone knows the history of this. How is it that such a horrific thing could overtake a country? They went after the churches first. They threatened them and kept them silent. You keep your worship inside the church, you don’t do anything outside the church. You don’t do anything active. You just do your little thing inside the church and stay silent. So many churches have stayed silent.
[00:58:20] Dr. Michael Biamonte: There's a formula, do you know that? You can find this. The Nazis, they actually had a formula of what you did to take over a country or to demean the people. That is one of the first things you do, is you go after religion, you silence the churches. The next thing is you take their guns away from them. Then you make them toxic. That was quite common from when the Nazis attacked the country. Prior to their attack, they would dump fluoride in their drinking water.
[00:58:50] Ashley James: Wow. Which is a neurotoxin, right, in high doses. And it causes people to be docile. I don’t know all the symptoms but I also know that it disrupts thyroid function.
[00:59:05] Dr. Michael Biamonte: You then start starving them of protein because starving them from protein makes them less aggressive. You take protein away from people, they lose muscle tone, their testosterone drops, they become less aggressive, less motivated. So, they had it all down, the Nazis. They had their whole formulation down. And unfortunately, you're seeing a lot of that getting repeated nowadays in trying to control people.
[00:59:32] Ashley James: With our church, our pastor said, “I don’t care what side. Republican or Democrat, I don’t care. I’m voting for the individual person that I believe is going to do the most good that’s going to help the most people, that's going to, for example, outlaw GMOs or not help these big organizations like Monsanto.” Unfortunately, we have to go based on trust because like you said, you were told one thing and then he did another. And protecting these major organizations that are causing and have a history of causing a huge amount of toxic damage to the world, it’s sick and wrong and very sad and I’m not for either side. I’m pragmatic. I want to see a better world.
[01:00:25] Dr. Michael Biamonte: I agree. I’m a libertarian. I’m registered as a libertarian.
[01:00:31] Ashley James: The idea that what we deserve is we deserve health. It’s a right. I want that for everyone. I want a cleaner, healthier, safer world for everyone. I know you talked about not wanting to necessarily go based on labels because that is the box they like to put people in just to give them drugs. But when it comes to suicidal thoughts and ideation and wanting to help someone to avoid suicide, have you ever had clients who you felt might be suicidal and are there any common things that are associated with that or imbalance is associated with that that you can help them with?
[01:01:14] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah. One of the first things you’ll find is that they're on an SSRI. So getting them off the SSRI and getting them on 5HTP or any of the precursors to serotonin is very important because you want to make sure they're not suicidal due to extreme dips in their serotonin. Usually, you want to get them out of their environment because unfortunately, people with these conditions are prey for other people around them to crap on essentially. So, getting them out of their environment is just as valid a therapy as anything else. So you get them good nutritional support, you get them out of their environment, get them into some other area where they're dealing with people who are not constantly invalidating them or causing them trouble, you’ll see a tremendous improvement in them and it’ll be safe.
[01:02:07] Ashley James: Dr. Hammer, he did Meta-Medicine. Dr. Hammer saw the centrifugal rings on the brain scans when not using the contrast dye and determine that the edema on the brain was specific areas were associated with specific… he did over 30,000 cases, were always related to specific parts of body. So, breast cancer, that sort of thing. He determined that a trauma would have had to happened in the last four years that would have triggered it. His biggest intervention was to take them out of their environment. So many times he’d see, if he took someone and moved them to a different country, just take them away from the friends or the family or the job or whatever it was that was stressing them out or triggered them that they were able to heal much quicker and in some cases, go into full remission. It’s so interesting.
[01:02:58] Dr. Michael Biamonte: The present time and environment of the patient acts as a constant restimulation to their illness from the time the illness was probably conceived going forward. So, it’s a valid form of therapy to change their environment but to hopefully to a better one. You wouldn’t want to take sick person and put them on the titanic. That wouldn’t be the right idea to change the environment. But that’s the concept. You get them away from the re-stimulators that are occurring in their environment. You get their nutrition improved to the point where they’re at least not going to be eating toxic food or not going to be in a toxic environment and then if lucky enough, if there's a practitioner like myself there, you can test the person and find out that if there are any extreme toxicities, there are tests that are offered by Great Plains Labs. Great Plains Labs offers a test which will check you for mold toxins, will check you for environmental toxins, will check how well you can detoxify. You can also look at neurotransmitter panels and do all these things and you can get a lab done for a person. The person would be in remarkably better shape in just a few months.
[01:04:13] Ashley James: I feel like we have to touch on this subject although it is such a sensitive one. A friend of mine lost her child who was a teenager to suicide less than two years ago. This child who was born a female decided they were not a female and did a transition to appearing as and functioning as a male. We see that the suicide rates for those who feel that they weren’t born the right gender, again, I want to be very sort of sensitive to this subject because the suicide rates are incredibly high and the statistics are that even those who transition, even those who get operations, the suicide rates remain high. Have you had any experience working with those and is there anything that we can do to help them?
[01:05:14] Dr. Michael Biamonte: I have actually more experience than you would think. It’s remarkable that in some of these people that make the transition, some of them are totally fine for their entire lives, they have no problems. Others do have these issues and you would have to then say, well, then obviously this is not the answer. If this was the answer, they wouldn’t still have these compulsions to harm themselves.
But then on the other hand, I’ve seen that there are some people physically who don’t handle the transition well physically from a biological standpoint and metabolic standpoint. Their bodies just don’t do well at all. They will reject the hormones that they're taking. They can seem to never can find the right balance or dosage of any of the medications. But yet, there are others I’ve seen that did fantastic. So, I think we’re down to this is what the psychiatrists don’t want to hear. But what you're down to is rolling up your sleeves, sitting down with the person and digging in and finding out what’s really going on as opposed to having them come in your office for 10 minutes, hearing their problems and giving them, as you said before, the pill that the drug sells and says it’s the right one for them.
[01:06:32] Ashley James: It takes doing the deep dive because we’re complex. We’re complex. I heard once that the functions with inside a single cell are more complex than the city of Manhattan. So, if you think about if you’ve ever been to New York City and you see just the honking and the noise and the deliveries and the taxis and just everything going on, that is a simpler system than a single cell. We have 37.2 trillion cells in our body, we’re an incredibly complex ecosystem that is affected by energy. The energy of objects nearby, we’re affected by water, we’re affected by the air we breathe. It’s so sensitive. You climb up to Mt. Everest, your muscles will begin to seize, right? We need a perfect homeostasis. When something throws us off, it’s enough to throw everything off-kilter and yet, we think that we can go into an office, spend 10 minutes with someone, take a drug and it’s going to just solve the problem. This is the marketing we’ve been told. It’s ridiculous. We should be and practitioners should be willing to do that deep dive with someone and not be afraid to do the deep dive with them.
[01:07:46] Dr. Michael Biamonte: To really appreciate what you're saying, I again would have to mention to the listeners to go on the internet and go to CCHR.org and look up I think it’s a 3 or 4-hour video called Marketing Madness. Once you start watching this, you cannot stop. The data they give you is absolutely mind-boggling and they uncover and reveal the entire scam which is the whole psychiatric profession and the psycho pharmaceutical industry. It’s just incredible.
I guess it’s no coincidence the LA Times back in the ‘80s published one of these inserts that you could pull out. It was all about psychiatry. The interesting thing I learned from there just off the bat that I found very curious is that as a whole and a group, psychiatrists have the lowest SAT scores. Psychiatrists have the highest rate of suicides out of any profession. Psychiatrists also have the highest rate of being convicted for felonies out of any profession.
[01:08:58] Ashley James: Wow.
[01:08:59] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Interesting.
[01:09:04] Ashley James: And we bring our lives to these people. I don’t think that their entire profession is evil. But we just have to remember that they’re fallible, that we shouldn’t put them on a pedestal like we’ve been taught to do, like the marketing has taught us to worship these drugs and worship these people. Now again, if there's a drug that would stop someone from being suicidal, I’d want them on it, right?
[01:09:34] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, until you figure out as you said earlier.
[01:09:36] Ashley James: Right. If someone has to check them, and I’ve had friends who went, they have five kids, they are like, “I am going to kill myself today and I don’t want to do that,” and they’ve checked themselves into the hospital, they spent two weeks in the hospital, be put on some lithium or something, put on some kind of medication, and then they're like, “Now, I got to get my life in order.” A few of my friends have done it but one friend in particular ended up finding, she found a few support groups, she changed her entire lifestyle, she had to change her diet, she had to do a deep dive into her life. She still has five kids and she has a sixth one on the way and she moved across the country. She’s done a ton of changes. But she changed her diet, she’s seeing a therapist. She’s going to two different support groups. She’s removed a lot of addictive behaviors out of her life. She had to do the work. But sometimes it starts with going “I’m about to break and I really don’t want to leave my children, but it’s like I don’t see an end to this and I’m going to check myself in.” Then you have to do the deep work beyond that. Sometimes it does take that immediate intervention.
Unfortunately, some people wait till it gets that bad. But hopefully, listening to you, we’re not going to wait to get that bad that we can make diet and lifestyle changes and even contact you. So you work with clients around the world, you do telemedicine. Health-truth.com.
[01:11:08] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Let me add this. Don’t be complacent about your environment. I’ve had quite a few patients over the years who under my treatment were improving but they then moved. They told me that moving made a bigger difference in their health than actually what I was doing with them. When it was examined, when I looked at that, it’s interesting but there are certain things you’ll find. If someone lives in New Mexico in Nevada, that area, where nuclear testing takes place, traditionally, when we do tissue mineral analysis on people, and the test comes back showing high levels of uranium. Now this is not that they're radioactive, this is inert uranium. The first thing I ask is well, do they live in New Mexico, Nevada, that whole area? Ninety percent of the time, they do. There's a high amount of uranium that's inert, it’s not radioactive, but there's a higher amount of uranium in those areas that people will absorb. Uranium, even though it’s inert and not radioactive still has physiological effects. It affects adversely your digestive system, it affects you neurologically. There's a whole list of uranium toxicity symptoms.
Also, another patient I’ve had for quite a long time, she had some strange elements showing and had beryllium, which is something you don’t see that often. She had high levels of beryllium and chromium and different elements showing. We never could figure out what it was and one day, she happened to realize that about every six months she would notice that the cars in her neighborhood and the windows of houses in the neighborhood had this white film on them. So, she collected the film and she had it analyzed and she found that this film was high in beryllium and chromium and all these elements that we find in her. So, she then started to investigate and she was very active in her community, she was active politically and the school board and everything. She researched where this was coming and sure enough, there was some industrial complex about six miles from where she lived that was dumping this stuff in the air.
[01:13:39] Ashley James: Oh my gosh.
[01:13:43] Dr. Michael Biamonte: I have dozens of other similar stories. But the moral of all these stories is don’t become too complacent about where you live if you're ill. Investigate if you're ill. If your area has any history of chronic toxicity, if there's anything in the water, if there's anything that’s in the water, eventually it’s going to make its way to the land. If you're doing gardening or you're doing any kind of work like this where you're getting in the dirt, you're going to start absorbing this stuff. It doesn’t have to be in the air although the air is the easiest carrier. But check out your environment to see what’s going on there. Because your environment might be making you sick and you don’t know what your doctor doesn’t know.
[01:14:28] Ashley James: I’m reminded of this. You might have heard this. Let me know if you have. But there were these guys that went to I believe it was Papua New Guinea and they were doing trading. They gave them a bunch of corn and grains that these people had never eaten before. This population didn’t have a history of mental illness but after they gave them, I mean, besides what you get from being a cannibal for those certain areas, but in terms of like bipolar or schizophrenia, they noticed that they were having mental health issues after being exposed to like rice and corn. Same with Hawaii that the ancient Polynesians who had never had grains, they didn’t eat grains, that wasn’t in their diet, they ate tubers and fish and lots of fruit. They were given grains and mental health which had never been recorded in their history was then found. They took these findings and they did an experiment in England with a psychiatric ward primarily that had schizophrenics, they removed grains from their diet and saw that many of the went into remission and had either less or sometimes no schizophrenic episodes just from removing grains from their diet.
[01:15:53] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, these are very, well, at least to me, pretty well-known stories. That especially you’ll read in the books of the doctors who are very anti-gluten or anti-grain. It’s very true. Very true.
[01:16:06] Ashley James: Do you think that their major component is that it’s not feeding the candida that is having an impact on the brain becomes of the connection, the leaky gut, like you had mentioned before that there was these neurotransmitters in the gut, but also, that there’s a nerve that goes straight from the brain into the gut?
[01:16:29] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, that would be presuming that these people had candida which we don’t necessarily know that they did. So, we would have to look at really… the most obvious thing is these people right off the bat, when they’re eating grains, they’re probably blood type O’s. So initially, you're introducing a fluid which probably hasn’t been in their genetic line because these foods are not native to those areas. Once you do that, you don’t really know what’s going to happen because it’s like putting someone on another planet. You don’t know how they’re going to react to the food. You don’t know if the food allergy is going to cause like extreme irritation or break down their intestinal lining, which is leaky gut is then going to… leaky gut is known to cause many psychiatric-like symptoms in people. So, we could stop just there. But when you go further and you look at allergies that you can get from grains, they’ve been well known to affect the brain.
Pfeiffer, again going back to Karl Pfeiffer from the Brain Biocenter, he did quite a lot of work on that, quite a few of the people who I would tend to call the earlier pioneers in nutrition, did a lot of work showing that grains would affect people in this manner. So, like I said, you're introducing something to a line genetically which it’s not native to. These people never had it before. You don’t know how they're going to be affected by it.
[01:18:04] Ashley James: Right. Is there anything you’d like to say to those who have or are struggling right now with emotional issues, maybe they're on medication or they’ve been considering medication, is there anything you’d like to say to them directly?
[01:18:24] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes. As you’ve been hearing through this broadcast, going on these medications is haphazardous and dangerous. That's not your first choice. Regardless of how society looks at these things, how they're accepted, when you really get into the scientific aspect of it, it’s not condoned. You really want to take a look at the things we’ve talked about here today. This is where you want to go first before you start taking medicines which the fact the insurance company pays for them and the fact that they're advertised on TV doesn’t mean they're safe, it doesn’t mean they're good. We can start advertising heroine on TV and have your insurance company pay for it. That doesn’t mean it’s good for you either.
So, I would say to them, please look into the things we talked about today. Make that your priority because a pill doesn’t fix your life. If you have a problem in your life, handle your life, don’t take a pill and go hide in the closet.
[01:19:32] Ashley James: There's one thing we didn’t touch on and I want to make sure we touch on it, and that's those with panic attacks and anxiety. Oftentimes they feel like they're dying. I’ve worked with several clients who they have to go lie down and their heart is pounding, their palms are sweating, they feel like they're dying and they're terrified that they're dying and so they end up popping a pill. Can you speak to those who have anxiety and are choosing to be on anxiety meds because they feel like otherwise they die?
[01:20:00] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well, the first thing you always do is go to your doctor and you want to see if there's a tumor, benign or otherwise on your pituitary gland or on your adrenal glands. You want to have your adrenal hormones tested. Not a blood test in the morning where it’s one take. You want to do several blood work over the period of 24 hours or you want to do a 24-hour urine test which is going to measure your adrenal hormones to see if there's any surge in the hormones. You want to look to see how your magnesium levels are. Most importantly, you want to look for toxic metals. Because metals like cadmium, lead, arsenic, nickel, and iron, when any of these are in excess, they stimulate areas of the brain particularly the amygdala of the brain which when you overstimulate that area, you end up having the panic attack-like symptoms.
You want to look for physical causes. Just simple being medicated is not handling your problem. As you would assume, if there's an underlying problem there and you're not addressing it, well that underlying problem you're not addressing today, in 20 years from now, can multiply exponentially to give you all types of other problems.
[01:21:18] Ashley James: It’s reassuring to know that there's a path that with working with someone who does functional medicine like yourself, that you work like an engineer and you go through and do a deep dive and help that person become balanced again in their body. Now, they still have to do the work in their life. There's emotional and mental work to do, and you're going to make sure that you help them with the balancing of their body so that they no longer have this. We have to really listen to the symptoms of the body as the language of the body, the body is speaking to us if we have depression. We have problems sleeping, if we have outburst of anger or panic attacks. We need to take these symptoms seriously and go, okay, we’ve got to go through and is there something in my life externally, is there something in my self-talk internally, is there something in my biochemistry that's going on or physiologically what’s going in. We got to do a deep dive. It takes the right practitioner. Like I love saying, you don’t take your car to an electrician. You don’t take your car to a plumber. You want to take your body to the right practitioner for the certain condition.
So, I love medical doctors for emergency medicine. If I have a broken arm or if I have certain types of infections, if I need emergency surgery, that's when I want allopathic medicine. But when I have a chronic situation, I want to go see someone who does a deep dive into functional medicine. That's why I love the work that you do and I think you're an amazing practitioner and I’m so excited that I’ve been able to share you with my listeners because I know you help so many people. So, thank you so much for coming on the show, Dr. Biamonte. Of course, listeners can go to your website, health-truth.com. Is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[01:23:09] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No, I think that's it. But I do agree with you. If I break my arm, I’m not going to run in the house and start eating yogurt and think something is going to happen miraculously. You want to go to somebody who’s going to be able to address the problem correctly. There's so much on TV, people are so brainwashed by these companies, so, it makes it more difficult. But I completely agree with you. Your summation is people, they have to hold that to their hearts and their minds.
[01:23:40] Ashley James: Absolutely. Well, thank you again for coming on the show and talking about this very much needed conversation. I really appreciate the work you do and please come back anytime to continue to teach us. I love learning from you.
[01:23:56] Dr. Michael Biamonte: You're more than welcome and I certainly intend on doing so.
[01:23:59] Ashley James: Wasn’t that a fantastic interview with Dr. Michael Biamonte? I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and I hope it really helps you to gain clarity and direction on mental and emotional health. There are so many resources out there and I’ve seen so many people heal anxiety, depression, and bringing themselves back into balance. Even bipolar, I’ve seen people to bring back into balance where they feel even-kill again.
Use the search function on my website. I do have a lot of other episodes about these especially anxiety. Please go to Learntruehealth.com and just use the search function, type in anxiety, see all the episodes that come up. Lot of episodes, lot of great information, lot of great resources and tools. This is just the beginning. It’s just pulling you down the rabbit hole through the matrix, out of the matrix, down the rabbit hole. Then, I want to just arm you with all the resources and all the tools that’ll help. Make sure that you go to freedoctorcourse.com, get my Free Doctor course from holistic doctors who look to give you the foundations of health and then make sure you go to Learntruehealth.com/coach and get the free sample class from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition as well. I’m just showering you with gifts today. Make sure you get those. Of course, join the Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group because so many resources, so many people are there to support you. It’d be great to have you be part of the community and join us there. Have yourself a fantastic rest of your day. Thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Have a wonderful rest of your holiday season! I have a few other amazing episodes to post before we get to 500, so you still have some time, but if you have any testimonial to share at all, big or small, please send it to me. You can give me an audio, you can give me a video or you could just type it out. You can send it to support@learntruehealth.com or you can also message me on Facebook or put it in the Facebook group, would love to see you there.
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