194: Dr. Mark Hyman: Why You're Still Sick—Finding the Root Cause With Functional Medicine

0:00Before we get started with this episode, I'd like to invite all of you to the first ever Next Self-Long Jevite Summit happening in Nashville, Tennessee, the Conrad Hotel on Saturday, September 12, 2026. This isn't all day summit where you're going to be hearing from some of the best speakers in longevity medicine, including Dr. Vanda Wright, Dr. Luis and Nicola, many of the podcast guests that you've heard here on the extent podcast. And of course, I'm going to be there curating the entire day. We also have incredible vendors coming so you can try the latest technologies and health wellness in longevity. Go to next-health.com-summit and buy your ticket today. We only have 400 spots and they're going quickly. That's next-health.com-summit. I look forward to seeing you all there. Welcome to Extend with me, Dr. Darjean Shah, a podcast dedicated to cutting-edge science, research tools, and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21

1:00and trained in board certified to the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results when it comes to your health span. We are living in a new era where we are creating a new health care system. No longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as an interview world-renowned experts, offering you a step-by-step guide to proactively avoid disease and most importantly, extend your health span. Today, I'm going to be diving deep into the future of health care with a true pioneer in functional medicine, Dr. Mark Heimann. As a practicing doctor and the founder of the Ocho Wellness Center and a leading voice of functional medicine, Dr. Heimann has spent decades serving as a medical detective for patients dealing with the most complex, chronic, and incurable illnesses. He shares his own personal journey of overcoming severe health battles from chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, and heavy metal toxicity to autoimmune issues and gut disorders, and how it shaped his

2:02mission to end needless suffering. In this episode, we explore why traditional medicine often misses the root cause by playing whack-a-mole medicine with your symptoms. We're going to talk about how advanced biomarker testing can transform diagnostics and your health care and about the powerful synergy between functional medicine insights and cutting-edge treatments like hyperbaric oxygen therapy, ozone therapy, and the p-curate protocol. Dr. Heimann and I taped this episode together because of a partnership between Next Health and Ultra Wellness Center, where we're offering advanced level functional medicine care between our two organizations to truly help patients all across the nation. Get ready for a mind-opening episode that will change how you think about your body and your longevity. Hey everyone, before we dive into today's episode, I want to talk about something that you hear me talk a lot about, your biomarkers. I want to tell you how I'm approaching this situation right now with all of the patients that are calling me from listening to this podcast.

3:02So what happens is every day patients are writing to me saying they feel exhausted, they can't lose weight, they're having brain fog, and they see their doctor, and the doctor tells them all their blood work is normal, but the problem is this doctor usually is only checking about 10 to 15 biomarkers and only tell you if you have a disease developing. Meanwhile, your body has 160 different systems that are running, and all of these have blood tests that we can test on how effective they're working for you every single day. So if someone is not close to one of my clinics, one of my Next Health clinics, then I tell them go to their local laboratory and get on function health. Function health gives you access to 160 different biomarkers, the same kind of comprehensive testing that we do at all of our Next Health clinics. And if you try to get this on your own through your regular doctor, it can cost you thousands of dollars, hormones, inflammation, toxins, nutrient levels, they're all tracked over time in this one platform called function health. They could even help you get an MRI scan or CT scan if you want one. So what I love most about

4:04this company is that they don't have a crazy incentive to do this. Function doesn't push supplements, they don't have pharmaceuticals are trying to get you to take, you're just getting the data, and you're getting insights from the data, and you can bring this data to a clinic like ours, and we then have the information that we need to tell you how to improve your health. Membership is now only $365 a year, literally it's just a dollar a day. And right now, if you're one of my listeners, you can get a $25 credit towards the membership. You just go to the link in the bio, or go to functionhealth.com slash doctor shop, and use the code doctor shop 25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. Dr. Heimann, I'm so glad to be here with you today again on the extent podcast. Thanks so much for joining me today. Of course, Dr. Sean, it's amazing that he's talked to you. I love you, man, you're the best. I feel the same way about you, you know that, and it's so great that we've got to be friends, and we get to, you know, see each other at conferences everywhere, and then talking about, you know, making our businesses friends as well, and having

5:08next-alth an ultra wellness center come into a partnership that's been pretty incredible to see this come to fruition. Yeah, yeah, I've had my practice for 22 years, and we basically see people from all over the world with the most complex illnesses that are often quote, incurable, but we help people address the root causes, and it's quite amazing when you actually have the right map for people with trying to kill this, how much they can get better. Yeah, it's really incredible, and I think what's really incredible about that too, for me, Mark, is that a lot of these patients go through the traditional medical system, and they get no help, and they get referred to so many different specialists, each one, even more frustrating than the others, because they don't really understand how the systems interrelate, and, you know, I think having a center like ultra wellness center that you created where someone can look at them from a full systems approach, and make a real diagnosis and really help people, it's something that we just eat so much more of. Yeah, it's true. I mean, Darshan, I always say that people that what is your mission? My mission

6:08life is to end needless suffering through the power of understanding the body and through the lens of functional medicine, and through the power of like support and health and community to help people change behavior. It's really, you know, we really do have such an incredible scientific set of tools now that we didn't have, you know, even a few decades ago to understand the human body in a new way, and that new way is not being taught in medical schools. It's not being practiced in most clinics. Unfortunately, it's really hard to get access to it, and the truth is that people suffer needlessly from things that have solutions. I personally have had chronic fatigue. I personally have had really bad linemen of BCI. I personally almost died from multi-facicity. I had horrible gut issues. I've had all sort of colitis. I've had autoimmune diseases. So I personally have all these things, and I don't have any of them now, and I feel good, and I've had function at a high level, and it was through my own journey of suffering, of desperate to find answers, that I had to

7:09become a medical detective one for myself, and then for my patients, and to be able to kind of do this over decades with people and help kind of be a medical detective, to pull back the layers, and unravel the puzzle of what's happening with chronic complex illnesses. It's something that the traditional medicine knows almost nothing about, and it medicates with symptoms, covering over with drugs. It palliates things a little bit. It doesn't really address the issues. And people go from doctor to doctor. I might say 10, 20, 30 doctors before they get to me. You know, like, or get to our practice at the Ultramanus Center, and my joke was I used to work at Canyon Ranch, which is a health resort, and then I was a resort doctor, the doctor of last resort. You know, like, and I think, you know, it makes me angry, honestly, Darshan, because we have the understanding of human biology in a way that we never get, we understand the microbiome, mitochondria, the immune system, hormonal cell communication, we understand how our body's detoxified. We know these basic systems, we understand

8:13it, we know these medicine, and these puzzle pieces that have been talked about in different aspects of medicine, but no one sort of synthesized them until, you know, we kind of functional medicine started to kind of create a framework or a roadmap or a way of thinking. I mean, functional medicine for those who don't know what it is, it's not a test, it's not a lab, it's not a subalman, it's not a new specialty. It's a way of thinking. It's the most a meta framework for all of medicine. Or everything that you can probably think of, any condition, any disease fits in this new framework. And we basically kind of took a left turn with Vithelius, who was a, you know, an anatomist who dissected the human body, saw all these different organs and parts, and then medicine got organized by these organs and parts that actually are not separately working. They're all dynamic connected and it's not actually the right way to look at it like, like, inflammation is a great example. You've got inflammation is driving diabetes, it's driving cancer, it's driving

9:14dementia, it's driving heart disease, it's driving depression, it's obviously driving all the autoimmune diseases, but driving aging itself, and instead of like whack them all, you're just treating all these diseases separately. If you treat their causes, the diseases go away, the side effect of getting healthy. And that's really what functional medicine is, but it's a lot of detective work and a lot of effort to really deal with some of these harder problems. Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of that detective work that you've also leaned into very heavily in his biomarker testing and with function health. And so we see a lot of people at Nexel that have had their function health labs done. And finally, they have that aha moment, like, oh, these are pieces of my biology that no one's even looked at inflammation, my hormones, etc. And then they come to us. Yeah, Thompson's like, how does that fit into the puzzle of how I feel right now? We're like, thank God you had this realization to actually look under the hood and get your own testing done so you can now seek help in a more productive way.

10:17Yeah, I mean, that, you know, actually, that was one of the ways that I kind of figured all this out was was at the ultra wellness center with our team. We have five physicians, we have physicians assistants, we have five nutritionists, nurses, we have incredible team that's been working together, I mean, almost 30 years together, which is embarrassing this day because that means I'm really old. But it's like, we've been doing this a long time. And you know, for a while, we're the only kind of ones out there doing this at the level we were doing it. But now the more people doing which is great, but the thing that I got to do, which was a privilege was to do a lot of diagnostics on people. So I got to look at the genetics. I got to look at their microbiome. I got to look at their immune system. I got to look at their food sensitivities. I got to look at toxin levels. I got to look at mole exposures. I got to look at tick infections. I got to look at nutritional status. I could look at organic acids and all kinds of things that traditional doctors don't look at. And you know, it's like, there's a joke I was telling a lecture, which was a cartoon

11:17I saw once. So the guy looking under this light post for something, his friend comes over, says, what are you doing? He says, well, I'm looking for my keys. He says, well, we're in jelluzum. So I lost him down the street. He says, why are you looking over here? He says, well, the lights better here. And essentially, when you go to the doctor, they do the normal set of standard tests because that's what they know what to do. That's what the light is. But it's not actually where the problem is. So they might like do a blood count in a chemistry panel and like check, you know, an x-ray or something, but they don't know. Jesus, I should look at your microbiome for the answer to why you have an autoimmune disease. Or I should look at your level of toxins to see why you have, you know, you're not recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome and look at heavy metals or they should look at, you know, your food sensitivities and leaky gut as a way of to understanding why things are wrong. Or maybe I should look at, you know, deep dive on ticks and viruses and latent infections that are affecting a lot of people. Or maybe you, God, you should, I should have taken a history that found out you had like a moldy house and you didn't even know it. Well, maybe you didn't know it and you were living in there and that caused this whole immune reaction that's causing this chronic symptom. So, you know, you have to kind of start

12:22to do the diagnostics and that really helps you to figure out what's going on. I mean, take a little side turn here if I can. I can take a little side turn. Yeah. I just, this is an incredible story, which is a friend, a friend of mine's kid had a pretty bad, a pretty bad ADD and kind of on the spectrum and, you know, very, you know, behavioral difficulties. They want to give them tons of drugs and, you know, the parents like what do I do? And I look at the kid and I can see looking at him. He's got allergies because he's got like the dark circles on his eyes. He's got for sure gut issues. Usually often it's dairy and, you know, he's like five years old, but like he's got a lot of behavioral issues and a lot of, you know, hyperactivity and on the spectrum. And we did deep dive on the diagnostics and I'm like, we've got to look at the levels of toxins. We've got to look at his gut. We've got to look at his nutritional status. We've got to look at, you know, things that are kind of specific to these kids. And what we found was he had fully receptor anybody.

13:26Basically, the, the, in the brain, folate is really important for methylation, for brain chemistry function, affects mood, many things. In some kids, dairy is something that triggers this antibody response. So you're creating antibodies to the dairy, but the side bystander is this folate receptor antibody. Oh my gosh. And that causes them to have this huge problem, where they have these behavioral issues. And in fact, the FDA approved for this particular problem, by the way, no pediatricians are looking for this. Yeah, like that. And that's your infunctional medicine. You're not paying attention. Right. But they, they FDA approved a luka warin, which is philinic acid, a form of folate, to actually treat these kids. So the treatment for this kid isn't just giving folates, giving a specific kind of folate called luka warin. And I, and getting him, and he also had very high antibodies to dairy. So we had a very high antibodies to dairy on his allergy testing. And, and I told you, testing any had a high frat binding antibody. That's, and that

14:31was his one piece of the puzzle. But he also had, he also had extremely high oxidative stress, because it all have oxidative stress. So the brains are inflamed. He had metabolic triggers of inflammation that were coming from his guts. We had leaky gut. He had overgrowth of yeast in his gut. He had antibodies against his, we looked at something called the antibitulin and antic dp antibodies, because these are antibodies that form after you have an infectious diarrhea, like an infectious gastroritis, and it causes like a motility issue in the gut. So he has irritable bowel, and his guts not moving well, and he gets overgrowth of bacteria. And he gets, he's overgrowth, which he had, which can cause a lot of the same symptoms of these kids. Chris inflammation, his great, and he's, his, his, all have brain inflammation. So his kids got brain inflammation. And he also had on the organic acid, the test called chryllinic acid, which essentially is a, when you're metabolizing cryptofan into serotonin, it can kind of go off this side pathway instead of making a good brain chemistry. It makes this very toxic metabolite for your brain called chryllinic acid.

15:36And so this is the kind of like, and he also had high antimony, which comes from like flameratardins, from like pajamas and shit and bedding and furniture. So he had all these toxins and mercury. So he's got like all these different pieces. And I know we're going to help this kid resolve his, his, his, his, his, his infectious disorder. I don't know how we're going to completely get rid of all of it, but we're going to help him become a way more functioning, way more normal kid without a lot of the symptoms by dealing with this. But none of this, none of these things that I just talked about, whatever I didn't look at, they're not part of a regular blood count, they're not things people look for, they're, they're weird things. But the, the science is there about this. And if, and what's beautiful now is like with AI, you know, the average doctor doesn't know about this. But if you go to open evidence, which is the doctor's, you know, kind of AI platformer, you can go to clot or, yeah, and you put this stuff in there. It's like, yeah, it goes, yeah, this is the thing. And this is how it works. And the, the, the science is there. It's just not getting to the people. So that's what the ultra wellness center, what we do, we try to kind of close that gap between the science and the practice and help utilize some of these insights about how the

16:39body works as a system getting your root causes and then figuring out the right therapies. And sometimes with therapies, like, you know, for me, I'll just kind of share like for me, you know, I needed to advance therapies like when I had Lyme disease and Bicia and when I had mole toxicity, I wasn't getting better. Like I was, I was, I was wasting away. I had, I had like colitis from the mold and a C-diff infection. And it wasn't until I got ozone and I got, I got which you offer at next health. And I also had hyperbaric oxygen, which you also offer at next health. You know, I was able to start to recover. And then I was able to use something called the PK protocol, which is a very powerful therapy for rebuilding mitochondria, rebuilding cell membranes as it detoxifies a lot of the cellular toxins. It helps remove a lot of the mold toxins. It's an incredibly powerful therapy. But like, you know, at the ultraviolet center, we're in Linux Massachusetts. So we don't have to think about problems. We don't have to solve the problem. But a lot of therapies, we actually don't do. Like, you know, like if you need to go to get, you know,

17:43hyperbaric, you need to go like, you know, 20 times or 30 times or you need to go get ozone every week or you need to go get PK protocol, which is IV for cleaning your blood and rebuilding your cell membranes with phospholipids. You need to do that twice a week for 10 weeks. So the beautifully right next health and partnership with ultraviolet centers, you guys actually do that stuff. So we actually can, you know, identify the problem. We should have the right therapy for that problem. And then you guys can deliver on those therapies, which is incredible. And I think, you know, you're now, you know, I don't know, 25 cities and expanding. And so it's a real access issue that we didn't have before. So, you know, a lot of times it was frustrating for me, because I knew what a patient needed, but it was hard for them to get it. Right? I would like struggle to find the way, you know, ways to do it. And now it's like, oh, wow, you guys really offer it. And so it's such a great partnership between the ultraviolet center and ex-health, because we both offer something that the other doesn't. We go really, really deep. And by new, we do can deliver on the modalities that are kind of unique that are a little bit, you know,

18:44say a little bit on the fringes of medicine, like plasma frecis, ozone, phospholacoline, you know, NAD. There are things that are kind of considered fringe. But if you look at the data, there's data on them. Some we'd like more data on. But the anecdotal data from like thousands of practitioners using this is so profound. And for me, like I like anecdotes of my own health benefit from all these therapies. And my patient's health has benefited from these therapies in ways that it really been like game changers. Like you can't just give a vitamin that sometimes or change your diet sometimes if you're stuck with these really difficult problems. Right. Exactly. Now, it's such and beautiful stories, both yours and your friend's child. I mean, it's just such a testament to how well functional medicine actually can work and help people. And, you know, I think about my own story, the reason we even form next to it was because I got severely ill 12 years ago with an autoimmune disease. It was called Crupti sombrase, an autoimmune disease.

19:47I was eating away at my skull and my scalp and causing my skin and my bone to just eat away and give me severe headaches. I couldn't even work anymore. And I was struggling and I learned from you, functional medicine. I went to a conference in Arizona. I'll never forget it. You were talking about functional medicine. Was I there? Was I there? Yeah, you were there. It was the first time I met you. It was like 12, 13 years ago or 15 actually now. And I was like, I got a deep dive into this and I did. And I was running all over the city of Los Angeles, New Hyper American One Place, IV said another place that I was getting. Yeah. And, you know, and I was doing all these therapies of like five or six different offices and I thought to myself, like, I'm going to put this all under one roof. So really, you know, all the therapies that you talk about and you recommended, we put under a roof in one location in West Hollywood and now that's grown to all over the country. And we look at ourselves as basically the service provider for functional medicine. If you functional issue, we can give you the therapies that are recommended that could help you. And,

20:51you know, I think it's been a great partnership with you guys because you do people fly in from all over the world to the ultra wellness center to seek relief from conditions that they can't find answers to. And when they go back to their cities like Chicago or Miami or LA or all the cities that were in Seattle, we can then enact your therapeutic program. And that's what's been really working well because I think a lot of people out there, you know, I always quote you on this one mark. I say, people are sick and tired of being sick and tired, right? And, you know, the first step is to get some testing done and, you know, you provide that and we provide that in next cell. And then people are like, now what? And if people come into our clinics and they have a complex issue like you're talking about with yourself or your friend. And by the way, auto immune diseases, I think almost all of them fall in that bucket of complexity. And so then we refer them to you and your practitioners do telemedicine with them and figure out treatment program. And then we put that into place and it just works so well for people looking for this high level of care. It's true. And you know, and there's whole realms of conditions where these kinds of intensive

21:55lifestyle and the modality really move the needle like, you know, I always see things like Lyme disease and chronic Lyme and long COVID and mold illness. You know, we call it Mcast, which is basically mass teleactivation syndrome where people just react to everything and they have lots of histamine. They're always having weird symptoms. But there's, and that's all the auto immune diseases, you know, from rheumatitis to colitis to MS. And then there's all the neurodegenerative problems, which are, I think, as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and ALS, like, ALS patients who've done amazingly well, like with PK protocols, a lot of these, the data show that ALS comes from, you know, actually the environmental toxins that I have one of my patients was a farmer who was just supposed to so many pesticides and he got ALS. But he's been doing great by getting some of these modalities. So I think, amazing. You know, really, we really need to help people understand that there's, you know, there's a lot that can be offered if you go to the right place and you have the right intelligence applied and you have the right modalities that you can lean on after. And there,

22:57there are things that, that, you know, people just aren't getting and it's unfortunate because somebody could walk around suffering and, you know, like, mold is a really common problem. I can't tell you how many people have molded. Somebody read another, like, it almost killed me. I had it, you know, of the little barn. I was coughing for a year, kind of figured out and then I got it moved out, but then I got to see different infections from an antibiotic for tooth for bad tooth and everybody holds system just collapsed. And so the only way I could rescue myself was through ozone and through hyperbariac and through IVs and a lot of the tools that next health offers. So I think, you know, sometimes you need very extreme stuff, sometimes you don't, but there's always, there's always a way to sort of design a plan that will help you build towards improving your and optimizing your health over time. Right. Absolutely. So I'm thinking about, you know, people that come in and they are frustrated because they can't figure out what's going on and the traditional doctors can't give them help. And I would love for the audience to get like some kind of maybe like a

23:59word cloud almost, you could put out there of symptoms that they're suffering with that if they're suffering with these symptoms and they can't find help with their traditional primary care doctor, maybe they should consider getting tested at a higher level for a functional medical for like a functional issue or a or a complex illness. Like when do you start getting worked up for a complex illness? Because I think it takes people like a year to get to that point sometimes or five years or decades sometimes, right. And it's like, you don't have to suffer that long, right? You know, mission in life. So what are some of the symptoms that they can be seeking on? It can be really from the mild to the severe. I call it anything from FLC syndrome to FLS syndrome. FLC syndrome is when you feel like crap. I should have less than you feel like shit. I think a lot of times people are walking around with stuff that they just think is normal for them. It's not normal because not normal to walk around everything from ear to mouth to migraines to join pain to congestion or rashes or ex-money at least you're not serious or like threatening,

25:01but they're very annoying and they affect people and they affect the quality of life. So whether it's something like that or something more severe like chronic fatigue or Lyme or cognitive impairment or severe psychiatric illnesses or neurodegenerative diseases or severe autoimmune diseases, these are these are things you have to take seriously and understand that you know, traditional medicine is great for acute care. It's really bad at chronic illness and they have the wrong map. They're really as you diagnose you by symptoms and geography. Okay, where's okay? You're you have this wrist pain and it looks like this and you're pain in the morning and it looks like this x-ray. You have a room-charthritis and you have this abnormal test. That's just the name of the symptoms. It's not the name of the cause and the way we think about things is really when you when I think it's worth talking about is how do we approach these different chronic problems when you have any of these things that you're suffering from whether you just got chronic achesome and you can't rid of it or whether you have like migraines or debilitating or whether you have you know amassed and you really can't walk like what you know

26:02what do you do like and and I think people think oh well I I just have to do the traditional treatment but you know our friend Terry Wallace was a was a doctor who had severe amassed was in a wheelchair couldn't move and is now fine and riding her bike 20 miles a day because she used the principles of functional medicine to repair brain she's studying this at the BA she's working showing how improved which improvement you can have if you follow this plan but rather than like all these specialties and organ and diseases we just think of the body very simply there's like basically too much of the bad stuff that's causing a problem that you need to get rid of and not enough of the good stuff that your body needs to thrive and functional medicine is really all about like diving as deep as you can in each of those areas like right so for that little boy one of the things I figured out was he's not too much dairy which is causing this antibodies it's blocking his fully receptor this causing his brain to not work that's the problem it's not that he needs ADD medication right to tranquilize or because he's hyper or like you know that's the problem

27:03and and so but it requires you to think about oh maybe it's something he's eating is bothering him so it's so it goes to the list and and then it's like how do you figure out they have two of the bad stuff or not the good stuff what system it's affecting and which systems are involved because there's not that many systems in the body it's not like you've got the cardiovascular system in your you know your your kidney system in your you know the paddock system in your neurologic system it's that's not how the body's organized it's it yes if you cut yourself open that's the organ you'll see like you're a surgeon you know that but it's not actually how things are working it's a network and so there's basically seven systems we think about in functional medicine and each one of these gets imbalanced by either too much of the bad stuff or not of the good stuff it's your gun micro biome it's your immune system call it defense and repair it's your energy system your mitochondria how you make energy that's a very delicate system to get affected it causes fatigue and many of these symptoms have all that as part of it there's your detoxification system how you handle toxins and both your own toxins that you make this process of your metabolism

28:05and also all the little environmental toxins are exposed to then there's your transport system which we should look at the circulation your vascular system your communication system is another really important system that's all the hormones neurotransmitters peptide cytokines like all the messenger molecules those all are very sensitive but those usually downstream to these other things and then there's your structural system which is your biomechanical structure all the way down to your cell membranes so right basically that's it and and and when you have a it's really a different map rather than the hundred and fifty five thousand diseases we just think about these simple things too much too little and then these seven systems so what are the too much stuff we look for and this is really what a good functional medicine doctor will do is they will be like relentless about answering the question of like what is it right what's the cost so is it food and that could be just eating a shitty diet and into my sugar in diabetes or it could be like this boy having dairy that he's got a unique reaction to it's causing a brain dysfunction it could be gluten you

29:05know it could be so it could be foods that's the tibities it could be microbes so they could be like infections like Lyme or things like no mold would be more in the toxin area I think but it would be like it would be like microbes could be like Lyme disease it could be viruses it could be change your biome yeah to your bioreirus you know it could be changing your microbiome that's a really big one and then there's toxins you know and this is it environmental toxins pesticides heavy metals mole toxins and so these are these are things we have to investigate so we know how to investigate mold you know how to investigate like you know investigate your microbiome and how to investigate infectious or not investigate alligator and investigate food and dietary effects you know how to investigate also stress like we can mod the mod of effects of stress on the body and that's another big driver of problem so stress talks in the allergens microbes for diet these are the big things that drive the problems you think of the AREID of those things and then you have to be He is a detective to figure out that on the other side, you share what's missing, right? And this little boy, he had a unique need for Luke of Warren. So this little boy had a unique need for this particular form of folate that is unique,

30:11that it's very special to him. So I can't just give him a multivitamin with folate, it's not going to work. So the idea is like, oh, is it enough for the real food? You need the right nutrients. And we can measure those, right? You can measure vitamin levels. You can measure munition levels. And you need the right balance of hormones. You need light in the right way. It's circadian rhythm. And you need movement. And you need sleep. And you need community connection. Meaning, purpose. And you need to be able to investigate whether you have enough of those things. And some of these things measure easily, right? You can measure, you know, you can measure, for example, like your nutrient levels, as if you're a deficient in something, or you can measure your heart and variability to realize maybe you don't have enough parasympathetic activation in your life. You know, like a big ol' nerve stimulator. Or something, you know? So basically, this is the whole process. And it's a very systematic process. But it requires someone who really understands the body in a different way, and understands the patterns and calvings connect. And then can kind of create a narrative of what's actually happening. Like with this boy, he's clear, he's got the problem.

31:13He's got leaky guide. He's got dysbiosis. He's got used to her growth. He's got dairy sensitivity. It's causing this receptor problem in his brain. He's got toxins as well. All of this causing inflammation. All of this causing oxypstress. All of this causing neuroinflammation. And so that all has to get dealt with. So we're going to change his diet. We're getting enough gluten and dairy. We're going to give him a treatment for his microbiome. I'm going to give him any fungal. I'm going to give him this lucovorn treatment. I'd probably give him a methyl B12 shot because he's got a methyl monoc acid elevation on his urine test. It's another marker that Dr. Zola got for B12. You know, we're going to give him things to help support the oxidative stress that's going on with him. And so we're basically going to, and I don't even have all his tests back yet. So I'm still working on it. So I'm just giving an example of a flavor of how specifically we work. And if I saw another kid with the same symptoms, he might have a very different set of problems. I mean, a very different set of treatments. Because I would say if you know the name of your disease, it doesn't mean it's wrong with the say Alzheimer's or autism or migraines or rheumatoid arthritis.

32:17It doesn't mean you know a cause for your particular version of that condition. And that's what social medicine is really personalized. And then the treatments become personalized. So now as we start with lifestyle, but we often have to graduate to the things that offer it at next health, which you guys are so good at delivering the IVs, the phosphol colon IVs, the hyperburet oxygen, the ozone therapies, pathophrases, you guys do exosomes. I don't feel any stem cells now, you do stem cells. These things do all the tools that are really helpful. So that's so beautifully. First you need the map and then you know what tools you're going to need. Exactly. And that's such a great way of explaining functional medicine and a nutshell. And it's been incredibly powerful for so many patients. And so at our locations, we have medical providers there. We have doctors. We have nurse practitioners. But they don't have the deep level of expertise that I'll show on the center as sometimes. So 30 years with five practitioners and your old team there. And so some of these people come in and we really want to get that super personalized program

33:17for them. So we refer them over to you. And I would love to like talk about two or three of the referrals we've made recently and maybe kind of explain those to the audience. Sure. You know, one type of people can get help through this partnership at any one of our locations at textile. I did the math. I think we've had like 150 years of collective functional medicine experience in the doctor machine. It's crazy. That's incredible. That's awesome. So one of the persons that came in, she had mass cell activation syndrome. Okay. And she was saying that a lot of people have not heard of, but she was really, really suffering. She was suffering with just, you know, in the middle of a day at work, she would just get hives all over her body. She'd have to go home. She would sometimes visit the emergency room for these types of symptoms just and they come out of nowhere. And so she was so frustrated to the point where she was just staying at home every single day all day long, just in fear of this disease and cause a tremendous amount of stress. And so can you talk a little bit about mass cell activation syndrome? What it is? What are some of the causes and potential treatment options?

34:19Yeah. So mass activation syndrome is a really horrible condition that thinking about like allergies on steroids, it's, you know, it's an overproduction and overreaction to almost an allergic syndrome, almost everything that people would be that they're exposed to chemicals. And mass cells are the cells in your body that produce histamine. So you know, if you get hives, that's a good histamine reaction or a bee sting, that's a histamine reaction. But imagine that going on all the time. And that often is a result of many overling factors that, that, that could be the things that we talked about. So it can be triggered by long-colyt, it can be triggered by thick infections, it can be triggered by mold, it can be triggered by heavy metals, it can be triggered by gut issues that happen like the cause of dysbiosis that then creates a leaky gut and it just tips people into this cycle where they're reacting to everything, they're, they're, they're having all these autonomic symptoms or having all these weird allergic symptoms and it's

35:20hard for them to eat things. And so there's a, there's a real way to sort of unpack the cause of it. So it's not just about treating them to the, the, the naky histamine because you can do that. That may be part of the treatment, the part of the treatment might be, you know, giving people different antihistamines, it might be giving them things like chroma one, which is a thing that can help block the histamine that got. It might be giving them the herbs and things that are very good in modulating the immune reaction, but it's really more about getting to the root causes of it. Right. And I think that's, that's what people with this problem often are not diagnosed. You know, there are, there are real ways to sort of diagnose it that people can, can, can learn. But I think that, you know, for the most part, mass electricians syndrome is something that people just don't, don't know that much about in the traditional medical field. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And what I was going to just say just to add to that mark is that, you know, if you, if you are experiencing these hyper allergic reactions, the treatment is temporarily histamine antihistamines and some, some people even walk in on high doses of steroids.

36:23But the idea here is we got to get to the cause where we're going to be suffering with this forever and it could get worse and worse. And so until someone does a root cause analysis and why you're having this problem, you're just going to suffer forever. And I think it's, I think a lot of people get the diagnosis and they just assume that steroids is a treatment forever and that's not the case. No, no, and it's really, you know, the, the, the mass electricians syndrome, you can get all kinds of symptoms like skin stuff, flushing, hypes, itching, you can get bloating, gut issues, diarrhea, you can get palpitations, blood pressure issues, brain fog, you know, all the weird anxiety, headaches, sleep issues. Yeah. And then there's a lot of ways to figure it out. And then there's, there's actually, you know, ways to actually treat it like the lowering load of, you know, food that have histamine in them, eating more fresh food, certain mastell stabilizers, endemic misuse. It's like they're natural, like, of course, attend the D.O.L. and vitamin C, and they're like, you know, they're not going to be that bad. And then they're going to be like, you know, they're going to be, you know, they're going

37:25to be, you know, they're going to be, you know, they're going to be, you know, they're going to be natural, like, of course, attend the D.O.L. and vitamin C, D.A.O.L. which is an enzyme that can help the processed histamine nettles. And there's, and then of course, you might need medication, you might need histamine, you might need mastell stabilizers, you might need things like low dose, don't check so much. That's something most doctors will use. And then you sort of need to sort of fix the gut, you need to treat the mold, you need to treat hidden infections, you need to optimize nutrient status. You know, there's, there's things you can do is even the helmet therapy and things like that. I think, I think, you know, there's a lot of stuff that can be quite powerful. But again, in this, you know, how to think about the problem and know how to diagnose it, you're not going to get to the right answer. And that's really what, what, what functional medicine is. It's a thinking solution. It's a, it's a new way of thinking, you know, my, my mentor Sid Baker talked about how traditional medicine is always in the naming and blaming game. Blaming the disease and then we blame the name for the problem. Oh, I know why you have hives. It's because you have mastell activation syndrome.

38:26No, that's just to name me get to be able to have high. I wonder why I know why you're sad and hopeless and helpless because you have depression. No, that's just to name me get to people who have those symptoms. It doesn't say anything about the cause. And so he says instead of naming and blaming, he needs to think and link. So it's a thinking and linking game really. And that's what functional medicines is. You're really not, you don't stop thinking when you make the diagnosis. When you and I went to medical school, basically, once we got the diagnosis, we stopped thinking. It's like, okay, here's the treatment. Okay. You have the disease. This is the drug. This super problem is the serious. Like as long as you make the diagnosis, that was the holy grail. But in functional medicine diagnosis is just a first step on the way to figure things out. Then you have to figure out what the cause is. And then that takes a little bit of investigation. Yeah. Yeah. That's not a great point. The diagnosis is not the end of the journey. Right. It's not diagnosis and prescriptions and you're done. Now it's time to figure out why so you can get off potentially the prescriptions and reverse the problem. The other one I wanted to talk about that you actually had told me your story around is Lyme disease.

39:28And you know, it's pretty incredible. Even I practice out here in California. And we're seeing a lot of people with Lyme disease even out here in California now. So can you talk a little bit about Lyme and kind of why it's how prevalent it is and what people should think about? It's very prevalent. It's, you know, it's not when people say Lyme, I think it's a rubric for all tick-borne illnesses. So it could be Lyme, Babesia, Bartonella, Urlwiki, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. There's a lot of these things. And there's very many variations. There's different forms of Borrelia, which is the Lyme. There are forms of obesity, there's different forms of Urlwiki and Bartonella. And they all are something that's hard to diagnose. And so my friend and colleague Richard Horowitz, who's a Lyme expert, just come up with a new book called I Think Any Chronic On This or Something, which is similar, which all these things we're talking about. And he talks about how he diagnosed it. But it can come in so many different forms. It can cause autoimmune disease, it can cause chronic fatigue syndrome, it can make you more susceptible to mold stuff.

40:30It can get reactivated with COVID. It can actually cause a lot of neurodegenerative symptoms. He just showed through a trial using a Dapsone of some other drugs in patients with Alzheimer's and high levels of things called P-Touch 217, which is a biomarker test. So look at your risk for Alzheimer's again. So no, your doctor wouldn't check for it. We offered it function. We offered it. I'm sure you're offered there the next health and all this. But it's like a like a blood sugar instead of like checking for diabetes, your blood sugar, checking for dementia with this test, because not a cholesterol where it's like a risk factor. This is actually showing this damage in your brain. So he was able to show by treating a Lyme that we able to reduce P-Touch 217 and reverse the cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's. So these conditions parade as all kinds of things, you know, I remember you probably remember from medical school, we learned about syphilis. It was like the great masquerader, right? It could treat, right? It had all these, those neuro syphilis, all the weird heart,

41:30it would affect everything. And I mean, Lyme disease and the tick-borne infections are like this new syphilis. It's like 80s. It suppresses your immune system. It affects everything. And so you really, you know, really need to kind of get the root of it. And I mean, it's the right diagnostics. And the treatments are tough because you know, anybody can be helpful, but they often don't solve the whole problem. And the things that can help me really helpful are things like hyperbarics and ozone, which can really, really do help a lot. And that help first, for example, help me a lot to get rid of my hand to BCI. I had a line to this. The bad. Yeah. Yeah. And we offer ozone at everyone of our locations. So it's very prevalent and we can, we can definitely help treat people. We've seen a lot of people like tremendous improvement in their symptoms. So that's so it's been, it's been a great to, you know, be able to offer the testing as well for Lyme disease, which I think is very hard to find. Otherwise, you know, just traditional infection disease doctors or if you ever even get to one. So, yeah, they don't do the right test. Yeah. They don't do the right test, right? Exactly. And by the way, just to highlight and then what tests you guys use at all to own the center for Lyme disease?

42:32Well, it's a different test. I mean, you know, there's some of the, some of the things you can use from regular lab that are indicators, like CD 57 levels lab core, but we use infective labs. We'll use hygienic labs. There's a specialty lab that are focused more on, on tick infections. But, but you know, sometimes you'll pick it up on a regular lab test, but often not. So, and even sometimes your immune system's not great. You might not even melt a response. That's very good. So it's a clinical diagnosis. It's tricky. It is tricky. Yep. Yep. Let's talk a little bit about something both you and I have had in the past two mold. This is rampant here where I live. It's almost every house has some mold in it. And because we look close to the water here, but it's a bad problem. And people are really suffering from mold and they don't realize it. Talk a little about mold. Well, I lived in a, I mean, I have mold a couple of times in my life. Other than a house that was from 1825, it was the former post office in the little town of Massachusetts. And the basement was so moldy.

43:34And this is before I really knew about mold before I kind of got into functional medicine. And I got pretty sick with chronic disease. And I couldn't get fit of it. And I moved out of that house and I moved into a barn. And I moved into a 1898 barn that had the stalls in the basement with the mold. It was a good smell when you walked in and the musty moldy smell. And eventually I renovated it in like, but I, it was not even that long ago. It was about 10 years ago that I had, I was working really hard to clean and clinic. I was traveling a lot. I was in my house, but I had this horrible cough that couldn't get rid of. And I was like, oh, I just, you know, typical doctor, but you know, I just ignored my health. I'm about a mission. I'm working hard, whatever. I think I looked at everyone and I'm saying, and, and I've mentioned I was like, this is not right. I think it must be my mold in the house. And so I did, I did the testing. I tested myself. I tested the house. I'm like, oh, shit, it's really bad.

44:37And then I had to move out. I had to remediate my house, but, but then what happened was I got this massive inflammatory kind of crisis that happened. And it was a cascade of things, but I ended up having a developing severe fatigue, cognitive function. I severe gut issues like a result of C diff, but it was because the mold had sent my system to be in this chronic activated inflammatory state. And I couldn't get out of it. And I was stuck in it. And I had, you know, chronic, you know, gastro, gastroritis. So I stomach, I had colitis. I was going to had 20 bloody balance a day. I was in bed. I lost 30 pounds. I was a scarecrow. And it was bad. I don't have 30 pounds. So I'm pretty skinny. It's all right. It was actually funny. It was a patient of mine who had been treating who had mold and had been in a house in the area with mold. And I had been staying in touch with him. And he's like, Hey, just FYI, I tried ozone and it really helped my mold. And I'm like, Oh, and I was like, Oh, ozone, it's like sounds weird.

45:38And I'm kind of on the edge, but it was, it fell too far out for me, even that, even 10 years ago. And I was like, I've heard enough stories. Like I've heard when I patients come and say, well, I was sick with this. This meant that I did ozone. I got better. And I probably heard that a dozen times over the years. And this time I listened and I said, OK, well, I'm dying. I'm literally, literally dying. Couldn't eat. I was 30 pounds lighter. I was in bed. I couldn't function at all. I couldn't work. I couldn't do anything. I can barely just get downstairs for one meal a day. And I said, I'm going to try it. So I went to New York and like you said, I had to piece together a hyperburet chamber here and ozone here. And I'd be there. And I was like, Oh, my God. It was before next health. And I ended up getting better as a result of doing ozone therapy. And it was just it just reset my immune system at reset my mitochondria. It cleared out a lot of the toxins. It was quite powerful. And I was really, I was really shocked, honestly, how effective it was. It's not a panacea for everything, but it is a very powerful,

46:40hermetic therapy that can really help a lot of people with many chronic issues, including chronic infections, including mold, including, you know, like Lyme disease, tick infections, autoimmune diseases can be very helpful. So I definitely, I definitely think it's got a powerful role in medicine. The last kind of thing I wanted to bring to the audience's attention is this newer treatment that you introduced to me that we then launched that next health, specifically for your patients. And now we have a lot of patients talking about it, which is the PK or phosphatidyl coolem protocol, IV protocol. And I think this is something that people are hearing about. It is difficult to understand what it is. And I want them to hear it from you because you're such a great teacher of explaining this to me. Yeah. Well, thank you. I mean, look, the reality is that we are poisoned. And whether it's the, you know, load of petrochemical products, flammartartons, pesticides, phallase, plastics, I mean, you name it. We're exposed to pretty much everything.

47:43Anybody, and they've done these studies where they've done fat biopsies or they get a fat, like they'll do a surgery and I'll give them a move. Some piece of fat or you know, breast reduction or you have a panic like the mirror or whatever. They'll just like do those five biopsies. And like everybody is just loaded with toxins. And even the newborn study from the environmental working group, you know, showed 10 newborn babies before they took their birth breath, had 287 toxins in their unbillable corn blood. And and so what happens is these studies where toxins get lodged in your tissues, they are lodged in your cell membranes. And your cell membranes are made of fat and majority of that is something called phosphatideolcoline. And it's, it's really important for many things, including your transmitter function, but more importantly, just for the health of your cell membranes and the health of your cell communication, the relationship between your cells is determined by that. Moles also really disturbs the, this thing called proxistone, which are these little factors in your cells that mill build the fats for your cell

48:45membrane. So mold actually poisons these things and you get really funny membranes yourself, don't communicate well, you get lots of inflammation. And you're dealing with all this cellular toxic load of mold and also environmental toxins. And then that causes mitochondrial injury and mitochondrial sub membranes. And so basically this is a protocol that was developed by someone in Patricia Cain and looking at what we call fossil lipid exchange. So basically they're taking, it's like a thing that is like an oil change. You're literally putting in this oil, phosphatideolcoline into your body through an IV and even in an oral leave, it's not as effective. And it basically rinses out all your cell membranes and it gets rid of the cellular toxins. It rebuilds your mitochondria. It builds your cell membranes. We're really good for chronic fatigue syndrome from mold toxicity, particularly mold exposure. It's very hard to deal with mold. That's one of the most powerful therapies. It really helps to people like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. It helps to be a chronic fatigue. It helps people with any kind of neurologic issues,

49:48cognitive issues, brain fog. I did it and I kind of was cleaning myself up after it's one of the most the you know, consequential things I've personally done to improve my cognitive function and my brain fog was so powerful. And I've used it a lot with people with Parkinson's, with Alzheimer's, with mold issues and it's really quite effective and it combines the phosphatideolcoline with a bunch of other things like glutathione and methylated B vitamins and biotin and carnitine and mineral, it's like a cocktail, but it's basically, you know, twice a week for 10 weeks. So the only bad next health is it's like, you know, you have to go in regularly. It's the ultra-ohm center. We can't really deliver that because we will come all over the world and it's going to live there for 10 weeks. So they're going to instead of home, they can put it next health center, they can do twice a week therapy for 10 weeks. That's not something people need to do at a second time, but you know, you can actually measure your toxin low before and after and I've done that. It's it's striking to see how dramatically it changes. So I think, you know, it's one of the most, I think, important and

50:50advanced therapies for all kinds of chronic illnesses that people are just starting to learn about, but I've been I've been doing some version of it for 30 years. That's not new. Oh, yeah. Patricia Kane. Patricia Kane taught this to me probably in the late 90s. It was probably the late 90s. And I and I have been using it ever since, but in different versions. This is the sort of more evolved version of it, but it's quite it's quite effective. Yeah, I agree with. We have quite a few patients going through hyperbarics, you know, ozone and TK protocol right now for moltoxicity and they seem to be doing a lot better. And also, you know, people that have even some neurological symptoms and of even Parkinson like symptoms as well that are using it that are seeing some improvement. Well, that's what I really got kind of doubled down on it because I really saw a Parkinson's patient. It was like dramatic change and I was like, whoa, you know, that's no. And Parkinson's is one of those conditions we know is related to the high load of environmental toxins.

51:51Yes, absolutely. And speaking of environmental toxins, you guys sent a patient to us and Colorado is doing plasma exchange with us specifically for toxin removal as well. He maybe just highlight on plasma exchange a little bit for us and let's put the positive pieces for that. Yeah, I mean, plasma freesist is it sort of a treatment that's been around in medicine for a long time. And it's been used for autoimmune diseases for people who have, you know, different levels of sort of inflammatory problems because it removes a lot of the auto antibodies. It removes a lot of inflammatory products in your blood. But also removes toxins and there's some really promising research around Alzheimer's and cognitive function. So again, it's like, you know, you think about like your your oil filter just gets clogged and you want to like clean it and it's like it's like blood cleaning. In a way, the busy filter your blood removes a lot of the, you know, old waste and proxies and inflammatory products and antibodies and and then, you know, you get this new flesh of albamymon and it can bind to more stuff and clean it.

52:51So it basically creates a it's almost like an oil filter chase. And it really works for people with with with product issues, particularly people with, you know, long COVID. There's been quite a bit of research on that in Europe, on long COVID and plasma freesist. And I think there's more and more research coming around along the jabby. There's a longevity therapy. There's more research coming around on Alzheimer's. So I think I think we're going to see more and more benefits of this. You know, it is a it is quite a, you know, involved procedure, but you know, I've done a fair bit. I've done a lot of these treatments myself at Next Health. So, honestly, when I go there, I I don't like to go into a place where I don't trust. And, you know, I think there's a lot of shady operations out there and I go in the Next Health, very professional, very buttoned up, you know, very clean, you know, clearly falls, you know, protocols and standards. And so I feel like I'm personally when I go somewhere and I want to do that, I'm going to see you. Thank you for your time.

53:52You have a hand in the leg. Can I come in? I love it. I can't hang out with you because we have to be tied into the chair for two hours. That's right. You can do that. It's time we have for two hours. That's how we hang out now during plasma change. That's fantastic. Well, I think this was a fantastic overview for my listeners about our partnership. And I'm really excited about this because we're just going to be able to help so many more people, people that did not have access to incredible thinkers like the people at the Ulchow on the center that you've assembled there that have tremendous experience. And we're giving them access to. And also, you know, they see you guys and then they come back and do the treatments that we really believe in that can really help them. So, for complex cases and even for non complex cases, I think this partnership has been fantastic. And we really appreciate you. You just need to tune up. It's like, you know, honestly, I think, you know, if you look and afford it and these kinds of treatments, you know, to me, you know, we all got something. And, you know, even if you feel okay, you know, it's always about trying to understand what's

54:56under the hood. Like, you could drive around your car and it's fine. But like, what if you had no warning lights and no, no dashboard, you know, if your tire pressure was low, your gas was low, your oil's low or you need to check your engine or like, we don't have that dashboard. So basically, you basically your car would just go and then we'd just kind of go off. But we were like, okay, morning, check your, you know, your time for your checkup for your car, we don't have it for a body, but we really need a dashboard. And that's why that function helps me, you know, kind of give people like a really clear dashboard. That's why people need to do the diagnostics at a place like culture on the center and next health to see what is actually happening because, you know, you might have a toxic load in your system and you might not know it. Like, I had high, high levels of herb, heavy metals in mercury, which is one of the things that I found out, you know, early on I got a critique that was the cause. And I didn't know it and I was fine. I was like fine. I was riding my bike a hundred miles a day. I was, you know, cognitively great. I felt good. And then boom, something happened and I went from the perfect to like barely functioning within a couple of days.

56:00And so it's like, if I had found out I had mercury before and I had addressed it, I probably wouldn't have gotten sick, right? Yeah. So, so it's really a cleaning up and make sure nutrients are optimized, making sure toxic load is low, making sure gut's healthy, making sure that I'm in the latent infections or ticks that are kind of swimming around in there that are potentially going to cause a problem. Cause, you know, we manage your bodies manage until the equilibrium shifts and the balance kind of goes, builds towards the, you know, over stress about whatever it is. And then, you know, you kind of fall apart. It's like, yeah, people with chronic illness were fine until they got COVID and then they died because they had this underlying chronic thing. So, I think that's really important for people to understand that it's important to really be proactive about your health. So, even if you don't have a chronic illness, even if you're not like struggling really terribly, but you just want to look at what's going on, there's so much you can do, we can do a thoughtful atmosphere, so much you can do to tune yourself up. Like, I go in for a problem, I go in for ozone, I go in for IVs,

57:00I go in for like a PK protocol for over a couple of years, because I just want to keep my system healthy. It's more like maintenance rather than like waiting until something happens. So. Right. Absolutely. It's a whole new world I think that we're living in now where there's solutions to complex problems, and also there's a way to maintain optimal health for a long time. And that's kind of like I think you're a mission, and my mission is help people who live their longest and healthiest life. And not get sick, yeah, to your point and need the suffering, right? So, really appreciate you doing this. We'll be marked. This is awesome. Thank you. Of course, I'm just fine. It was fun as always. Thank you. As always, can't wait to see you again. Thank you. Thank you.