Resetting Inflammation A Functional Medicine Approach With Dr. Josh Redd

0:00Forget frequently asked questions. Common sense, common knowledge, or Google. How about advice from a real genius? 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified in license. 5%? Go above and beyond. They become very good at what they do. But only 0.1% are real geniuses. Richard Jacobs has made his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Come the geniuses. This is the Finding Genius Podcast. Richard Jacobs. Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast. I got Dr. Josh Red. He's the founder of Red River Health and Wellness. He's also the author of a book. He just sent me as a, you know, for free to evaluate. Call the 30-day inflammatory reset. So, appreciate that. Welcome, Dr. Josh. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah, it's a little bit about your background. What inflamed you to care about information?

1:02Well, very question. A long time ago, I graduated from chiropractic school and opened up my first functional medicine clinic. I never really did chiropractic. I always did blood chemistry, looked for underlying imbalances with medical testing, diet, lifestyle, all sorts of that stuff. And now I end up owning one of the largest functional medicine clinics in the world. So, we see a lot of really sick people who are dealing with lots of chronic diseases and a lot of immune conditions. And inflammation is the key driver for pretty much all of the conditions that I see within my clinic. And so, I started to realize a lot of people didn't know how to test for inflammation. They didn't know how to assess it. And then if they found it, they wouldn't know how to address it. And so, over the last 17 years, we've been helping so many different patients feel better and have a better quality of life. And to see us, that can be pretty expensive. And so, you know, in order to help those that maybe aren't from where my clinics are or maybe can afford it, I decided to put every single thing that I've learned into one book on how

2:02to really help individuals feel better and have a better quality life, how to identify inflammation, how to check for it, how to assess it, and then once found how to treat it. And so, pretty much I, you know, that's it in a nutshell right there. So, just to, you know, I don't want to give away the book, but how does any of you know if you're inflamed? Like, what are a couple of things that a person can look for or notice to let them know? Yeah, I think that may be that way. Yeah, these are great questions. There's a number of different things that you can do to assess if you have inflammation. Some of the easiest ones and least expensive ones are to test for inflammatory blood markers. For example, one of the most common ones is a C-reactor protein that you can check through your labs. It's about a $8 test and really easy if that is, if that comes back high, it's likely that you suffer from inflammation. Other ones that you can do is something called homocysteine. This is a methylation marker, but it drives inflammation and causes a number of different problems. Ferritin and LDH, lactate dehydrogenase. You can also test if those come back high.

3:02They're acute phase reactants and they're common indicators that you have inflammation. And ironic one, which is common, is HDL. Most of people think that HDL is a great marker. But if HDL is too high, it can indicate inflammation. Some other ones. Let me go back on one second. You said ferritin, isn't that just iron? Yeah, exactly. So why would that be a marker of inflammation if the iron is high? Well, ferritin, the marker itself is what we call an acute phase reactant. And high inflammation will actually drive ferritin high as well. So it can mean that you have iron overload, but it can also just mean that you're really inflamed. Same thing with something like vitamin D. Vitamin D is what's called the negative acute phase reactant. And so inflammation actually forces vitamin D to decrease. And so somebody could be really inflamed. And no matter how much vitamin D they're actually taking, it might not ever move that lab marker because inflammation is too high.

4:04And so those are some really easy, simple ones that you can check for. They're really inexpensive as well. And that's a good indicator to see if you're inflamed. From a symptomatic standpoint, you know, you could you could retain water. You could feel like inflamed in your hands and feet. You could have intestinal problems. You could have brain fog into depression, fatigue. Those are common signs of brain inflammation. You should end up having joint pains. You know, other symptoms like that that are common indicators that you might have. Some type of inflammatory process going on. Yeah, you should ask us in the beginning, what is inflammation and why should we care if we're inflamed? Well, inflammation when it happens in short term, inflammation is fantastic. It's life-saving. It helps with viruses, bacteria, injuries, all sorts of things that way. When inflammation becomes more of a prolonged and chronic thing, it can be really bad for our body. And it's when our immune system just kind of goes haywire and doesn't shut off, that's essentially chronic inflammation. And when that happens, it drives a ton of different physiological imbalances.

5:06For example, in males, inflammation degenerates the lidate cells of the testes so that they can't produce testosterone effectively. It also causes insulin resistance. Inflammation can cause testosterone to convert into estrogen. There's a number of different things that inflammation just on its own does from a physiological standpoint. Inflammation can cause neurotransmitters in our brain to not synapse properly. It can cause the intestinal lining to break down so we don't digest food properly. Inflammation of females can make perimenopause and menopause worse. It can cause infertility. It can cause hormonal problems. In our children, it's really sad because inflammation can cause the brain to not develop properly. It can cause neural behavioral type problems. It can cause ADHD. Inflammation is a key driver for autism. A number of other conditions like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease. It's one of the most common things that drives disease in our country for sure. I was in a joke and say, what are you doing to combat mis-inflammation?

6:09It's a bad joke. That's great. I love it. I love bad jokes. So if someone's inflamed for months or years, what is the due to them? What's the accumulated longer term effects of being like this constantly? Well, you're going to have a lot poor quality life. And then it can turn into autoimmune conditions. It can turn into cancer. It can turn into cardiovascular risk. It can turn into dementia, Alzheimer's, so many different things, right? But what really stinks a lot of the patients that we deal with. When we ask them how many good days they have out of the month, a lot of them will say anywhere from zero to five. I mean, their quality of life is really poor. One of my first patients who was struggling with autoimmune conditions and a lot of inflammation. Her son was asked to drop a picture of her at school when he drew a picture of her in bed. And he brought that home. She pulled it out of his backpack and she said, what's this, honey? And she's like, that's you, mom, because you're always in bed. And these are realistic circumstances that we see every single day in our clinics.

7:10We see patients who are really, really struggling. And they can barely function. Their quality life is really poor. A lot of patients don't even realize how bad they feel at times. And when it comes to the medical model or conventional model, where they're just giving pills for symptoms and not actually addressing the underlying inflammatory triggers, there's really nothing that you can do to help these patients feel better. And so these patients are hurted around like sheep. They feel like they're crazy. They've lost hope. They go from doctor to doctor and nobody knows what in the world is going on with them. And in reality, they have these underlying inflammatory triggers and problems and imbalances that are really making their condition way worse. And if they could really just get to the mechanism and do simple strategies to help calm down the inflammatory process, their lives could completely change. If someone that comes to you, I don't know if this is common, do they say to you, how come my normal doctor didn't say anything about this or didn't test for this or didn't bring this up if it's so important? Do you know, back in the old days, we would see that often. People would often question, why are other individuals not seeing that?

8:13And why are they not testing for this? Why are they not treating it this way? However, since COVID, there's kind of been a massive shift of the mindset of people from a health standpoint. And now we're seeing a lot of individuals who are more educated than most of their doctors when it comes to their condition. They're doing their own research. They're doing their own investigation onto all this stuff. And so we received that question less than we did before. Now it's more about patients know why their doctors aren't checking for it. They kind of know that they lived this model of, here's the pill for your symptom. And oftentimes it's not the doctor's fault. They're kind of trained this way. But then at the same time, insurance companies handicap these doctors in a way that you can't really help these severe patients with a 10 minute appointment. You can't really help these patients with simple lab tests. You have to be more complex. You have to investigate thoroughly. You have to spend a lot more time with these patients. You have to actually do a physical workup and assess what's going on, you know, to really get them to the next level.

9:15And insurance companies now, they just don't cover that, right? They'll cover a 10 minute appointment. They'll even at times dictate what medications these doctors can give these patients. And it's pretty alarming. And so we don't want to blame it all on the doctors. I think there's lots of great conventional doctors now that are starting to learn this. It's just not taught this in school. And so, and you know, back then it was kind of a secret. Now it's not a secret. I think a lot of people nowadays understand this concept. And so we have, they don't ask that question as much anymore. So when people come to you, what is your intake look like? Are they doing like food diaries? Are they, you know, how long until they ask to make changes? And what kind of changes? I know it depends on the person. But in general, what can you say about your treatment methods? Yeah, I mean, for the most part, even like my book, for example, someone actually did the 30 day inflammatory reset. You should notice that they're improving within the first 30 days. When somebody comes into our clinics, we'll do a thorough physical exam. We'll do a thorough history.

10:15We'll assess what their diet is like. We'll do a 48 hour diet recall and kind of assess how they're eating. And then on top of that, we'll look at the blood work. Once we eat the labs back, the medical testing back will sit down with them for about 45 minutes to an hour and explain the labs in detail. And then explain what our options are from there. Typically, you can't treat everything all at the same time. And so typically, we try to identify the imbalance that's driving the patient's problems. And it's kind of like a domino effect. We want to pick up the domino that's going to have the biggest or medic effect or biggest impact. And then once that's improved, we'll retest and then work on other imbalances from there. The way that we treated patients even five years ago is significantly different in the way that we treat patients now, which is really cool. We don't want to be a stagnant practitioner. We want to understand everything about everything when it comes to the newest and most up-to-date research. And so now, you know, we used to use diet, lifestyle and nutrition, thyroid hormones. You know, we're not opposed to medications. We're just, we just want to correct the mechanisms that are driving it, right? But now on top of that, now we have peptides.

11:16We have ozone therapy. We have something called eBoo, which is kind of an intense version of ozone therapy. There's a procedure called any ferrisis, which can completely get rid of, you know, microplastics. Other things within your blood serum. We have... Is that like a, you know, your blood is drawn out and it goes to a machine and it goes back into you, or how does that work? That's called eBoo. But yes, you're exactly right, where eBoo is where we draw blood out of one arm. It goes through a machine, gets ozoneated, goes through a laser, and that gets put back into the other arm. And you can essentially filter a 30-year blood volume in one sitting. This has a significant anti-inflammatory effect. It's great for autoimmune patients. But there's another thing where we actually draw your blood over prolonged period of time. And you take out your plasma and then you replace it. And you can essentially get rid, you know, we can test for microplastics, mold, things like that. And then retest after the procedure, and oftentimes microplastics are completely non-detectable, which is great.

12:21And then we have stem cells. Stem cells are incredible. We can do stem cell IVs. We can do stem cell injections. Stem cells are advancing every single year. But a lot of our patients will do stem cell IVs. And one thing that you can do with stem cell IVs is you're introducing a lot of growth factors and regenerative cells into the system. And those cells carry all of that. And it helps modulate the immune response. It improves your own body's healing response as well. And there's a lot of great benefits that you can get with stem cell IVs. So you combined all the different regenerative medicine therapies that we have now on top of all the functional therapy, functional medicine therapies that we have. It's a pretty fascinating thing for sure. So the stem cell IVs do what? What do they draw in particular? Well, so with stem cell IVs, what they do is they're kind of vehicles for growth factors and regenerative cells. And so when we do a stem cell IV, we're introducing those growth factors and regenerative cells into your body.

13:21And it maximizes your body's healing response. It can significantly modulate inflammation, which can help. You can use what's called exosomes, which bypass the blood brain barrier. It can help with brain inflammation. And it just helps speed up the body's healing response and it helps modulate inflammation. And so we're seeing a lot of really cool things when it comes to stem cell IVs as well. Any other protocols that are for particular problems? I mean, besides all of those, that's what we've got. Now you have peptides too, which are really cool. There's some pretty cool peptides that are gaining a lot of traction. We've been using peptides for a long time. But for example, when it comes to out immune conditions, you could use, you could microdose. Yeah. Oh, sorry. I was answering with a BP-157 is what I've heard about. But go ahead. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, you can microdose GLP ones and those help decrease inflammation. They help. They're kind of cardio protective and neuroprotective. And so, you know, I don't like massive doses for GLP ones.

14:22We use it more for a therapeutic response from an autoimmune standpoint and inflammatory standpoint. But microdosing GLP ones, there's something called GHK copper, which we're now finding. Lots of people use it for hair skin and nails, but we're seeing that it actually helps with mitochondria. It can help with the inflammatory process too. You mentioned BP-157. There's another one that we use with that called TB-500, which are awesome to improve angiogenesis, which basically says, you know, means that it improves the cardiovascular response to a certain area. It can help with the intestinal lining and gut integrity. And so nowadays, peptides prescribed properly can have a significant impact on people's health too. I'm not a fan of just doing a shotgun approach of peptides or stem cells or any really therapy for that matter. What we like to do is do extensive labs, extensive blood work, and really assess what's truly going on with that patient. And then once we understand the mechanisms that are driving that patient's problems, then from there, we can kind of dictate what therapies will get that patient feeling the best the fastest.

15:26Someone's making, you know, they may use it. I'm just not in a place right now where I can really change much about my diet. But, you know, Doc, give me three or four of these protocols and just give me like a spa day and fix me. Do you do that? Well, yeah, I mean, look, look, they're the regenerative medicine properties that we have. Patients can pretty much do those without changing their diet lifestyle much. And it can have significant impacts now. So from a regenerative medicine standpoint, there's lots of things that you can do. However, there's there's simple strategies that we can do. A patient doesn't, you know, my book lays it out in detail as far as like, here's what to eat. Here's what not to eat. Here's what in your environment causes inflammation. Here's how your lifestyle can cause inflammation. Here's how to check for it. If you don't want to do that extensive of a process and program, you could avoid things that spike glucose. You could avoid maybe the two highest foods like gluten and dairy, conventional dairy. Those two are probably our biggest inflammatory triggers for our patients right now.

16:26Obviously, blood sugar stabilization is key. And so they could just simply work on stabilizing their glucose and minimizing foods that are ultra processed that spike glucose like crazy. And just stabilizing glucose can decrease inflammation tremendously. You know, so there's simple strategies that a patient can do based off of their motivation levels. For our patients, sometimes they're so sick, they feel terrible and they're ready to make all the changes in the world possible. And so they'll do more of an extensive plan, right? We have some maybe longevity patients or patients that are looking for wellness that just want to make a couple changes. And there's things that they can do from a dietary standpoint to do that. And so, you know, it depends on the patient, but we have all the different therapies that could benefit really anyone. Do you have any protocols where someone comes in literally for like a spa day and they get, you know, three to five different things you've done. We do. You sell as like a package like what would be that if it exists? Yeah, we do actually. We have patients that travel from all over the country and world to see us.

17:27A lot of times we'll do orthopedic stem cell injections. And then, you know, before that, they might do what's called standard ozone with a stem cell IV. And then we have hyperbaric chambers that get up to 3.0 atmospheric pressure, which is the highest that they can get. They're high medical grade hyperbaric chambers. And so they'll come do the hyperbaric chamber. They'll come in and, you know, do things like the red light bed, standard ozone IVs in conjunction with stem cell IVs. And then on top of that, you know, orthopedic stem cell injections or whatnot there too. Pretty cool stuff. In terms of the diet, what's, I don't know, where are a couple of things that people can do? You mentioned gluten and dairy, traditional dairy. You know, when else can people do that would, would help them out? They did it in moderation or didn't do it moderation. I mean, I mean, the biggest impact that we'll see is obviously gluten and dairy, but we'll often give our patients what's called a continuous glucose monitor. And they'll wear that monitor and track their blood sugar levels.

18:28And our goals will be to get it between 80 to 130 no matter what they eat. If they can do that, they just significantly improve their quality life and minimize long term damage from blood sugar and stabilization. Blood sugar issues in our country is rampant, right? Everyone pretty much has them, even kids. And so if we can help coach them through how to stabilize glucose, that makes a big deal. When somebody has blood sugar problems, it causes problems with hormones. It converts hormones into cortisol, which is your stress hormone. So you don't have reproductive issues. You end up having hormonal dysfunction. You have lots of issues there. But on top of that, blood sugar imbalances cause problems with the intestinal tract. They cause problems with the brain. They cause problems with how our liver detoxifies. Just stabilizing blood sugar levels can be a game changer. And something as simple as getting the continuous glucose monitor and doing a science project on yourself can make a significant impact long term if you can get those blood sugar levels to be within 80 to 130. Most of the time, they're dropping to 50 and they're spiking to 170.

19:30They're kind of all over the place. If we're just eating our standard American diet. But if we can be maybe more intuitive and more mindful about what we eat and how it impacts our overall physiology, that's one simple task that somebody can do that can make a big impact. Yeah, I've worn the CGM. It says my wife and we'll go out and get a meal. And some places are like, yeah, probably we're just having chicken and rice and whatever. And wow, it's really spiked our sugar in other places, not so much. So we can be learning where to eat, where to eat, where to hot. We would take a walk sometimes for 15 minutes after a meal that spiked our sugar in that part of town, like 20 to 25 points, which helps. So we learned a few things by doing it, but there's a lot to see. Yes, it's fascinating, too, because the foods that you eat might not spike blood sugar levels with the foods that I eat. If we react or have an immune reaction to food, that's actually inflammatory. And when we eat something that our immune system reacts to and it induces inflammation, it will spike blood sugar levels.

20:30Whether it's a high glycemic food or not. And so sometimes we could react to rice or corn and our blood sugar levels could skyrocket. And if our immune system reacts to that specific food protein, because inflammation increases, you're guaranteed to have blood sugar levels increase as well. Those two kind of go hand in hand. Is there anyone you're not able to help and you can see they actually are trying or this always works as long as the person is trying? I mean, before we had all the regenerative therapies, Lyme's patients, and there's patients that suffer what's called SERS. Those patients were really hard to manage, but now that we have the hyperbaric chambers, the ozone therapy, the stem cell IVs, even those patients improve quite drastically. And so, you know, there's some patients we don't help, but for the most part, most of our patients that we bring on and accept do really well. Yeah, that's good to know. I know, nothing can help every single person. I just wanted to be at some completely treatment resistant type people who are very rare. Yeah, it's super rare.

21:30Nowadays, with the therapies that we have at our grasp, we can help most everyone. In fact, most of the time, a patient that sees us, they've already been to 10 different doctors, and that's our standard patient. And we're able to get to where they have, go from zero to five good days a month to 20 to 25 good days a month. We do have patients that for some reason or we just can't help, and that's always terrible, but those are, those are few and far between. In terms of diet, do you find that some people have to be really, really strict in order to get results, and other ones could just kind of, you know, make a good attempt and they'll get a lot of benefit. You betcha. The more physiological and balanced is somebody will have the more strict they have to be dietary wise. And there's some patients that will have 15 different food intolerances. There'll be some other patients that only have two or three based off of their overall immunology presentation. So we do see that for sure. Is it, I mean, is there any other reason why, you know, someone eats pretty well. They can't move the needle unless they're like perfect about it. That's a great question. Sometimes you have so many autoimmune conditions in your autoimmune response is so severe.

22:34They'll have to be a lot more restrictive because any subtle trigger can flare it up. Another really common set of population that we have issues with that will notice they're a lot more sensitive to foods is our people suffering with parimenopause. When your estrogen is fluctuating quite drastically, it causes inflammation. And on top of that, it causes your immune system to be not as resilient. And so our patients that are suffering with parimenopause tend to have to be really strategic and a little bit more complex with their eating habits. It's just a little bit more fine tune with their eating habits because their blood sugar imbalances and things like that can fluctuate with hormonal fluctuation as well. And so you'll notice somebody that can be a little bit more resilient prior and then also hit parimenopause and it's like the wheels came off. And typically those individuals will have to be a little bit more strategic about how they eat and focus more on blood sugar stabilization. And that might be more reactive to foods because of the fluctuation of estrogen which messes up the immune response.

23:35Great question, though. Great question. No problem. Yeah, so can you help people from all over the US or only certain states? We have patients in 30 different countries and every state in the nation, which is pretty cool. We do a lot of telehealth as long as they have access to labs. We can do a lot of things and a lot of people fly from all over to CS2. So if they want other therapies, then they'll fly to us and stay at the hotel right next to our clinic and we'll work with them for a few weeks there too. Okay. And what's the best way for people to start to engage? Well, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, very good. Well, Josh, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and spending any time. I really appreciate it today. Yeah. Thanks so much Richard. I really appreciate it as well. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes.

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