Getting To The Root Cause of Your Disc Herniations with Dr. Jeff Fisher | Podcast #381

In this video, Dr. Justin and Dr. Jeff Fisher discuss various types of disc issues, including bulging and herniations, and how they can be treated using chiropractic exercises and programs, as well as soft tissue and deep tissue therapy.

They also talked about using devices such as traction devices and decompression machines and the potential benefits of diet and supplements, including collagen.

Dr. Justin and Dr. Jeff Fisher also mention stem cell therapy and stem cell injections, hydrostatic pressure, and spinal canal herniations. They also cover signs and symptoms of when surgery may be necessary and natural anti-inflammatory options. Key takeaways from the video include the importance of exercise and therapy in managing disc issues and the potential benefits of supplements and alternative treatments.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

00:30 – Introduction to Dr. Jeff Fisher
06:25 – Chiropractic Exercises/Program
15:00 – Decompression and Traction Devices
19:17 – Diet and Supplements
23:00 – Stem Cell Therapy/Stem Cell Injection
26:00 – Spinal Canal Herniations
28:10 – Signs and Symptoms on Getting Surgery
30:20 – Natural Anti-Inflammatory

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s Justin Marchegiani. Welcome back to the show. I have doctor Jeff Fisher here on today’s podcast. I found doctor Jeff because I see lots of patients all over the world functional medicine wise and a lot have chronic pain and a lot of that pain can be disc degeneration, disc bulging, disc herniation and Doctor Fisher has some excellent advice and excellent products to kind of interventions to help work get to the root cause of some of these motion. So, we’re gonna have a topic. We’re gonna have a conversation on this topic and really dive in and look at all the different options. Doctor Jeff, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Great. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Appreciate it. Excellent. And we’ll put links down below to some of the things we’re talking about Doctor Jeff’s website, his practice and to get some traction support as well. So how did you come into this space obviously your chiropractor, we talk pre show that you’ve been doing this for over 30 years, but how did you get specifically into the distraction space? Did you see a gap in conventional chiropractic and you were trying to fill that need, how did that happen?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: So it’s kind of a sad story for me, but a great story for my patients. I was a horribly slow football player. I was a slow moving target on the football field back in my day. So I’ve had a couple of disc herniations in my neck. I’m not even sure you can see my scar here. I’ve had an anterior discectomy with fusion. So I’ve got the little titanium plate and the four screws. It’s C5 and C6. And I also had a disc removal with a said procedure. Uh, where they went. They went in with a probe, stuck it in, went all the way out the back of my disk, and they sucked out material at C5, C6 and C7 is where I have my fusion. So I was in an incredible agony and I have the large decompression tables in my office, but obviously I couldn’t bring those home with me at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I could barely eat. I was in an incredible amount of pain, so I just started experimenting with myself and rigging up different apparatuses on a railing on our stairs up upstairs and I had this aha moment like the mother or father of invention is a necessity. I started to create my own home traction unit and Ijust said, wow, you know, I really got something here. As a matter of fact, I was in so much pain, I couldn’t sleep. And one night when I had built this prototype, I slept. I was out cold. My wife came up and she looked at me. She was like, Oh my God, he’s snoring. So just laid a blanket over me and left me there for about three or four hours. I woke up. I woke up and I was like, Jesus, I actually slept. I got you know, I got something here. So then I brought that into my practice and I started to experiment with my patients. And over the years I developed different prototypes that just became more and more successful, easier and easier for me to use and my patience to use. And finally we evolved into my Fisher traction and I have, you know, primarily we had a cervical unit, but then my wife had a large disc herniation for low back, there’s like contagious in our family, these disc herniations. And so I built one for my wife and she got incredible results. We actually had before, during and after MRI’s on her lumbar spine and we could see the reduction of her lumbar, discrimination from 7 millimeters to 5 millimeters to three millimeters in a relatively short period of time. So at that point I thought, wow, you know what, there’s so much, you know, clinical value and therapeutic value to this that you know I got to do something with it. So. I gotta do something with it. You know, we ended up. Building and creating my official traction as it is today.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK, very cool. So we’re kind of talking more today about disc bulging herniation.Um, the disk is essentially popping out. It’s either hitting Chipley, that intervertebral foramen where those nerves are going out. And so conventional chiropractic where we’re adjusting, we’re moving the bones, making sure we have movement in the spine, we’re addressing subluxations. Why isn’t that not enough sometimes to address these disc issues?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, you know the disks are complex in some ways, but they’re actually very simple. And others, you know, are discs, the center of our discs, the nucleus. Functions on its hydrostatic pressure and because the gravity always pushing down, there’s that creation of the pressure pushing out and with our adjustments, you know obviously we’re working on enhancing the motion at the facet joint level and we are affecting the disk, but when you reverse that pull of gravity on the spine and you elongate it and you stretch it out, then you can create a negative intradiscal pressure. That actually sucks the disc back in and you can suck the herniation of the bulge back in through the annular fibers, which, you know, we can’t, we can’t quite do with an adjustment by itself. But you know, traction and adjustments, you know, especially in my practice, we do both. We don’t do just one or the other, we do both. And you can get incredible success when you combine both of those treatments together. Um.It’s a super fortunate situation for a lot of people with disc issues that you know when you combine chiropractic and traction together you can just get amazing results.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. So with the chiropractic we’re getting good movements, good alignment within that spine. Everything’s moving better, better alignment, especially if we have upper cervical issues. You’re probably applying some level of exercise, right? And I imagine really working on extension muscles, postural muscles, probably just that upper cross or lower cross syndrome issue with the tight hip flexors or the deep cervical flexors. What kind of postural awareness or exercises do you kind of build into your program when you’re addressing disk issues?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: So how do I allude to this in my practice because I’m a corrective care chiropractic so I’m looking at restoring normal curves. So if you I I tell my patients this if you think of me.I’m like an orthodontist putting braces on your teeth. So my job is to try and get your spine straight or restore the normal curves in your neck. So I’m like putting braces on your teeth. I’ve got, you know, physical therapy and traction, which is like brushing and flossing. And we use Pilates, which is like a retainer. So we’re helping to strengthen those core muscles. Stabilizing, you know, the muscles that support and control the spine so that they’re not 100% reliant solely upon adjustments or entire lives and doing both. They’re working on the outer part, while I work on the inner part.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If there was just one exercise like lower back disc or cervical disc, is there one thing that you could think of, one kind of movement pattern that will be essential and kind of your program?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, I would say, you know, extension exercises are hugely important like with you, which you touched on is Uppercross syndrome. Yeah, now in the tech world, it’s called tech neck. Yeah, people on the computers or on their smartphones, so we have that tendency to lose the normal curve. Not matter of fact, they, you know.When you’re a chiropractor, you always have different examples, you know. I’m not sure. Can you see this? So, you know, we have tech neck. You know, this is the tendency of the spine to move forward, which is the opposite of what God intended our neck to be, which is back more in extension or that represents more of a natural curve.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: There should be a C curve. That C should be there.

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Absolutely. Absolutely. So when you work on these extensor muscles to strengthen and condition them to make sure that they’re constantly trying to pull the neck back into its more normal curve. They’re essential. And this, you know, this obviously is, you know, the head up here. Here’s the occiput and here’s the cervical spine but this also applies the lumbar spine too Lumbar spine too, you know, they’re they’re very similar curves in the lumbar sliding it’s anywhere between 20 and 40 degrees is the natural lordosis that we’re supposed to have. And in the cervical spine, this natural lordosis, this is supposed to be more towards about 30 degrees. So anything that you can do to help strengthen the condition and enhance those curves going backwards is super, super important.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s good. So what kind of an exercise would you recommend out of the game? Like a pro Cobra or like something like a walling where you’re tucking that chin in? Any specific, one exercise you can think of that kind of sticks out?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: So we call them supermans. Have you ever heard of that?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah you come on a Swiss ball sometimes or like yoga mat kind of

Dr. Jeff Fisher: yeah or just yeah you lay, you lay flat on the ground and you and you’re just trying to you know extend your body back contracting those muscles in the head and neck and and also a lumbar spine.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. So you’re putting yourself in that really good extension with your back, an extension with your neck and where does soft tissue come into this? Do you ever do like active release technique or graston or any soft tissue to kind of get some of these muscles that may not be, they may be inhibited and you’re trying to facilitate them working again.

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Yeah, So what we do, my practice is we do a lot of neuromuscular reeducation and there there’s some incredible techniques that we use for our deep tissue therapist where they’re working on relaxing the trigger points, relaxing the muscles and typically what we do in my office is I have all my patients get that deep tissue neuromuscular reeducation work done first before I adjust them.So it’s like, it’s like marinating them before I go in and I, you know, give him a good strong adjustment to restore that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s very good. That’s excellent. Alright, so I want to just put up some visuals here just for some of the listeners. I think it may be helpful. If you’re listening to this on podcast, we’ll put the YouTube links below so you guys can see. This video was good. This was the one that I think you showed what an actual disc herniation looks like. I’m going to just play it here for the listeners and. Just a visual here.So we have the nerve right here and then here’s the disk and essentially overtime that disk is shortening and then we have a little bulge irritating. That nerve right there. So just kind of bringing it down here, this is a really good picture. Can you explain what’s happening here when you’re doing traction and what’s how that’s working?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: So what’s happening is. I’ve got a couple of my units here. I’m going to use this one because you might be able to see it a little bit better, but what my invention would I actually created is is a new form of traction and the actual engine or the mechanism of pole is these little discs here with these latex bungees in the middle and over our studies we calculated the amount of strength, the tensile elastic pull strength of the bungees where you see and pulling them apart, and this is our cervical unit. And the cervical unit can apply a maximum of 50 pounds of pull force, which supposedly that’s about the maximum of human neck can handle, although we’ve we’ve experimented on patients with with even a larger magnitude of pole force and they’ve been able to handle like big guys can handle a lot more but that pulling, you know, like this, it’s pulling in the opposite direction of what gravity does and the great thing about these latex bungees is that they have very similar characteristics to our muscles in that like when you’re on a big table and your neck is getting stretch, your body might fight with it and there’s not any sensory to relax the traction so your muscles can relax these bungees. What they’ll do is just naturally they’ll relax if your muscles pull and as your muscles relax. It pulls more uh, which is very good. They actually act like kind of in a symbiotic relationship. This is our standard low back unit and this guy. I uh, OK. I’m pulling as hard as I can as far as I can, that thing’s got like about 100 pounds of pull force.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s very cool. Well, when I saw these devices a couple things because I’ve been recommending various devices. Usually the lower cost ones tend to be more gravity based, whether it’s like a kneeling inversion or inversion boots. Obviously those tend to have problems where it just can be a pain in the butt to get into those. And if you’re really hot with your disk being inflamed can be a little difficult. And so, and then my concern with a lot of them was when I saw your device, there was an aha moment because what I really was needing from my patients was this ability to decompress and then relax. Decompress and relax. Think of that as you get a rag, you fill up with water, you ring it out and then you have the absorption to clean up the mess and then you bring to a water again and then you rinse it out again. That’s how your disk works. It’s like a sponge. Now the problem is, I’ll just, for the listeners, overtime the discs tend to shorten a little bit, cartilage tends to get weaker and essentially you’re disc gets hydrated with imbibition that’s essentially the pumping of that that disk and that movement of putting the pressure on letting it pull. Right. Expand the disk, create the negative pressure, suck it in and then relax. That for me created that Aha Mama. That’s the inhibition that the disk needed to kind of rehydrate and heal. Can you comment a little more on that?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Yeah, that’s really the critical component to decompression. Decompression by itself is the desired outcome and one of my proprietary components, Umm, I’m not sure if that’s in reverse there, but says crap, so release strap is engaged by the user to go through these periodic resting phases and if you think of the center of the disk, like the substances in baby diapers where the the proteoglycans, they can absorb, you know like 500 times their weight in water. But that lasting phase is critically important because once you draw the water it socks in. It needs to get absorbed in the matrix of those proteoglycans. And that resting phase allows that. So you’re literally, you’re rehydrating the discs, you’re giving the discs life.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. That makes sense. And I didn’t. I haven’t seen a lot of other devices on the market that provide that pumping action. Unless you’re going into that, you know, unless you, you know they have the ones over the top with the weights or the blood pressure cup, but then it involves, it’s kind of a pain in the butt to kind of off on and off on. Are there any other competitors even close that has that release action?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, they can’t because yeah, I have the United States utility patent, so I invented a new form of traction. So it’s kind of funny. Matter of fact, we run on Amazon and we’ve taken down about 40 competitors that tried to steal my idea so that no one else can actually design or make a traction unit like mine, because I invented a new form of traction. It’s mine, it’s my baby.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So it’s cost effective too. So that’s great. And this is kind of what’s happening at the lumbar here, right? This is pulling this apart.This is essentially pulling the hips down. You’re anchored up here, so it’s creating that disk space versus having to do traction or having to move your body and then you can release it here. Do you have a good image on the website for the cervical spine?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: I do, I do if you well actually, you know what so you know you’re funny story. We just sold out right there. There it is right there. If you click on that, you will probably see it. But we literally just sold out of our cervical units. Yeah, it’s a positive problem.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s a good problem. That’s a quality problem. Yeah. Yeah. OK, that’s cool. Alright. Anything else? And with the cervical spine, obviously similar situation. Right. We’re just, we’re just grabbing, you know the, everything from the neck up versus you grabbing it from the hips down. Where’s that image that I just had? Let’s see, here where go. I’ll try to pull back up here had it was a good image of what was happening there.

Dr. Jeff Fisher: While you’re looking for it. Another really important part about how my traction unit is different from most others is that there’s studies have been shown that if your spine is in extension in its more natural curve during traction you get better results, so that’s another reason why mine is supine. So when you lay down, your neck still maintains that natural curve. What they did was they designed it at an appropriate length so it maintains that 30 degree angle of pull force which enables you to reach over a larger number of disk spaces in the spine. If it’s too flat then you’re only affecting the upper cervicals, and if it’s too far forward where your neck is an extension one that causes damage to the discs the two, then you’re only reaching the lower vertebrae, but when you allow it to be in a 30 degree angle you can reach over almost the entire cervical spine all at once.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So this angle right here.

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Exactly, exactly.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then typically this is anchored over gonna be like a door jam. Typically,

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Yeah, yeah, you do both. The upper, yeah. Hook it on a doorknob and just you lay down. It’s really super easy to use.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s cool. That’s excellent, very good. So outside of that, what else would you want to highlight with your programs like this is going to be a part of the program? What else do you see like nutritionally, diet wise, helping them move the needle, whether it’s reducing inflammation, kind of a Whole Foods kind of paleo template, certain food allergens, what kind of supplements as well would you want to add in to kind of help reconstitute that disk tissue?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, you know one of the most simple is water. Water, water, water, water and and and and so many of us, you know like I drink, I drink my coffee. You know like everybody else does but I myself I’m kind of like a test tube or a test.Things out on myself first before I implement my practice. But I’ve been consciously drinking more water over the last year and honestly, I’ve virtually only drink water. I drink my coffee and I just drink water.That’s it, and I can tell myself that.You know, that’s helped in the inflammatory effects. I still run, I still work out, and my knee problems are gone. My feet, my ankles.Uh, you know, along with I take glucosamine with chondroitin MSM. Umm. And uh, you know, nutrition is a huge, huge, you know, part of our health. And, you know, unfortunately, we don’t always get that in our diets. So if you’re not taking any vitamins, you should take at least a multivitamin to start. But there’s so many, as you know, like in functional medicine, there is such an incredible depth of nutrition that can be evaluated properly and you can add it into your life. And honest to God, nutrition can totally change your life. It really, really can.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so if you’re hydrating good clean filtered water, mineral water, you’re not, you’re not obviously doing a lot of the high fructose corn syrup junkets inflaming your body. What about for like tissue? Like what about collagen peptides or conjoin or any any building block stuff like what’s your experience with that?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: So you know that that’s a great question because we actually just started looking into that because, you know, as the disks themselves. Here’s my little. my little baby here. The outer fibers of our discs are made of type 1 collagen, and just a little bit deeper, they’re type 2 collagen. So you know, my wife is much smarter than I am. So she takes all these incredible supplements, but she’s been taking collagen. And she notices a difference in her skin, everything and and and I you know honestly I that’s not my area of expertise per se. You know more about that than I do but but I think you know collagen is able to maintain its same, you know, compounds even if it as it gets digested and you have extra collagen in your body then it can replace maybe old collagen I mean.That’s like a no brainer to me. Yeah, I think, yeah, you can pump that in you, you pump in the good and you pump out the old and your body stays healthier, stays younger.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean your your body tends to know where to lay down these these amino acids and proteins just by lifting weights your body creates the inflammation in the bicep by doing curls and you’re going to reconstitute protein there. So I imagine that same kind of response in that dish tissues and the trigger some of that building block and if you’re eating junky food or not digesting and absorbing a lot of nutrients, then that collagen will be helpful. Anything else that you would like, let’s say someone’s really hot, really inflamed, would you ever add in something like prolotherapy or PRP platelet rich plasma or stem cell injections. What’s your experience using an injectable in that area to kind of work alongside it?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: So you know, that’s actually a great question. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this, what’s happened with stem cell therapy most recently. You know the FDA has stopped us from being able to use that, but we used to do stem cell injections in my office and they were.Oh really? Oh yeah, yeah, incredibly successful. But now they’ve put a limitation on it because most stem cell injections i’s a mixture. And once you start, once you start mixing things, you’re creating new drugs. So of course, FDA shut that down.So, we’ve had to discontinue that in our office, but it was incredibly successful. So there’s something there. There’s definitely something there.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I always tell patients too, even if you were to do an injectable, whether it’s PRP or stem cell or prolotherapy. It’s still not the root cause and maybe accelerating the healing of that tissue, but you still have to fix the underlying mechanism of why that got beaten down. And you still want to bring that disc back in so that annular fibrosis, that outer ring, can heal. Because of that pulposus is still pushing through that ring. It’s just not going to heal. It’s like ripping a scab off all the time, right?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Exactly, exactly. And you know, again, that gets back to the rehydration. You know that disk lives on the hydrostatic pressure, so the greater the hydrostatic pressure inside the disc is so incredibly important and I’m not sure if you’re aware of this is something I just learned because I do all my continuing education courses every year. I always I’m always looking for disc related material and I came across this.Just most recently that we have these nerves that go into the disc. They surround the disk and they go into the disk OK and I can’t remember what the name of the nerves are, but the hydrostatic pressure prevents those nerves from getting deeper into the disc. And now they’re talking about discogenic pain. So the deeper those nerves are able to penetrate in, they’ll collide with an acid that the nucleus has and it causes pain. So as a disk dehydrates and loses its water those nerves can grow further in and then you have more pain. So maintaining that health of that nucleus by increasing that hydrostatic pressure by decompressing prevents those nerves from getting in, which prevents pain. So it’s hugely, hugely important.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So essentially you have that herniation, that video we showed where that disk kind of comes out, hits that IVF intervertebral foramen, those spinal nerves coming out. It’s not just that it could not even be hitting that, just there’s little nerves around the actual disc, just a little bit of pressure on that could be sending a signal, a pain signal, essentially.

Dr. Jeff Fisher: 100 percent, 100%. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now what about disc herniations into the spinal canal? I think most disc herniations are going to be more IVF just based on the anterior to posterior nature of that where the spinal canal is more interior. How often do you see spinal, spinal canal herniations and would this type of traction still help that?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: They would and you know this one of the reasons why because we have a, you know, all the way in the very back of our of our spine, we have the posterior longitudinal ligament, which is like like a thick piece of leather that goes all the way down our spine and that prevents that that direct posterior disc herniation. But I do a fair amount of injury cases, car accidents. Where, when? When? Instability. Where the bones were able to move forward and backward beyond their normal range of motion. Yeah, that can cause a little bit of elasticity or loosening of that posterior longitudinal ligament were it actually allows a posterior disc herniation to go backwards towards the spinal canal and it doesn’t happen that often, but it just depends on the magnitude of injury and force. But when there’s instability is going forward and backwards, which you can see on flexion extension films, then you have to look for that also, which you know an MRI of course could show you that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But you find, you still are able to recover patients like that?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Yeah, we are, you know there’s such an incredible power to traction and it’s so simple. But the key is really the frequency and the consistency of use and like what we stress what we found is that.If you can use it for 21 consecutive days, 21 days. Use it before you go to bed or when you wake up in the morning, whatever is most convenient for you. But you know if after 21 days, you know, most of our patients are a lot better. If you’re not, then you better go check in with an orthopedist because you might be a surgical candidate.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And at what point do you need surgery? What are the signs or symptoms of what percent of people do you think you’re able to save from getting surgery? Do you think 90, 95% and you can avoid and what symptoms you have to look for when you’re like OK yeah you really need surgery and then maybe work on this later?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: So like for me, I’m a perfect example.I had an enormous discrimination in my neck and I was starting to get atrophy of my left tricep and part of my pack. So if you’re getting atrophy of muscles, you need to consult with the surgeon because that can be a permanent issue. But again if you have numbness and tingling, if you’re if your reflexes or sensation are affected when you go in to see you know any healthcare provider may evaluate you. And if those things are progressive, they’re getting worse or they just will not go away with any type of conservative treatment.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Even interaction as well.

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Even traction. I mean, I wish we could help everybody, we can’t, but you know our success rates are over 80% and most studies show that about 80% of people that that take on traction, they get better. But there is, you know, I don’t know the exact percentage of people that are just, you know, always going to be surgical candidates or not, but you know, in my office I have a great relationship with the orthopedist who actually did my surgery. So he’s incredibly conservative. He knows all about. Chiropractic traction, everything. If I get a really difficult case where my patients just are not progressing, I’ll send them over to Nitin N. Bhatia and he’ll look at them and many times he goes, you know what, go back to Fisher. Keep doing it. Let’s give it another month. Let’s give it another month after that

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That see how much you can retract that this back in and if you’re seeing improvement and imagine some people they probably still feel a little bit better on the traction if they have a disk issue. So if you see a little bit of improvement and you can inch away at that like 21 days you said, then you could probably get some momentum. I would assume.

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Exactly and that’s the key. It’s getting that therapeutic momentum of treatment over and over and over on a consistent basis. And you can draw it back.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Any other natural anti inflammatories you would add in? Imagine just getting to the root cause, you’re going to be avoiding lots of these dangerous opiate medications that conventional medicines finally getting keen on and their addictive nature not really fixing anything, they’re just blocking perception of pain but any other natural anti inflammatories, you wanna add in or you see to be successful with their patients with disc issues?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: You know, I don’t know. Because, you know, I’m like a mechanic. You know, I’m, I’m restoring the motion and position of the spine and I tend to refer out. You know, there’s a big functional medicine facility that’s close to us. And uh, let those experts do what they do. I mean, you might, you know better than I do is, I mean what do you use, is there any?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean I think out of the gate, you know higher dose fish oil can be excellent. I think different herbs like frankincense or Boswellia or even some topical CBD can be great. I even find systemic enzymes taken away from food. Systemic enzymes that have like seropeptidase, they, they kind of get into the bloodstream and they start breaking up scar tissue, they break up inflammatory cytokines and interleukins and they can help provide more pliability to that tissue. So those are just a couple of things out of the gates I think can be helpful.

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Awesome. Well, you know what we need to collaborate then.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. And then can you work with patients that have gone the conventional medicine wrote. Let’s say they went in and they got a cortisone injection. OK, the pain is better. Doc, can you still work with those patients while that cortisone takes six months to wear off.

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Absolutely. We do that all the time.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And how do you find their limitations? Because now they don’t have pain telling them, oh, don’t do this. How do you get them to be on top of their limitations when they really can’t perceive pain?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, you know, I X-ray everybody, Umm, I do. And unless somebody has films that are, you know, less than six months old, I X-ray, everybody. So I look at them from a structural standpoint where if I’m looking and seeing that they have subluxations, they have a lot of curve or scoliosis or whatever it is. I stay focused on that and I get them to focus on that because even if the pain is not there, their spine is not at their optimum level. So we’re always concentrating on the restoration of normal curves. So it helps the patient to get more focused on, hey, if you want to prevent this from coming back, you want to stay healthy, we have to get that curve back to normal.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good. Excellent, doc. Well, any other last clinical pearls you wanna leave us with your 30 plus years of practice?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Uh, well, I’d say, you know, I tell my patients this all the time. Motion is life and life is motion. So if you are constantly working towards the restoration of normal motion, your maximum motion, you’re gonna live a better life, a healthier life. You’re going to be able to experience all the things that you want to do.vacations grandchildren whatever it might be so motion is so key so whatever you can do to help increase your ranges and your functionality and your body. You got to do it, you got to invest the time and effort.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. We’ll put links down below guys to access some of Doctor Fisher’s patented technology fishertraction.com. We’ll put links below in the comments and also Doc sees patients in person over an Irvine CA fisherchiropractic inc.com. I’ll put both links if you’re in the California area and you want to get support. He’s there for you as well. Anything else though, you want to leave the listeners with any other coordinations or social media stuff you want to highlight?

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Well, you know.We actually were coming out with our new boxed units of my Fisher traction. Um, we’ve got a deal going on right now. You’ve probably heard of Meyer DC they’re one of the largest durable medical devices. So we’ve got a big deal going on with them. So, we’re trying to reach out more to practitioners.Uh, like yourself, where patients need it, you’re going to be able to purchase it and have it in your clinics readily, readily available so patients can try it right away. We’re going to do some training videos on how you guys can implement it in practices and help your patients with it. So you know we’re we go to fishertraction.com. We’re always trying to update things and I have my YouTube channel where I’ve got I don’t even know over 100 videos on Chiropractic on traction on, you know virtually anything for health. So uh, it’s kind of an exciting journey.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s very good. We’ll put links below. We talked about a promo code, maybe Dr. J will work. We’ll put it in the description below. We can get that set up after. All right, doc? Well, thanks so much. Amazing chatting with you. Appreciate the information and we’ll talk again soon. You take care.

Dr. Jeff Fisher: Alright, brother. Take care. Thanks.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thank you.

References:

https://justinhealth.com/

https://www.fishertraction.com/

Recommended Product:

Neck Traction Device

Discount code for 10%: Drj10

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/getting-to-the-root-cause-of-your-disc-herniations-with-dr-jeff-fisher-podcast-381

How to Deal with Stress and Feeling Overwhelmed – Functional Medicine Approach | Podcast #380

Let’s get real: there are times when you’re going to feel overwhelmed. Whether with work, school, social obligations or just life, we all feel anxious, overwhelmed, or stressed at some point. In this podcast, Dr. J and Evan discuss that giving yourself grace and patience when you have these feelings is essential as well as your gut health.

Different coping mechanisms work for each person. The following suggestions can help. If one doesn’t work for you, consider trying a different one. The most important thing is to check your diet since what you eat can significantly affect your overall function.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 – Introduction
2:28 – Foundational Physiology
12:51 – Mold and Fight and Flight Response
28:35 – Takeaways

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys. It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani. I’m with Evan Brand today. We are so excited to be back at you with a live podcast. We’re going to be chatting about stress and overwhelm, and how to deal with it. What’s the functional medicine approach? Evan what’s cooking, man? How have you been?

Evan Brand: Oh, really good man. The first thing. Let me make sure my camera looks good. The first thing is like people run to alcohol in modern society, it’s socially acceptable to run to the liquor store, even as a soccer mom, and go buy enough alcohol to just kill your whole family and nobody bats an eye. And that’s like our.Coping mechanism not just as Americans, but other societies too. So I’m hoping today everything people have been through. Overwhelm is huge, man. A lot of people are burned out. A lot of people are frazzled. The stress response is broken. Their fuses are short. They’re nervous systems are stuck in fight or flight. So I was like, man, let’s hit this as a topic because, let me tell you, the pharmaceutical route is nasty too. It’s Gabba like products, but it’s Xanax and lorazepam and all these benzos, which are benzos terrible. They’re addicting.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That could be hard to get off. You start at a, you know, 0.25 to 0.5 milligram dose, and then you keep on ratcheting up and then it’s hard to come off it once you start getting really high.

Evan Brand: Now if you saw a VAT of adaptogenic herbs that you and I have consumed in the last decade between us it would be a large VAT of adaptogenic herbs, but that’s what allows us to work hard with sick people and raise children and keep up with animals and wives and houses and all of that. And so for me, that’s my first thing for someone. If I could take someone as a conventional American on the street going to drink alcohol tonight because they’re stressed or overwhelmed. I’m gonna say, hey, instead of reaching for that bottle, reach for the bottle of water or maybe some herbal tea like chamomile if you want. But then let’s hit some adaptogens. Let’s go for maybe some Relora. Let’s hit the passion flower. Let’s hit Rhodiola, let’s hit something that we can do to change the stress response. There’s tons of studies but today’s more free flowing conversation. But if you type in Rhodiola stress, there’s many, many studies done on this and how it literally alleviates the feeling of stress meaning, you and I can’t magically make the stress and overwhelm disappear from someone’s plate. But what we can do is provide their body nutrients so that their brain, their nervous system, doesn’t think that plate is as full as it really is. And that’s the cool thing about these.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So when I look at any type of stress, I always look at the foundational Physiology because if you take someone’s Physiology and you throw it off kilter like for instance the easiest stressor to put someone under acute is acutely is just don’t sleep for a night and then let me just kind of, you know, see you in the morning and list out all my problems and complaints and stressors that you have to then deal with. Well, you’re gonna have problems being able to take that information in and be able to execute. So we have to look at the foundational Physiology. So the first thing is sleep means if you can just get 8 to 10, eight hours of sleep and get to bed on the other side at midnight. That sets your Physiology up in regards to recycling your neurotransmitters having a good healthy cortisol awakening response. That circadian rhythm or cortisol is higher in the morning and lower at night. So then you have this inverse melatonin-Cortisol ratio. Where your cortisol drops at night, your melatonin goes up and then of course, you know, making sure the food is nutrient dense, good proteins as fascinate meal and we’re not overdoing the carbs, what our body needs and it’s anti-inflammatory and we’re stabilizing that blood sugar because people forget one of the biggest stressors on our hormones is that blood sugar fluctuation throughout the day the more this glycemia we have, the more our blood sugar goes up and down, like a roller coaster. We have to make stress hormones to bring it up and then insulin to bring it down, which then causes us to be in a fat storing mode. And so if we can manage your blood sugar, prevent these disc glycemic swings, we can make sure we have good proteins and fats. Stay away from the junkie process, fats, and we manage that blood sugar reading every maybe five hours or so and getting to bed on time. That sets the foundational Physiology and then we can come in there and biohack and add other nutrients and stuff as well.

Evan Brand: Meaning if you’re a vegan, living on date bars and drinking yourself to sleep with wine. Yeah, you gotta stop.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, like with alcohol, like every now and then is having a little bit of alcohol to kind of distress. Is it OK? Sure. Choose clean organic alcohol, do it after a meal, maybe have some activated charcoal or or some NAC. But that’s like at the end you really want to have the foundational food, the foundational nutrients. Again, if supplementally, the easiest things I’m going to add and I like to stick to nutrients first, so I’m gonna do magnesium. That’s a very kind of sedating, calming, supporting herb. I mean nutrients and minerals. It’s going to have 300 enzymatic roles in the body, anywhere from blood sugar to relaxation, to relaxation in the heart, to vasodilation, to sleep. Very anti-inflammatory in the brain so I love magnesium. You can even do it with a magnesium salt Epsom salt foot bath which is great too. If you have gut issues that help with the absorption you could be doing theanine which is an amino acid that helps upregulate and support healthy GABA levels you can even add-in pharma GABA, maybe a sublingual GABA tablet, that’s excellent as well. So a magnesium, GABA theanine, these are excellent things out of the gate from a nutrient standpoint. Anything else nutritionally you want to highlight?

Evan Brand: Well, I told you, I was texting you over the weekend. I got hit with something luckily I’m back in action. But my resting heart rate was pretty fast, so my nervous system was just kind of boom, boom, pumping, responding to whatever type of sickness I had. And so that kept me up. So I took some motherwort as you know, motherwort is one of my favorite herbs, because it’s great for the heart. We use it for A-fib, we use it for atrial flutter or any kind of heart palpitation type symptoms. It’s amazing, it’s calming that, but it’s great it’s calming emotional stress too. So if you’re overwhelmed, if you’re frazzled, if you’re even getting to the point where you’re like.I’m going to have a mental breakdown. I’m gonna have a panic attack. Somebody put me on some kind of drug. A lot of times psychiatrists will prescribe antipsychotic medications, which are not the answer. They’re not the root cause at all, but motherwort can really calm you. So it’s an emotional support and it’s a heart nervous system support and it’s great if you wake up in the middle of the night and you can’t get back to sleep. Take a little squirt, go lay back down. It’s amazing. Doesn’t taste great, but it works amazing. So I would rate that as more potent than something like theanine.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. And then also um ashwagandha I find to be very helpful as well. I’ll take that before bed if I need to, I’ll typically do a magnesium before bed. Ashwagandha can be really good, especially if you’re stressed because that’s going to help modulate the high cortisol, but also can help bring up any of the low cortisol as well, so ashwagandha is excellent. You can easily combine that with the Rhodiola. Two things like ginseng tend to be a little more stimulating so things like ashwagandha are going to be great and even phosphorylated serine. Serine can be very common. What serine does? It sensitizes the receptor sites on the hypothalamus to cortisol. So there’s this natural feedback loop of cortisol circulating in the body. It binds to receptor sites in the brain and the brain is like, whoa, this is a little bit high, let, let’s kind of calm down that cortisol secretion so it helps regulate that cortisol from getting too high, so phosphorylated serines are excellent. PhosphatidylSerine is kind of 1 electron. It’s one step in the enzymatic process backwards. So phosphorylated it’s better because it’s a little bit more activated and activated state. So that’s excellent.

Evan Brand: Man, I’ve been looking at some papers on mold toxicity and melatonin. So mold actually does a couple things. That’s crazy. If you type in mycotoxins, dopamine, you can find papers saying that mycotoxins damage the part of the brain that makes dopamine, so then you’re less likely to have energy and focus and concentration. So I’m sure that brain fog increases your stress and overwhelms you because you feel like you’re less capable of being a parent, being a boss, whatever you got to do at work. So, that’s one impact of mycotoxins and then also it’s reducing melatonin. So, I know when I was out of my house, we were staying in a hotel for like six weeks with the kids. It was crazy, but I didn’t sleep. I mean, it took me 3 different hotel rooms to find one where I could sleep and I just, I’m assuming now it was a mycotoxin issue, screwing up my sleep. I’m sure I was stressed from being out of my house. I mean that was years ago now. But I look back at that time and I go, Oh my God, anytime I’m exposed to mold, like in a hotel, I just don’t sleep. And then the research proves that. So my advice is if someone is dependent upon medication and herbs, a supplement for sleeping. If you are sleep deprived, the first thing you mentioned is the foundation. If you are sleep deprived and that’s creating stress, well, what’s your environment look like? Do you have good air purification? Do you have dehumidifiers? Do you have a mold problem? Do you have water leaks? Are you living in a moldy apt, a condo or townhome? It has water damage because if so even the most perfect supplement protocol can’t counteract us, so you may need to take steps to investigate your air quality, like some Petri dishes. And maybe there’s something there. Maybe when you get out of there, you sleep better. That’s a good clue that you’re onto something.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. The problem is most people, they have issues and they take action, but they’re still kind of anxious about what’s going on. So it’s really important. Action should help with the anxiety. Like the reason why anxiety is there from an evolutionary standpoint is to get you to take action to avoid, I don’t know if there’s someone gotten that woods. Last month they got eaten by a bear. Well, yeah, when you get near that woods you should be anxious because your body’s hardwired and make you more alert so you don’t get eaten by that bear. So you have to understand where the anxiety is coming from and as long as you’re taking actions. And you’re closing the loop, so to speak, on what that anxiety is coming from. You should feel better about it. And so I always say whatever the anxieties are, just try to have one or two solutions for each one of those. Then your brain knows, hey, I’m doing something about it, I can turn down that stress response because action are already being taken. So think about that as well. And then also like you mentioned, hey, if I have, if I’m uncertain about my environment, let’s get that mole test. If the mold test is positive, let’s do at least one thing to make sure that the environment gets better. Are there active leaks? Do I see water stains on the ceiling? Is there a chronic high level of humidity? Let’s work on that.If not, we can always just get in some good air filtration. We can work on fog in that area, make sure there’s no active leaks coming in. Then we’re, you know, getting a dehumidifier in there. We’re taking active steps. So you shouldn’t feel as anxious about that environment because you’re starting to make it healthier.

Evan Brand: And people say, what the heck are they talking about molds for on a podcast about stress and overwhelm? Well, here’s the mechanism. Your immune system responds to the mold as a threat, and it is a subconscious threat, meaning you Evan, or you Justin sitting here, you might think, OK, I’m not very stressed right now, like, I’m having a good time, this is great. But your nervous system subconsciously is running all these programs that are saying, hey, look, there’s actually a toxin in this room I’m responding to. And so you’re amygdala, your fighter flight system, part of your limbic system sends out an alert. Danger, danger, danger. And you may not even know it. So you could be sitting here on your couch, anxious for no reason. And it’s your limbic system. And many, many people report when they improve their air quality. They can settle down. So that’s the mechanism. I want people to understand when you think overwhelm you think just emotions in your head. But no, these external factors, these external toxins and variables can impact you. I mean, what about a bad neighbor? What about every time you see your neighbor’s car pull up, you’re like, Oh my God, there’s John again. And John stresses you out every time he pulls in the driveway because you guys got in an argument, so, you have to.Integrate some four of, I would say trauma release into all of this too. So you and I are big fans of tapping. So I would say if you’re catching yourself in these loops, you mentioned closing, closing the loop, which I think is smart but if you’re stuck in a loop well maybe you could integrate some tapping to pull you out of that. So tapping is basically acupuncture, but without the needles. You tap these points and then you say an affirmation. You know, I’ve done that many, many times here.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think it’s very good. Kind of helps calm down the nervous system response. There’s different programs out there. I’ll put some links down below like there’s DNRS or the Gupta program. These are excellent programs that involve visualization, maybe some aspects of NLP. You really work on controlling the thoughts and the images in your brain, whether you do tapping or eye movement like EM DRI movement, desensitization, response techniques, these things help calm down that fight or flight response and then you kind of allow you to be using more of your frontal brain because the data is when you’re in this chronic stressed out state, the amygdala right that. That forebrain or that hindbrain is kind of more active, that’s the prehistoric brain that is involved in fight flight and that fear response. And so most people are all working from this reptilian brain versus that frontal cortex that involves thinking and looking at your options and coming up with solutions and problem solving and predicting outcomes based on where you’re at, right. We need that frontal brain. But if we’re using our reptilian brain right, then that’s gonna be activated with a lot of these stressors. And so one study right here, I’m looking at, I’ll pull it up here and we can talk about it. I think that kind of supports what you’re saying regarding mold and this fight or flight response, being a big deal. So this one study here was looking at mold inhalation causes an innate immune activation, neural cognitive and emotional dysfunction. And they were talking about intranasally administering different, you know, this is black mold Stachybotrys. And they were looking at, you know, innate immune activation, toxic mold and how it affects your emotions. And of course it’s going to impact inflammation. It’s going to cause joint pain. It’s gonna cause sleep issues. You mentioned earlier, it also has a major effect on dopamine. Can you highlight that again?

Evan Brand: Yeah. Dual control F is dopamine in that paper. It might be a different paper. See if you can find it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, here you go. So exposing drosophila to 0.5 mil part per million of this chemical causes significant loss of dopamine neurons. So decreased dopamine levels and initiated onset of Parkinson’s, suggesting that exposure to mold produces the chemical that may be another environmental risk factor for Parkinson’s disease. So dopamine is really important for feeling good, for focusing, for dealing with stress. It’s that neurotransmitter that gives you that kind of connection that makes you feel loved, so really, really important and it talks about long term inflammation following mold exposure and autoimmune changes in the brain. So that’s that’s powerful.

Evan Brand: Yeah, this is huge. Uh, trying to get Dale Bredesen on the podcast, he wrote a book called the End of Alzheimer’s. And now he’s really hitting the mold angle as an Alzheimer’s link. I think it’s a huge piece of the puzzle. That and heavy metals but many people may hear this and they may just glaze over what we’re seeing. We’re literally saying that your environment could be contributing to a neurodegenerative disease where your neurologist is not going to have a clue. They’re not going to be testing you for this stuff. They’re not going to ask you about your water leak under your kitchen sink. They’re not going to be running mycotoxins in the urine, they’re not gonna look at the Great Plains or organic acids test. So in terms of. We’ll talk about testing in a second, but I think we should describe to people, how do you know if you’re in a state of overwhelm? Because many people are so used to living in fight or flight that they don’t really know how to downshift. So maybe we should go through symptoms, I will say inability to make decisions or analysis paralysis, like, if you’re struggling just to decide what to make for dinner, or you’re struggling just to decide what to do tomorrow, that’s that’s a huge problem. You can’t comprehend simple decision making, I would say loss of libido, loss of energy, motivation, sleep disturbance, maybe some sugar cravings, brain fog, anxiety, I would say distractibility or escapism, meaning you’re always jumping from like social media app to social media app. Like you just don’t want to live in your reality because you’re in a state of overwhelmed, that’s like escapism. What else would you add to the list?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Like, well, I would say it just depends where someone’s at, right? If someones going into an acute exposure or an acute stressor and they have a good foundation. That’s a good, that’s good because a good foundation you know allows you to deal with and adapt to stress. So I always look at it’s always good to model healthy people. So you work on the water, you work on the food, the blood sugar, the good fats, the good proteins, the sleep before midnight, getting enough movement so you feel energized but not tired. That’s a foundation. And then if the stressor comes into your world like mold, right? In this study, they talk about not just mold, but pesticide exposure, smoking. Right. So basically I’m looking at air and living quality. So the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to just cross things off my list. I’m gonna get a mold test from my house, whether it’s a plate test or an army test. I’m going to make sure I have good quality air filtration because even at my home there is no mold. You’re going to still have some off gassing of some furniture or paint or carpet or hardwoods or professional grade vinyl. There’s something in your air that’s gonna be more stressful and so you want to make sure you have a good quality air filter. Whether it’s an Austin air or an air doctor, you’re going to want to make sure your water is filtered and clean, and then you want to make sure if you’re in a human environment, you know, get a dehumidifier for your home and keep the humidity below 50%. I think that’s really key out of the gate.

Evan Brand: Yeah, yeah. What other symptoms do you think somebody would experience if they were in a state of overwhelm? Well, it depends. I mean, chronic overwhelm can just happen by having a lot of open loops on someone’s plate, a lot of stressors that are in your environment, emotional stressors, and you’re not taking action on them and now you have 2, 3, 4, 5. And so your body is going to cause you to get really anxious, really stressed and really overwhelmed because you’re not closing the loops. And so I just look at what are the top three things that are stressing you out from an emotional stress thing you haven’t taken action on. Just pull out your phone or paper and just write down what they are and write down A&B options for each one. And then say OK, good, I got them down and I’m gonna execute it when the time’s right, but I can at least put that to bed. And so that’s a really important thing. It’s kind of like that. Just trying to think of one situation. We had a, you know, mold issue in my home and it was like, OK, took action on it, got the remediation person out, got the air filtration, did it the right way, did in a negative air containment. Make sure we test it like.I just, I took action. But, you know, when I knew this problem, this environmental stressor was there, it was stressing me out because of all the unknown, right? And so I just said, I’m going to take action. I’m going to handle it the best way possible. I’m going to make sure we test, I’m going to make sure we clean it out. And I felt a lot better about it. But the more you leave these things open, it just kind of gnaws at you quite a bit.

Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, this applies to the debt too, right? A bill here, a medical debt here, a debt here on the car and then the car is going back like, so those things, you got to try to chip away at those too, I mean, this is in the financial podcast, but I would tell people try to knock out your smallest debts. Because if you’ve got like this bill and this card and that card and that debt, like that really weighs you down emotionally. And I see it all the time with people. It’s a huge piece of the stress. So like if you’ve got a credit card. Let’s say you’ve got an Amazon or Target credit card with 500 bucks. Like knock that one out first and then go to your $5000. One, like you have to chip away at these things.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, I think biggest thing out of the gate, I mean you can look at some of the Dave Ramsey stuff on that, but if you use a credit card or not, like I use credit cards because they get 2% back on everything, right? So it’s like, OK, I’m gonna get paid 2% for using it. Sure, I’ll use it. The difference is I pay my credit card off every day. And the reason why I do that is running a business and doing all these things. There’s lots of expenses and one if I have hundreds of transactions at the end of the week.What if there’s fraud? What if there’s issues? At least I can see it every day and then I can also monitor it. I can have my pulse on what’s where money’s going in and out. And so it makes me feel on top of it. And I would say just from a stress standpoint, financially, you know, three to six months of living expenses, I think is a good one to have in savings at all times. So if any issues happen, you have that to lean back on too many people. I think you don’t have that three to six month buffer. I think that can be a big stressful thing. That’s just kind of in the background for sure.

Evan Brand: Yeah so even some of I think it was Shaq or someone I saw it’s been some, I think it was Shaq or someone I saw recently an interview, some extremely high level millionaire was saying that every day they still look at the numbers, they still check their numbers, the bills, where the moneys going, where the credit is, where the debt is, they still look at it even though they could buy anything in the world, they still take a look. So if you’re just out of the loop on, that’s a big problem.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And with phone apps, you know you can jump on it and you can finalize it and look at it in about one or two minutes. The more you kind of have your pulse on things, the better. I think it’s really good and then you know you could talk about all the inflation that’s happening. That’s a whole different strategy in regards to investment and such like that that you know we do a lot of things on the investing side as well. But I think the biggest thing is to have about three to six months and just be on top of income coming in and expenses going out. So you have your pulse on it.That allows you to pivot and make changes.

Evan Brand: Yep. So that’s the financial piece, to try to get that buffer. The environmental piece, try to have a good clean Oasis where you can properly sleep, your nervous system can calm down.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think a couple of good air filters. Couple of good air filters. Get your home tested. Even if you just get a couple of the plates and you just wait five or seven days and count the spores and make sure the spores are under five or so, that’s fine. You can avoid setting it to the lab that is more than five, then we definitely want to send it to the lab. Um, you know, take a look at your ceilings. Go walk around, make sure you don’t see any spots on your ceiling. You know, go hire someone to come out once a year and just do a roof inspection. Just make sure your roof looks good. Go take a peek in your attic right, get a moisture meter and just kind of test the walls out a little bit and make sure everything looks good there. You know, those are all good simple things you can do out of the gates.

Evan Brand: Keep the exhaust fan on if you’re gonna take a hot shower. I’ve seen many, many people have issues with that just because of that hot steam of 2020 minutes or however long the shower you’re taking, all that steams.Gotta go somewhere. So if you’re not sucking it out with an exhaust vent, it’s gonna have to soak into that drywall so that paper backing on that drywall can get real moist. We see that as a huge problem area.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Or even just get a dehumidifier for your bath or even just a portable one. That’s a big one. If you don’t have an exhaust fan and you get a portable dehumidifier and just keep it on to at least pull that moisture out of the air and think that’s important.

Evan Brand: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then I would say, I would say message. Get body work done, whether it’s chiropractic, that very coming on your nervous system, having your spine adjusted, that’s where your central nervous system flows from your brain down the spine, making sure your spine and your vertebrae are moving. Make sure soft tissue is doing well, those good pliability in that soft tissue. Making sure that fascia is being manipulated. Myofascial release different things to help that fashion that connective tissue stay soft and supple like a tenderloin versus harden and flame like beef jerky. Chiropractic, I think it’s powerful as well just to make sure all the joints in your hips are moving your upper cervical spine. Really important that that’s all kind of dialed in as well. All these are all really important things that can calm down that nervous system and inhibit the IML, the intermedial, I think it’s the intermedial cell column that kind of stimulates that fight or flight nervous system.

Evan Brand: Turn your screen share off. That way I can see your figure. Yeah, the message is huge. I went to get a massage a couple weeks ago and the ladies like, yeah, we’re all fragrance free. And I went in there and my God, I left smelling like a dryer sheet. Like my wife is ready to kick me out of the car on the way home. She’s like, you reek. And so I guess they’re, they’re sheets at the massage studio just had driver seats on them or something. So that was a stressor for me because here I am going to do something good like call my system and then I leave smelling like a dryer sheet. So double check the head.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The best thing you can do, and I told you about it too, the best thing you can do is the cheapest thing is to get washed soda, which is basically baking soda for your washing machine. And then what you do is you do your wash and then you put like a 30 minute soak on there. Or one hour or soak you could do 30 minutes, right? Put a cup of the wash soda in there so you know it’ll sit for 30 minutes. The baking soda absorbs any smell, any stink. I had a little lemon shirt that was moldy. It was so bad because it got washed and then it sat there for a couple of days and it got moldy and the washer, I couldn’t get it out. I washed it like a dozen times. My mom comes into town, she’s like, oh, here, it’s just, it’s an Italian trick here and she will put the arm and hammer in there, do an hour soak, and it literally kills it. It felt brand new and I had washed it dozens of times wiith all these essential oils and anti mold uh, shampoos couldn’t touch the smell. So wash soda, especially if you’re sensitive. Use that to suck all the smell out of what’s in your detergent or anything else. And I’ll use just like the free and clear, no sense. I’m like Evan. I’m very, very sensitive to smell. Just really. It’s really ready to shop there for me, man.

Evan Brand: It was my skin though. My skin ripped. I had to take like 2-3 showers. I still smell. Maybe I should, like, scrub myself with baking soda. It was nice. It was like impregnated into my skin, man.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I don’t know what it is, but there’s like a I think it’s like I’m not sure if it’s younger woman today, but it’s like it’s like my parents generation that group wore at least the females a lot of perfume. Like you could literally be 15 feet away from someone and you could smell their perfume, it’s definitely changed. Like my wife’s generation, right, women in their 30s and 40s, there’s a less perfume smell. I think people are using more essential oils and natural things, but it’s funny how generations change how much perfume to last more and but I’m super sensitive to perfumes. We try to keep zero in our home and if we do anything, it’s like an essential oil or like a lavender or like a little bit of cedar or kind of rose. Those kinds of things keep it simple.

Evan Brand: We could hit the smells for a minute too. That is a stress to the system. It’s a big stressor, yeah, especially if you’re burning it. So, like candles, throw them away. If they’re not essential oil based, it’s just garbage.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dryer sheets. Throw dryer sheets away. If you want to get the benefit of dryer sheets, you can get one of those static balls. Just put it in there.It’s like a little ball that knocks the static down. That’s the purpose of dryer sheets mostly, right? But then you don’t have all that scent and smell, so that’s a good way to kind of mitigate the stress from that.

Evan Brand: Yeah, we hit the blood sugar, the sleep, the environment, the smells, the finances, I mean, those are a lot of pieces of overwhelm, really. What else are we missing?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean, I just think, you know, close those loops. Look at what’s on your plate for stressors, what’s bugging you out, what pops into your head. Be on top of that. Also monitor that self talk. Most people, if you look at how you talk to yourself, that inner voice. right? Behind your head that you hear. Most people would not be friends with a person that spoke the same way as their inner voice. So make sure you really upgrade the quality of your inner voice. Having that inner voice really gives you guidance, intuition. But also don’t beat yourself up. I think it’s super important. There was no Anthony Robbins quote that was really important as well. It’s like, you’re going to do so many things right in the day, so many things you’re gonna do right and well. And you gotta give yourself a pat on the back. Because if you’re not watching yourself succeeding and then giving yourself that congratulations to that PAT in the back and you’re looking for your kids or your spouse or your friend to do it all the time, they’re not going to see enough of it. So really make sure you’re catching yourself doing a lot of the good things and pat yourself on the back for it. And you know, take your wins whenever you can take your wins.

Evan Brand: Yeah, no, that’s great advice. The rumination, right this negative self-talk, ruminating about your problems, thinking about your past, the things you did wrong, living with regret. Those are big problems. So someone told me years ago,

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I want to hit that. It’s really important. So the rumination, I find serotonin and acetylcysteine plays major major role that sulfur and serotonin for me I used to be a little more OCD and ruminating and getting my NAC up and getting my serotonin levels up five HTP and B6 really help rumination. It allowed me to kind of like OK that that’s the issue and then allowed me to disconnect from it and and then just kind of focus on what the next thing is and not have to be playing the loop on repeat all the time, which is very stressful.

Evan Brand: Oh yeah, it’s huge. So people don’t understand that. They think once again negative self-talk, they think rumination they think .We’re talking about these emotional things, but no, we’re actually talking biochemistry. We’re talking neurotransmitters also. So what I was going to say is someone told me years ago, if you want to get out of your head to get into your body. So that’s what I do a lot of. If the weather is decent enough, I’m out there on the mountain bike, I’m out in the woods, I’m hiking, I’m biking and moving among the water. I’m doing something to get out of the head by getting in my body. So do that, and then the testing. Let’s talk about that, because you brought up serotonin and then overwhelmed.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, go. Go ahead, go ahead. Hit that part. One more thing that you brought up, I wanna hit it too.

Evan Brand: OK, don’t forget. So if you’re overwhelmed, I would say do the following. Get the urine test, urine done at home. You can order it through our office. If you need help, reach out to Doctor J at justinhealth.com or Evan Brand on evanbrand.com. Let us help you order these at home from the Functional Medicine Lab so we can investigate the cause of this overwhelmed because there could be internal toxins. There could be pesticides, mycotoxins, bacterial overgrowth, parasites, worms, H. pylori, gut inflammation, brain inflammation, low neurotransmitters, nutrient deficiencies, all combining to create these emotional issues. So get the oh, we may want to look at stool, we may want to look at chemicals. But reach out and then we can help you develop a plan to figure this out.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Really important one last thing I wanted to highlight too is appreciation. Because most of the time when you’re overwhelmed, you’re thinking about what’s missing in your life or you’re thinking about this problem that you have to address and you’re like, I don’t know what, do I have time to do this? So you’re thinking about this expense that you’re thinking about things that you’re you’re missing or things that you have to expand or you have to lose, but when you appreciate your focusing on all the things that you have and you’re really trying to create context for that and really feeling that sense of gratitude and appreciation and appreciate essentially like if your finances appreciated, if your investments appreciate, they get greater, they get bigger. So you’re taking everything in your life and you’re feeling that sense of gratitude, making everything bigger in your life in regards to how you feel about it and how appreciative you are and having a perspective of, you know, if you live in the United States like you’re, you’re a one percenter just living in the United States, right? I mean I think it’s if you make $19,000 a year, right, which is poverty in this country. You’re 1% in the world. It’s like, whoa. That’s like, that’s perspective, right? Perspective also gives you appreciation.

Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, I can have dark humor with my grandparents. Like my grandma called me the other day. Apparently my grandpa hit a curb and busted a tire. They were without their car, then the tires on backorder. Nobody has that size in stock. And I was like, well, it’s better than being dead and she’s like, you’re right, you’re right. I’m gonna enjoy this. This is fun. We’re gonna get a rental car. It’s no problem. And so I just tell her all the time, you know, if there’s a complaint, like, at least you’re not dead because, you know, her relatives have disappeared. And you know, she’s one of the last women standing elf, that generation, you know, from the 40s. So I’m like grandma, like, enjoy it, you’re alive. This is amazing. And usually it kind of snaps her out of the funk.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, appreciation is important, right? Because usually you’re just focused on all the things that are going wrong and you’re just flipping that switch. And if you look at NLP and kind of the work of Richard Bandler, he is a really interesting guy, but he would always take a look at successful people and he talked to them. He’d want to know what’s the image in your head when you’re in this peak state and you’re succeeding and you’re doing well, what are the images in your brain look like at the time? Meaning like, what are you thinking of? What’s the picture real in your brain look like when you’re achieving and doing these things? And almost always it’s in the positive, almost always it’s showing in visualizing the outcome and you’re already seeing it happen multiple times already before you actually do it. And versus it’s the negative, it’s the worst case scenario. So really be aware of the picture screen on your brain almost like go within, pretend like you’re in a movie theater and you’re literally seeing the picture screen, which is what you’re seeing through your eyes. And then you’re really changing that screen. Like you’re the director directing that movie screen while you’re seeing it in the movie theater through your eyes. Does that make sense?

Evan Brand: It does. It does to me because I do it all the time. I’m always trying to visualize the outcome. This has already happened. The person I want to say yes, already said yes. What I needed? It’s already here. Even though I don’t have it yet, I’ve already got it. And that goes a long way.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then also pretend like if you’re there in that movie theater inside your brain, remember you have control over that. If it’s in a bad space and you’re just all negative and you’re just looking at everything the wrong way, you can just put a new movie in, right? You’re not a victim, you’re not sitting there chained down like Clockwork Orange, right where they peeled the guys eyes open, right? It’s like you have control over what you’re watching, so put a different film in there.

Evan Brand: Yeah, the last thing I would say is just take a nap. Like if you’re just so overwhelmed the middle of the day hits, you’ve got fatigue that can also be overwhelming because you’re so tired. You have so many obligations you’re trying to do, but you’re so fatigued. Number one, get the labs run so we could figure out why you’re so damn tired on paper will,

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Your adrenals looked at, yeah. See how stressed out there do you have that chronic low DHEA? Are your neurotransmitters VMA, HVA, 5-hydroxy, indoleacetic? Are they all depleted and down? Because this could take a while to get this thing repleted.

Evan Brand: Yeah. So if you’re feeling that, get the data then. If you gotta close your eyes for a minute, close your eyes, lay there and take a nap. If you can do it, if your lifestyle allows you to take a nap, escape from the kids, whatever you gotta do, do it. And hopefully you’ll come back a little more refreshed, a little more in control when you’re not so exhausted.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And when your neurochemistry is depleted, it’s really hard to willpower out, willpower that. And so sometimes, yeah, they get the food and the supplements on track and then it’s like then the willpower and then the energy and then the ability to now start doing the things you need to do is start to become easier, there’s less resistant to get this downhill kind of momentum, so that’s very important. And again, looking at the adrenals, looking at the neurotransmitters, looking at your DHEA sulfate, looking at your circadian rhythm, right, that circadian rhythm should should go up in the morning and down at night, and the more dysregulated that is if it’s reversed or flat, that tells me that stress feedback loop is disrupted and you’re probably using that amygdala in that brain stem. You’re operating more from that fight or flight state all the time.

Evan Brand: Yeah, that makes sense if you need help, reach out. You can reach Doctor J at justinhealth.com worldwide consult meaning labs can be sent to your door. Wherever you are. You get the results. Look at them, make a protocol, get yourself better. So justinhealth.com for Doctor J and myself Evan at evanbrand.com. We look forward to helping you guys, and hopefully this content was helpful. Share it with your friends, your family. If we can get somebody else out of the whole, that’s what we love. I mean, it just takes one person that could totally transform your life. This is your husband you’re trying to get out of, overwhelm your wife. Have them listen to this so we can help lift them up because it’s gonna make your life way better.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, just pick one thing. If you’re overwhelmed already and you’re like, crap, he just said 15 things, just pick one, like what’s the easiest thing that you can do? And then once you get some momentum, then we’re gonna go to two and then we’re gonna go to three. So just start kind of stacking and get that momentum and then you get that downward momentum going. Then it starts to be easier to add new modalities to the mix.

Evan Brand: Yep, Amen.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Alright man, great chatting with you Evan and hope everyone listening enjoyed it. Feel free to share with friends or family. We’ll put a link down below where you can review us. We really appreciate a review on both our iTunes channels. Super helpful. It’s the word out there and you guys have a phenomenal day.Take care of y’all.

Addressing EMF, 5G and Improving Your Athleticism – Justin Frandson | Podcast #379

Exposure to artificial radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs) has increased significantly in recent decades. Therefore, there is a growing scientific and social interest in its influence on health, even upon exposure significantly below the applicable standards.

In this video, Dr J and Justin Frandson discuss the possible harmful effects of EMF and 5G on our well-being and what the strategies are to keep our athleticism and overall health performance. To find out more, make sure to like, subscribe, and watch out for more evidence-based health tips!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 – Introduction
0:28 – Athleticism
4:57 – Concussions
16:03 – EMF
25:30 – Correlation vs causation

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys! It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here, really excited. I have Justin Fradson on today’s show. We’re gonna be talking about 5G, EMF, natural ways to help eliminate that, reduce it, neutralize it and also talk about improving athleticism as well. Justin, welcome to today’s show. How you doing, man?

Justin Frandson: Really great. Thanks Dr. J for having me on.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, awesome. And you got a new book that’s out called athleticism, whole body, whole brain performance. Can you just kind of what inspired you to write this book and what are some of the key take home points you want to highlight out of the gates.

Justin Frandson: Oh yeah, I’m pretty stoked on this book, I must say, this is my life journey just. Oh, and between those two hard back cover so, I mean, I started working with the athletes about 25 years ago. Started athleticism.com. I had a Scripps clinic in La Jolla and work with the amateur and professional athletes develop sensory, motor, nerve work for sports performance. We do whole body, brain training, ambidexterity, and I treat concussions and do a bunch of stuff.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK, that’s very cool. So let’s talk about the, the, the ambidexterity training. What does that look like? What are some of the exercises? What are some of the therapies you run your athletes through to improve that?

Justin Frandson: Well, we’re one of the only sports performance programs that actually has an ambidexterity program. And that’s great. The crust of it I think is, is to really get these bodies being a whole body and whole brain.Performer. So we do everything from juggling to washers to cup stacking. Uh, a lot of martial arts stuff as well. Stick training, just coordination with the hands and integrating with foot movements.Those are some of the ambidexterity stuff, just with the hands that people would think of. We also do the same things with the rhythms, with the feed and then everything’s nonlinear semi circles figure eights connecting to the infinite flow of the universe.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So is someone coming to you and saying, hey, I wanna be a better athlete? These are some of the skill sets that I need in my sport and then you kind of come in and recommend various kind of modalities within your clinic. Is that how it works?

Justin Frandson: Yeah definitely and then or I get bridge training post PT guys Sir kind of fed up with PT and or their sessions have expired and they don’t know what to do. They’re kind of left high and dry. So we bridge that gap all the way to high level performance and then do a lot of treatments as well for injury recovery like a stretching therapy and brain and trainment, light, sound, frequency, vibration, those are all my go to.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s cool. And so when you have people that come in from PT, what do you see some of the big shortcomings of PT that maybe prevent some of the people that see you? Like why they’re not healing all the way? There are certain modalities or shortcomings philosophically or modality wise that are missing in that? That you kind of bring delight, if you will.

Justin Frandson: Definitely. I really feel PT’s are some of the most gifted facilitators out there, but unfortunately a lot of them are held within the restrictions of billing and so they’re just going to ice, they’re just going to do 5 minutes of yeah, fascial work. They’re not able to do, use their gifts to the extent that they use them. So I think that one of the downfalls of the PT system is a really locked into the insurance space method and protocols most of our PT or excuse me post OP physical therapist so your session has expired. You certain point then you’re pretty much you’re done. I mean you then there are where do you go? And I have that same experience. I tore my ACL playing basketball while dunking on a guy and when I landed, he then bends his knee in the side of my knee and tore the ACL. And went through PT out of scripts clinic in La Hoya where I was officed out of. So the Orthos brought us in there and to work with the PT in them so they could have the system. So I’m like OK, I’m going to use this PT even though I got it three from a handful of other PT’s, well, he starts billing me. It was like $750 to ice my knee for the first visit. And then and three weeks, four weeks, four weeks in I had expired all my, my and I had like I had. I had like the best insurance he could have and I was done in like a month and so. And then he had built the just crap out of me. And so I’m going this is just a flawed system. And it ended up being my niche where I could take over that bridge, bridge that gap to where they really missed out on.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK, got it. And so when you see people that have come in with concussions, what’s your first step to addressing that outside of the, you know, the conventional model, right? The conventional model a lot of times is like sunglasses go sit in the dark corner maybe? Don’t, don’t fall asleep for a little bit, right? Is there anything else you’re doing that’s kind of specifically improving healing? Anything nutritionally, anything neurological exercise wise, to kind of help facilitate that healing?

Justin Frandson: Well, the first thing I do is they go to a chiropractor. So the first thing I do? So go to Chiro, get everything adjusted. Make sure everything is structurally in place. I mean, that’s number one. When they come to see me, what I do is what I do. They work on sensory nerves so I level their horizon and get them connected to their center line, which is basically obviously their longitude latitude line. One thing I know where they are in space, everything will start to heal.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So how does that work? Is that upper cervical type of stuff? How do you do that?

Justin Frandson: No, through light therapy and muscle lights. OK, you are soggy.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK. And so what’s the input? You’re adding light or anything else to help that?

Justin Frandson: Light and I use essential oils and I use muscle testing and energy work to do it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s cool. Excellent. And so someone comes in, they have these concussion issues, right? You’re using these different modalities and that’s you’re seeing that helps celebrate healing. Are you doing anything with a red light? Are you doing anything with nutrition at all?

Justin Frandson: Well yeah, I mean like red light is what we use, so I actually use GRT light most of the time Umm. And it’s red LED and infrared and it has different policies and mechanisms and then I’m actually using essential oils as well and nutrition is huge because your stomachs, your second brain. So, right. I had a guy who just had a client actually two days ago. Crazy. You bring this up, but he put a breath mint. He’s 14. Little kid got a concussion and I had seen him three times prior and I’m working on his nerves, on his REM patterns and he was, he held in the beginning of going right to left on his eye movements without moving his head, just moving his eyes.He put them in his mouth and I go to retest his eyes, and he goes weak. And guess what? Events are full of artificial… about his nervous system.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. Nutrition plays a major role, whether it’s additional toxicity coming in through junkie sugars or artificial sweeteners or potential food allergens or junkie fats, right. All those things matter. And what kind of diet changes do you make, I mean, most people that I see that come to me and they’ve seen PT in the past, most very rarely even look at nutrition or anything in that realm or get extra nutrients to help build back connective tissue or joints or bones. It’s kind of ignored 100%. You see it also, already conventional medicine too. What kind of changes do you make out of the gates in those areas?

Justin Frandson: Well, the big thing is looking at all the different stressors of the body and you gotta look at what John rates like down regulates the nervous system. And so comically food, drink, air, EMF. So food is just basically eating real stuff like eating a real balanced intake. That’s a real food that’s not modified, that’s not real in pesticide, herbicide and also growing in the garage. That doesn’t come out of a bag and from an industrialized manufacturing plant. So some of the basic stuff on that. I love structured and structuring the water. Just get hydration down, have them start to own their power a little bit.More and then sleep is the other biggest thing which our grounding bags help with. So kind of normalizing a full spectrum of these athletes and you know that that’s where we’re really diving into.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Any specific diet recommendations, are you making sure proteins are adequate? Or is there a certain amount of protein you want people to eat in relation to their weight? Half a gram per pound? One gram per pound of body weight? What does that look like for protein?

Justin Frandson: Yeah. I haven’t really gotten too granular with them on that. I just say balance it out. What I do look at is we have an MCT oil called Lean Oil. So it’s from the palm kernel, so it’s medium chain triglycerides.That’s right. So they’re the very fattest fuel. Uh. But you gotta kick in the oldest people valve, get some protein in the body. Yeah, first thing in the morning. I mean, these are some things that I like to do. Uh, and? That’s kind of where I go out and I’m not big on digitally quantifying like these specific ratios and it just feeds your body what you feel is right for you and does your food really well and dying, but enough fuel in your system too, so you’re not burning adrenaline. You’re burning fuel.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that makes sense.Absolutely.Yeah, I mean I thought protein is really important because if you’re athletic and you’re using your muscles, you’re creating this breakdown, your body trying to heal that back up. So proteins and it’d be really important. Also protein is going to be very blood sugar stabilizing, very satiating into preventing you from overeating, obviously good fats or super important because every cell in our body has a good healthy cell membrane and we need good healthy fats whether it’s coconut oil or good healthy grass fed pasture fed animal products. We want to really be avoiding a lot of the junkie more inflammatory process fats Omega 6 trans fat. So I think that’s, you know, important to have those components dialed in for sure. That makes a lot of sense. What’s next? So you see patients, they come in to you, your. What’s the next step the average person’s missing to make themselves more athletic? Like, if you could do one thing with the average person, what would it be outside of some of the things we’re already talking about now?

Justin Frandson: Well, the first thing I recommend to them is to start balancing more, so when you’re probably the number one thing I dressed in the book. If you don’t balance, you can’t do anything. So that’s the biggest thing. I think right behind that would be flexibility to have some range of motion and once they get established a functional range of motion. Then you go into the stability components, and then we start to develop a foundation that we build on for speed, power, coordination, and it is just a human disguise of limits. And it’s unilateral versus jumping off of both feet and you just take the athletes and our new dimension.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s why I always like unilateral work, because I find that you can really show weaknesses to people. A single like deadlift for unilateral kind of opposite arm pull. I feel like when you do things that are unilateral it really exposes a lot of weaknesses. and imbalances in the body so that that’s really good. Plus you don’t need a lot of weight, you don’t need a lot of load. When you’re rolling, you’re only using half of that foundational stable unit. So that’s cool. Yeah. What’s one thing?

Justin Frandson: Yeah. But the other thing real quick is I’ve been doing a lot of B3 bands. And which is blood flow restriction and, I found that’s really helpful for me because of limited time for workout. I’ll throw on the ban, it boosts my nitric oxide buildup and endothelial vascular growth factor. So I think more growth factors.That, you know what, I’m in my 50s, so, uh, I could use all that I could get right now naturally, and that’s been a fantastic way. And my strengths improve, my speeds improve. So for a quick workout, those B3 bands have been awesome for me.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s cool. And the goal of those bands is like a rubber band, almost like what they do if they were to take your blood, they wrap it around there and that’s restricting blood flow. And then as a result, it’s what, increasing growth hormone, increasing NO2, essentially.

Justin Frandson: Yeah. The nitric oxide is oxide for it and what happens is, you develop these buffers and you just develop more growth factors from it. But B3 bands have Airways in that restriction, so you’re not starving the muscle of oxygen, you’re just constricting it. So my whole thing is like resistance. Resistance and the subtle resistance are vascular systems that just don’t have it until you put a ban on it. The two activities that restrict or provide resistance for your respiratory system are swimming because you’re exhaling into the water or playing a horn instrument as a musician. Other than that, we don’t develop that respiratory system with resistance. So there’s ways to look at fast resistance, respiratory system resistance versus just traditional strength training resistance and so that’s why we’re looking at all these components.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Excellent. And so you are also very passionate about EMF and you sent me a couple of goodies which I appreciate. You sent me some EMF kind of neutralizing crystals, a Faraday bag, a couple things and they have a website, EMF rocks. Let’s talk a little bit more about EMF and just kind of some of the negative impacts out of the gate that you see, for instance, with your athletes that you work with?

Justin Frandson: Ohhh, yeah doctor J. I mean, I saw an endurance athlete come through and this one.Higher arm when weak from wearing a smartwatch on his wrist. And so I’m like, oh wow, yeah, get that radiation off your wrist. His whole arm just got better. It got stronger again without me kind of radiation. Was it hooked up to Wi-Fi or was it just like a simple what kind of signal was it? Was it Bluetooth? Yeah. So it’s Bluetooth. They’re about 2.45 billion waves per second of one directional wave form. So let’s breakdown the.Difference of why that’s so challenging for our body. We’re built on scalar waves. Distributed equally in every direction. Man made stuff. Whether it’s electricity, dirty electricity or wireless, they’re all basically one directional wave forms or they don’t work. So when you put something on your wrist like Wi-Fi at 2.45 billion waves per second when our body optimizes that one to eight when we sleep and heal an 8 to 12 when we’re in the alpha state when we’re in the flow state, we’re competing. That’s where really close with the Schumann resonance of Earth, which is 7.83 Hertz so, when we add in 10 zero speed and it’s a one direction polarizing waveform, that’s localized radiation when someones weak or toxic or just has a sensitivity to it for some way shape or form even too young old. Their blood type is an RH negative.Those people will be more sensitive to EMF.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so what kind of EMF are we talking about? Like, are we talking like the Apple Watch? Would my small little Fitbit that’s charting my steps be enough to throw me off?

Justin Frandson: Oh yeah, that muscle tests weak with that fit. Now out of the gate, they’re having challenges. And they had to lower the signals kind of where Josh still made a documentary movie called Take Back Power on the smart meters. They were ramping up these smart meter signals. They had to notch it down because everyone was getting sick and couldn’t sleep. Same with fit that it’s still now enough where you’ll task a week with it. So I would never, I mean again, this is my whole deal, Doctor J is we gotta get back to listening to your body and how your body feels, not having something tell you how it feels. This meta universe is not OK. It’s not the direction that we want to go into.

Dr. Justin Frandson: So is there any technology you recommend if someone wants to kind of track their steps or make sure they’re doing enough activity during the day, what’s the best way to do that? Is there a certain way that you could adjust that so as a lower lower drain on you?

Justin Frandson: Yeah, I haven’t really dove into the lesser of the evils. What I would say is. You only test athletes. We’ve established a baseline, maybe in the midpoint and point, and the task we’re not doing day-to-day. So know your stuff the day, track them and then use that as your baseline to say, hey, yeah, I feel like I did a few less than I did, you know, or I did way more today. And you’ll know that your body will just feel it. You don’t need something to tell you how you slept or what you did. You have to.Look into yourself to start to feel again.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. And so what’s the, what’s some of these wireless signals, what’s the mechanism? What’s actually happening? How is it disrupting us? You kind of went into it a little bit more. I want to make sure I understand. Like how is that actually happening at a biochemical level there?

Justin Frandson: OK, so when we introduce one-directional waveform. What happens is there’s an oration effect in our body, it’s just a secondary effect. Doctor Martin Paul talks about the voltage gated calcium channels opening up less. Yep, letting the positive team into a negative cell, in turn causing tremendous cell and DNA damage. Once that vibration secondary effect happens, what I’ve seen clinically as people’s eyes, their teeth, they’re large and they’re thymus and then they’re large intestine are the four primary areas that decharge EMF. We can use our grounding bags to tap on them and recharge those areas. I’ll go into that a little bit, but then the next level is what we see are cognitive, so focus, memory, behavior, anxiety, fatigue, stress, lack of sleep. They’re gonna be the first signs of EMF toxicity and challenges that people will feel especially.Actually.You know, athletes and they’re gonna make poor decisions, you know, when they’re competing. So this is a huge thing. So the other thing is, you’re going to see more non trauma concussion symptoms, so you’re gonna see basically headaches, more severe headaches, so, migraines. Uh, in the years. Muscle twitching, bloody noses, I mean, these are all the different things that you’re going to see. It’s going to be nausea, fatigue, tremor. Ears, bloody noses, and you go to Vancouver talked about this, the first attack of U.S. embassy workers on foreign soil with microwaves. You know, that was that’s a real deal. These guys are sick for months and then the hospital and they couldn’t get better because they were so toxic, then you go into the bigs, cancer, suicide, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular, and then, now after fertility and yeah, so I see a note here. Yes, today’s stress. Yes 245 ways per second destructores water. Yes, 60 gigahertz, which is a 5G level, changes what oxygen molecules are made out of as well.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so we have different kinds of Wi-Fi, right? You could have the EMF put it in that camp. We have EMF maybe on our wrist from our smartwatch. We can have our Wi-Fi signals in our House, right. And then we’re going to have cell phone towers, especially the 5G, those, those kinds of the big ones or is there anything else missing?

Justin Frandson: Yeah. So we categorize it into three different types? Yeah. Milligauss magnetic resonance would be one where you get a magnetic resonance where you get a milligauss meter. That is in the 50 to 60 waves per second spectrum. Then we do dirty electricity, which is a static in the line. It measures amps to volts. That would be 4000 to 100,000 waves for a second approximately. And then you have the acoustic meters, the radio frequency meters that measure for the wireless signals from 50 million to several billions per second. So there’s meters to actually quantify and those stressors and those levels of each of those singles. So wireless would be any wireless signal Alexis, NASA units computers that aren’t hardwired. Uh, you’re others smartest.Of the self driving mechanisms and cars, all that stuff off your it’s all wireless. The Dirty electricity would be static in the lines from bad wiring, grids crossing outside your home, rats heating lines, signals going in and out of a junction don’t meet.That would cost static transformers on LED lights inside these new homes will cause lots of jury electricity and then the the milligauss is all the electricity in your home.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So what do you actually do about it? Right, because these stressors are all around us. You’re not going to get rid of Wi-Fi. You won’t even get rid of cell phone towers. Obviously you could do your best to be far away from them or from, you know, at least not to have one right on top of your kids school right nearby. You do your best to kind of mitigate exposure, especially when you’re sleeping, you can control some of the Wi-Fi in your house hardline, or turn it off when you sleep. What can, what are the actual practical things outside of like don’t do it or don’t use it?

Justin Frandson: Practical for. Well, I want to dive into something else, too.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sure. Let’s go ahead. Let’s hit that first thing, and then we’ll come back to it.

Justin Frandson: OK. Yeah. So there’s a book I want everyone to read. It’s called the invisible rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg. Have you heard that one?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I Have. I heard of the author before.

Justin Frandson: Yeah, he’s one of the biggest names in EMF, and if you guys haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. He categorized as a history of electricity and life and correlates every major pandemic to spikes in the in the.Increased electrification of our atmosphere. So let’s do a little physics and biology lesson here. Our atmosphere is made of Ether and plasma, OK, these waveforms travel through these plasma waves and particles travel through because of that is our air. We’re connected. We are one with the universe, alright. This is how we are made off of scalar with. So everything has a residence that carries a frequency and on man made stuff is all one directional or one word, so if you’re standing up outside of it and you’re in the sunlight. You’re not in the sunlight in one spot and then out of it in another spot. It distributes equally in every direction or biofield of our body resonates. It doesn’t just go out like straight out of your right ear. It’s a residence all around you, the human residence of Earth, you’re not in the residence in one spot and then out of it in another. It’s up there. So that’s what these scalar waves are based on. And so this book, the invisible rainbow. Anything before 1918? Uh, well actually let me backup anything we’ve had since 1889 were solar flares, we’re cosmic shifts. That’s where people have got sick. So they called the flu the flu because it would fly in when there was a solar flare, a cosmic ship. People’s bodies would adapt and then, you know, they get better and then we move on to someone you know because their body just adapted when they needed to at the level they were capable.That’s what we saw before 1889 when we introduced electricity in the homes. So we got home with electricity got shoes on so we’re not grounding and 1918 winner introduced radio waves that was the that was the first the Hong Kong first excuse me that was that was, uh, 1980 Spanish flu and then satellites in the Van Allen belt where the Hong Kong flu, World War Two radar and then 5G for the last two years. So basically what these doctors are saying like Tom Cowan, Andrew Kaufman, Zac Bush, Kelly Brogan. I mean all these and they’re and MD’s, you know, not that MD’s other and they’ll say, well, I’m more of a Cairo guy myself, but this, these doctors that have been medically trained are out there saying that electricity stressors is an environmental toxin and a biotoxin, and what we’re doing is we’re adapting to these toxins and that’s what’s happening right now.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK. How do you distinguish correlation versus causation because at the same time the last 100 years you know we’re doing a lot of other stressors being introduced whether it’s toxicity and our food nutritional deficiencies, you know excess antibiotic usage as a lot of other things. So how do you make the correlation of these things happening, but is it really dry? Is it really the root cause or is it just another stressor that our bodies are having to deal with, among many others?

Justin Frandson: Well, that’s a great question. I mean you no one can argue that all these combinations of stressors don’t add up to be a stressor, but I think, when there’s a breaking point, like look, we can call and talk to someone across the globe instantly, I mean, right? So there’s no scratch in your head that you can broadcast something instantly. There’s no scratching your head that there’s a shift in the atmosphere.Yeah, that’s gonna mess up our REM patterns. So there’s too much there for me to go and do that EMF is not often the number one stressor right now. Zach Bush will say it’s glyphosate for the last 40 years of research.I’ll go back and say, hey, look at the invisible rainbow. The bibliography is 150 pages, so most reference books for reading and this is 1889 when it starts. So, there’s no scratch in your head. For me, I live in Newport Beach, California. Healthiest place on the planet. No one gets sick in June, so this year everyone was getting sent to everyone. But a lot of people were getting sick in June. That’s when they ratchet up and turn stuff up. People’s bodies will shift. There’s times where there’s going to be higher levels of certain stressors that are going to be that shift, and that’s what I feel are these triggers for. A lot of these major pandemics and Tom Cowan and a former MD turned in his license, but he’ll say when you pollute the ocean, you know the Dolphins will get sick. Yeah it’s not backed off and given that often a virus or hey let’s look at their genes you know and in 2020 all get sick now that would be stupid. So we’re looking at things like it’s all environmental toxins that are the challenge here and I feel the top two or you know, EMF, obviously the 5G and then glyphosate.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally makes sense. No, I think that’s a big one for sure. And So what can we do about it with the EMF, right? I mean, there’s different devices that you can plug into your outlets to kind of help clean up some of the dirty electricity you shot me over, different things. What we can do is like a Faraday bag and you can put your phone in that or turn your phone off, or definitely don’t sleep near it. Definitely don’t keep it right on your person, especially in your pockets next to your genitals or sensitive tissue. You mentioned crystals and different things like that or rounding math. Let’s kind of go over the top three to five things that the everyday person could do. That’s pretty easy and simple.

Justin Frandson: Yeah, well. First, I distinguished the difference in products out there. So if someone’s looking for a product to clear. Basically what we want to look at is, is it a GMO product or is it an organic product because we all want to get it, we all don’t want something that’s been modified. So for me, I look to the healing power to kick off her residence, to create a coherence with us. So we hand my crystals. The crystals have moisture, magnetic properties in it, you know, that’s where our money bags look like.The other man made devices are devices that are looking to over power another device like. That’s a futile effort, so that’s a genetically modified signal, that’s non-native, that’s looking to replicate what nature already does. So, my first thing is awareness and understanding of the different products that are out there, because if you’re going to look at a product.To solve this. You gotta look to nature to do it.There’s no one who is more intelligent and has those medicinal qualities like Mother Nature. So the first thing would be our grounding bags in your home and you not having bags in your home, you’re outside and you’re getting grounded outside so you’re getting barefoot your touching a tree, you’re gaining bodies of water. You’re doing your grounding protocols outside.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the goal of grounding is what like you, the goal is you dispersing some kind of positive ion charge in the body. Is that what you’re doing?

Justin Frandson: Yeah, so one of my favorite books is called Electric body Electric Health by Eileen McKusick and she talks about your body being a body battery. You get a negative ionic charge from Earth, and we pull those electrons from it. You get a positive charge from the unpolarized light of the sun coming from above. And then breathe in the minerals and hopefully we get it from our food, but this is how our body battery recharges. And so we’re getting that, getting grounded by nature, being outside, so the sunlight will do it.Getting in those resonances, the negative charge we’ll deal with the bodies of water, touching trees barefoot, laying down on a picnic. Gardening, climbing rocks, all that good stuff like that’s gonna get you that grounding, that negative charge. So that’s how our body battery works.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s good. So you really happened and dispersed a lot of those positive ion charges which you’re going to accumulate when you’re around a lot of these wireless frequencies. Is that correct?

Justin Frandson: Yeah, definitely.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And how does the crystal work? How do the crystals work and do you have to keep them in the bag so they don’t get dehydrated? Can you take him out?

Justin Frandson: Yes, exactly. They have to stay in the bag and they’re sealed and you use it as is, so you keep it sealed. They come like this. And there’s about 1 pound of crystals in here. They work the same way nature does as they kick off a resonance to convert the one directional wave forms and then they feed us the electrons. So that’s the way Mother Nature works. That’s why it feels so good to go to the beach and get grounded and going? You’re recharging your body battery. Literally, scientifically, that’s the physics and the biology that’s occurring. So, as far as using these protocols, well, you can do is you can accelerate this product going to your body. You can hold it top on it. Cover your eyes. Cover your teeth. Cover your thymus. Cover your large intestine one at a time and that’ll accelerate the medicinal properties to recharge you. Because when people have layers of toxicity sucking their energy field and biofield. They’re going to be more sensitive to EMF. If they have toxicity internally they’re going to be a more sensitive EMF, so an internal flush would be protease, digestive enzyme and then apple cider vinegar. That will be a very subtle detox for internal stuck EMF. External, you’ve got your grounding protocols outside and you gotta do the tapping with the grounding bag inside.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK, that’s cool. And with the crystals there are certain types of crystal people can look forward to. I mean obviously we, you know we’ll put your site below is a good resource but is there any specific kind of crystal that you find works better.

Justin Frandson: Well, yeah, they’re the average person won’t be able to find it, unfortunately. Amethyst Shanghai black tourmaline. They are known to have Tesla property or magnetic resonance. Well what happens is they’re getting overrun too quickly with all the access to EMF in our world. So we had to deploy a 1 pound bag of crystals of hand mine that would have moisture with the magnetic, so the combination of the moisture with that Mech properties is what allows them to be exponentially stronger for repelling EMF. So the average person is never going to find these colloid crystals anywhere. They’re hand mine, they’re over 85% of here. You’re not gonna find the purity and be able to bring that rest to your home like we have with fees.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s cool. And so the average person can do what with the crystal just put it in, put it on the night stand when they sleep to help kind of provide a filtration of a lot of the EMF frequency. Can they just get a small one, put it on their person. How do you use it?

Justin Frandson: Yeah. So Doctor Justin, when you put it on your bed. At the head of the bed. And if it’s not on it, If it’s under it.Lean it against the leg of the bed, at the head, the back. They’ll sleep 30 to 50% better.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s cool. That’s good to test it. I mean, the whole idea crystals always seem a little out there for me, but. You know, I get it like we can’t see Wi-Fi, we can’t see all these things around us and we know everything does have a frequency to it. So the more you can kind of harmonize that or or or neutralize the negative impact of these frequencies, it makes sense. We know there’s a stress component, especially 5G. And so crystals are one big tool. What else? Anything else we can do that simple? You mentioned the internal stuff, you mentioned enzymes, apple cider vinegar, you mentioned some clays or binders, what else?

Justin Frandson: I mean those are some great things to do. People like carbon C64. I like doing methylation so I like to open up methylation pathways. So I need methylfolate, it is great. You gotta do magnesium. I like some calcium as well as magnesium. And it’s probably one of the biggest things that everyone really needs, like on a day-to-day basis. This is uh, uh, but for EMF protection, just keep hydrating yourself. Get some good distilled water with some minerals in it. That’ll be the most mineral dense water will do. And then structure it. That would be even better.So those are kind of the things that we’re looking at.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good, Justin. Well, we had a bunch of good things today. We’ll put the links down there below as good references for your site where they can get more information. Any other coordinates or information you want to leave to the listeners here?

Justin Frandson: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on you got.I just really wanna encourage you to understand physics and biology and what health really is. And good health is really connecting above and getting grounded into nature and smiling and living and touching and hugging each other and being together and that’s that’s the answer. That’s the essence of living for life, having fun and smiling. A smile is the most contagious thing on the planet. So there’s bioenergetic resonances that naturally occur in nature that are stronger than anything. And I want people to stop living in fear and understand what true health is and that our viruses are just our adopted system at work. We’re dead proteins that we produce so there’s No Fear, there’s nothing flying around to kill anyone. We just smile and live for life and you guys the most important thing you can do right now for your health is to do all those and make sure you’re getting out in nature and getting grounded by nature and then when you’re inside use your grounding bags and then also establish pro, turn your Wi-Fi off, turn your electrical off in your bedrooms. Create your home into a really quiet resonance so it’s closer to as human residence, not these one directional, billions of waves per second when you’re trying to sleep and heal.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good, Justin. I appreciate it. What are your sights again? We have EMFrocks.com.

Justin Frandson: EMFrocks.com. We have clinics all around the country and then athleticism.com is where we have our curated health and performance products and that’s spelled athletic SM for those of you who have trouble spelling athleticism.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK, perfect. I will put links down below. People can get access. Oh, by the way, Faraday bags. How, how do you use those by the way? And do you always keep your phone into a Faraday bag? Is it only at night when you’re kind of putting your phone away?

Justin Frandson: Yeah. So we have two sides of the Faraday bags. Thanks for asking, Doctor J.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How does it work, by the way? How does it even work? Like, what is it exactly?

Justin Frandson: Yeah. So people think of Faraday, they think of a very change where no frequencies going in and out of our static bags are 7 millimeters, so frequencies go in and out of them. So that’s the difference. But there’s a physics component that when you put a polarizing positive charge inside of it, it fairly back squash it to what bio initiative.org would consider safe levels and muscle testing. Applied kinesiology, would our body would feel safe levels that we can handle now what also happens so it dampens the signal strength of your cell phone to safe levels, your phone may or may not ring inside there, but what it also do is is it’s it does is it stops the data harvesting so it slows down the aggregation of all the information, they’re coming from you. That’s the drain on your battery. That’s why everyone’s battery dies so quickly because they are listening to everything. They’re aggregating every bit of your information every second of the day. They know all your biometrics now, if you’re giving him your retina scan, your voice, your face, your Palm imprint, I mean these. These are some of the most individual imprints of your body you don’t want to use for commerce so avoid using fingers, palm print, voice, Retina Face, imprint to get access to your phone, you don’t want that information. You don’t want to use it for commerce because they know your passcode, they know where you live, how fast you drive all this information. They’re just aggregating, sending it to AI to create this meta universe, so as much as I love technology is allowing us to connect where we probably one of because you’re more in Texas and I’m in California but this stuff is cool, we just have to develop proximity protocol with it and understand that it’s enhancing and certain times and then when you’re not using it and get it away from you. They’re already back. If you have to sleep with your phone on at night, make sure things inside the bag are tested and put in there, seal it. You’ll have the best night sleep, your phone will still ring and you won’t have the thing tapping on your shoulder all night long. Saying talk to me, talk to me. This is that it’s essentially, that’s what it does. It’s always looking for a signal.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is your phone safe if you put it on airplane mode and it’s on you? Is it safer? Is it still less signal?

Justin Frandson: Way better. Way better, because there’s not that wireless looking for that signal. So definitely get it. Get in airplane mode. The next step would be to save your battery because they’re still gonna aggregate through airplane mode. They’re always having these signals on these.Telecommunication companies, they want all your information. They’re beaconing stuff. So they’re always doing this called surveillance marketing. It’s why Apple’s a multibillion dollar company. It’s not an office selling devices. Yeah, they sell a lot of devices, but.It’s this marketing that they’re doing and listening to. They’re selling your information. That’s where they’re really making the substantial revenue from. So slow down this aggregation information actually on your biometrics and we’ll be able to stop this meta universe and really get back to connection with God and getting grounded by nature.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, with a lot of these tech companies you are the product, it’s good to keep your privacy and keep it yours. You know, have control over that. So I like having tools that put kind of these controls back in your hand. So Justin Fradson, really appreciate today’s podcast and we’ll put links down below for some of the some of the good products.That we talked about here today, and I’ll put links to the books that we chatted about in the show notes as well. Have a phenomenal day, Justin, great chatting with you.

Justin Frandson: Hey, thank you, Doctor J, man. Appreciate you.

References:

https://justinhealth.com/

https://www.EMFrocks.com

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/addressing-emf-5g-and-improving-your-athleticism-justin-frandson-podcast-379

Recommended products:

https://amzn.to/3B6wHnX

https://amzn.to/3gYtKis

https://amzn.to/3iv69WU

How to Retrain Your Brain, Amygdala and Heal From Trauma – Ashok Gupta | Podcast #378

Hey, guys! In this video, Dr. J and Ashok Gupta talk about brain reach training and nutritional component to better well-being. The brain is a highly active and malleable learning machine. So, we can develop strategies to improve well-being, like engaging in new and challenging activities.

Therefore, we can influence our brain development in positive or negative directions. The more we engage and challenge our minds and body, the longer our brains function at a high level. There are also many other benefits to encouraging neuroplastic change.

Moreover, for the brain to function correctly, it needs specific nutrients, making the food we eat vital to brain function. To learn more about improving your brain function in areas such as memory, attention, focus, and sleep while eliminating symptoms of anxiety and depression, make sure to subscribe, check out other videos, and feel to reach out for more info & consults!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 – Introduction
2:17 – Amygdala
13:05 – Repetition and Self-Love
16:22 – Breathing patterns
21:33 – Techniques
24:24 – Nutritional component
29:17 – Program Transition
32:10 – CBT vs Brain Reach Training

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys! It’s doctor Justin Marchegiani here. I’m really excited for today’s podcast. We’re going to be talking about how to retrain your brain, your amygdala, and heal from trauma with Ashok Gupta. Ashok, really great to have you today. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Ashok Gupta: Hi, I’m very well. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Lovely to be here.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome. Well, in the functional medicine world, dealing with a lot of chronically sick people that have hormone issues, gut issues, when you’re doing a really good history on someone, you see a commonality and that there’s a lot of underlying emotional trauma that usually can be a big stressor in that stress bucket, that’s holding back healing. And so I wanted to get you on the show because you’re an expert in this and you have a program that really works on getting to the root cause. So I wanted to just kind of first talk about kind of, you know, what you’re passionate about and kind of what your goal is with your program out of the gates.

Ashok Gupta: Uh, yeah, absolutely. So just to give a bit of background to myself, I actually suffered from a chronic illness many, many years ago when I was studying as an undergrad at Cambridge. So I actually suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome. And it was, you know, I was a young guy in my early 20s. My whole life had suddenly had this brick wall which is a chronic illness. And I’m seeing doctors and specialists and they’re telling me we don’t know what causes it. There’s no treatment for it. You may have this the rest of your life. Good luck. Essentially, you know, I remember my darkest moment thinking this is the worst thing ever. If I can just get myself better. If I and thousands of others who suffering from this. And I said if I can just heal this one person, just even myself. I would dedicate the rest of my life to helping people with this condition. That’s how serious I was about it. And that spawned a lifelong quest to understand these conditions and really treat them. So I did a lot of research into brain neurology, understanding these conditions, and eventually I came up with a hypothesis. I got myself completely, 100% better using ad hoc parade brain retraining that I created and also the clinic to treat others and have published other papers as well. So that’s my journey, so my real passion and vision here is that I believe that brain reach training as we refine it better for these conditions could be the future to treat chronic illness and I want that to be embedded in primary care and that is my mission.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s excellent. Now I know you talked about with your Gupta program, we’ll put links down below to so you guys can access this. I know there’s some kind of introductory you know offers on the on the website where you can kind of take a look and kind of dip your toe in and see if you like if you talk about Neuroplasticity, which is obviously, you know, rewiring the brain in the sense so these neurons can’t connect in different ways, but you also talk about the amygdala, which is kind of the part of the brain, it’s like an almond size and it’s all about processing fear and threatening stimuli. And so when someone is chronically ill, is that part of the brain over active where where you’re seeing everything as a threat and it’s kind of always on talk a little bit more about the amygdala, how that plays in to these chronic health concerns.

Ashok Gupta: Yeah, absolutely. So I always like to start this explanation with the biggest question of all. Why are we here? And I love that. Half an hour long conversation about the philosophy of that. But let’s say from a scientific perspective, we’re here because this brain, this body, this nervous system has been trained over millions of years to adapt to the environment, to survive and pass on the genes the next generation from. So from a Darwinian perspective, this system is designed to adapt, thrive, survive and pass on genes. And this has come from, you know, plants, single cell organisms, invertebrates, vertebrates, reptiles, mammals, human beings, all of that, that DNA. And that growth is all within our own DNA. And in fact, you know, we share around 50% of our DNA with a banana. Right.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:That’s crazy.

Ashok Gupta: Uh, you know, so our team actually contains a lot of the DNA of their animals as we’ve evolved to get to where we are so this system is designed to survive, so the number one priority of our bodies is not actually well-being or health.The number one priority is survival. If we take that as a starting point, the way that these illnesses start is that. Let’s take the example of COVID and long COVID, because we know millions are suffering from COVID and the after effect. So imagine we get collection normally, our bodies trigger the immune system, they’re able to fight off the virus, then the system resets, goes back to normal. We have our health back but in a small number of cases where actually 10 to 20% of cases. What happens is if our system is a little. Let’s say tired, fatigued or we are mentally, emotionally, physically overdoing it.Then the system is more vulnerable. So when the virus comes, our immune system thinks right. We’ve got to really fight hard because our systems would speak so it over response towards the virus and we know that for instance, people who passed away from COVID, they’re not passing away from the infection, they’re passing away from the cytokines storm or the over inflammation from the body itself and so what happens is in COVID we believe that the system over response we still managed to fight off the virus, but it’s left the legacy in the brain which is, let’s turn on the side of caution because maybe the virus is still here, so the brain continues to trigger immune system and the nervous system inappropriately. Creating this cascade of symptoms in the body. And we believe the culprits, as you’ve mentioned, are the amygdala and the insular. So the emitter that we believe is where the core conditioning lies in terms of triggering the nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system and then for the immune system. We know they’re from animals, this comes from the insular part of the brain, the insular part of the brain, is getting over triggered and overstimulated, so both these structures keep triggering this over different responses creating symptoms in the body. And the brain detects in a hypothetical way, all of these symptoms. The body which comes up to the brain, the brain says, Oh, maybe we’re still in danger. Yeah, just like in this diagram. Yeah, #9 we’re still in danger, then triggers at #4 and five. The chronic sympathetic arousal, the immune dysfunction HPA abnormalities, which then creates symptoms to #6 and then at #8, the brain because it’s hyper hypersensitive, magnifies these signals.They come back in the bank #9 and we are caught in this vicious cycle, and this is a vicious cycle of a lot of these different conditions and the only difference here which we certainly always are. Fibromyalgia is pain or chronic fatigue is immune oriented such as long COVID, but we also get sensitivity reactions to the external environment, so more disease, chemical sensitivities and muscle activation. This is where external triggers and food sensitivities. External triggers now create this cascade and this. Despite all this vicious cycle. And an analogy, I don’t know any doctor, you were a fan of Game of Thrones?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it’s a great show. Yep.

Ashok Gupta: So, let’s say an example of imagine you’re the the king of the castle, OK, and your Kingdom is suffering a drought and your army is the sympathetic nervous system and your Navy is immune system, so imagine the kingdoms you know weak because of the droughts and incoming army invading army with some dragons over the hill, right? So your immune system and nervous system your army and navy responds. They fight off this invading army. But because they’re weak, it takes them a lot longer to fight it off. Once they fought it off, they come to you as king of the castle and say, hey Doctor J, we only just managed to fight off that incoming invasion. We need all of the resources of the Kingdom, the castle now, channel us so all the wheat, all the corn, all the metal, everything comes to us, and you agree because it made sense. And so now all the sources of the body go to the Army and Navy. And then even if a child is walking over the hill. The Army, Navy respond as if it’s a full blown threat and trigger your machine using up all the resources and hence we get stuck in that alternative way being that lack of homeostasis? And so bring me training is saying actually, we need to persuade the general, the Army, Navy, that we are no longer in threat, no longer in danger to switch off these responses and get back to normal. So that, in a nutshell, is the hypothesis.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. I mean, it’s good to have an amygdala that’s making connections, that’s a processing threat. It’s like if there was this woods over here and bears would come out and eat, eat a human, you know, you there’s probably be natural inclination to have some fear and anxiety about being close to that because we already know there’s a threat that could take your life, so it’s good to have this level of fear perception. The problem with a lot of trauma today is it’s firing off like it would take your life, but it’s really maybe not that serious anymore. And we kind of have to it there. We need to have this rational discussion with our amygdala and our brain hit, this isn’t maybe as much of a threat and so obviously may not be, may not be able to do that from a conscious ability where we can just have that conversation. So what type of modalities are you incorporating to make that connection? Hey this is, this shouldn’t be the threat that it is. My amygdala is hyper responding. It’s like having an allergy response to danger in the air like it’s a virus. Well we shouldn’t be responding that way. So what type of modalities are you using or techniques within your program to kind of get that response to be more appropriate and realistic.

Ashok Gupta: Exactly. And as you say, traditionally these types of approaches have been applied to emotional reaction actions or trauma reactions, right? OK, so the emotional side, but how do we communicate with our immune system, right, it’s a very, very different approach and so what we’ve done over the last 20 years is develop a system and set of processes that actually communicate with these unconscious brain structures about physical health, yeah. And you might say, well, hang on this, you know, how on Earth can you do that? How can we kind of change our physiological responses? But, you know, as we know, the power of visualization is very, very powerful. So let’s take an example of a lemon. Right. So imagine I take a slice of lemon. And I placed it on your tongue. But you can’t bite into it yet. But it’s really it’s hanging really sour. Just on your tongue, you bite into that sour lemon. Just right. Imagine doing that. Imagine all the saliva starts coming up. Now imagine so you got saliva coming in your mouth, by the way?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yeah, that visualization. Yeah, for sure.

Ashok Gupta: Yeah. So isn’t that incredible that we’ve been able to create a physiological response just through the power of imagination, even though you know it’s not real consciously. You can bypass the conscious processes and imagination, visualization is one aspect. OK, that’s one aspect of this brain retraining. But there’s plenty of other processes. So there’s a seven step process where we get people to recognize these unconscious data signals. So then process them and they actually create a safety response to the brain. Say hey brain, we are safe. We are not in danger. You can switch off these. Uh.These immune responses and these defensive responses, and that uses a number of different techniques including self coaching, breathing, visualization and imagination and also you know, physical touch as well, so there’s a number of different processes and that supported through meditation and breathing as well.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s excellent. So, what’s the first step out of the gate? Right, we start out of the gate. What’s the first thing we’re going to do to kind of move the needle? Is it just breathing? Is it really just making sure we’re breathing to the nose? Uh, having a deeper breath. What’s the first step out of the gate?

Ashok Gupta: So out of the gate before our brain is ready to be retrained. As you say it becomes. Alright, so it’s a bit like the idea of until we were able to accept something first and become, we can no longer give if the brain’s not so flexible if we are stressed and anxious. So give the example of, if the husband and wife come home after today’s work and have an argument because they’re both stressed, that’s the worst time for them to have an argument. If they calm down, relax, etcetera, then they’re more likely to have more conducive conversation. So in the same way we calm our brains first through breathing and meditation, so they are supportive techniques, and then, we look at the brain retraining. That’s the second R. So the first R is relaxing. The second R is retraining the brain, and that’s where I’ve talked about these unique processes. And the third is reengaging with joy. And this is something that is often neglected in mainstream medicine, which is that we know that actually when people are unable to connect with things that uplift their spirit that bring them joy and happiness. Their immune system is bolstered. They actually are able to heal from a wide range of different conditions, so we teach people to recognize what can boost their immune system and reset it. Use this idea of reengaging with joy, which is I think it’s a missing piece of medicine.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. And then what type of I don’t like? NLP’s been out there for a while where they used a lot of visualizations and really focus on the pictures kind of in your brain, how much does visualization and just kind of the images that come within your brain, because a lot of times people have a fear. There’s almost always the image of that thing before that fear is felt. How do you start to change the images in that brain and maybe the self talk. A lot of times, most people wouldn’t be friends with the person if they’re self-talk was emanated from a friend in front of them. The amount of self-talk that’s so negative and so putting themselves down. If it was a friend then in real life they would never be friends with that person. How do you change the pictures and the voice inside the brain?

Ashok Gupta: So this is a great question, and the core of this is repetition and self love. So it’s a bit like imagining that self-talk is a precocious 7 or 8 year old child, right? And we want to kind of get really anxious about something. If you tell them one time, hey, this is nothing to worry about. They’re not going to listen. But with that love and that compassion and that action and that repetition of look, hey, we’re safe. There’s nothing to worry about if you can calm down. Through that process, you’re able to gradually get the brain to recognize we’re no longer in danger, and a representation is absolutely key and imagination and visualization is part of it, but not the only part of it. Any change in life involves awareness. We have to be aware first of all of what is that negative self-talk is. What does it look like? Let’s write it down. Let’s be very clear. What is creating this vicious cycle, that’s the first step, is awareness. And from that point onwards, and that is acceptance. So a lot of people have these conditions but don’t accept that they have this condition. They’re constantly fighting it, pushing against it. That’s tensing up against it. Resisting it, which then creates more anxiety, more turmoil. So the first step is awareness and the second step is acceptance, then the first step is this process of repetitive retraining of the brain again and again and again. And so the brain gets the message that we aren’t in danger and switches off these responses and that’s the core of how do we get people well?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good. So what’s the next step? So your program out of the gates, what, 28 days?

Ashok Gupta: Yes. So we offer a 28 day free trial where people can access some of the videos, some of the audio. And get a flavor of the program and see if it’s right for them. So that’s the first starting point, we’d love people to experience the free stuff that we’ve got lots of videos and if they choose to take the full program then it is what we call a six month program. Now, why do we say six months? Because that seems like a long time. Actually many people retrain within weeks and months. But we don’t want people to become complacent because I’m still a doctor J. You’ve seen in your practice, as well that people get well from some kind of protocol, but then as soon as a new stress comes into their lives, wow, all the symptoms come back again. Yep. So we teach people not only to get well, but to stay well, to recognize our stress triggers, to recognize what brings back these symptoms and to control that and to you know, uh, recognize that for the rest of their lives when people stay well. We call it a six month program because we want people to get so deeply into retraining that it becomes part of their lives and so that they can maintain that health for the rest of their lives.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. And what do you find? I mean, obviously the goal was to try to activate some of the parasympathetic nervous system response, right? If that amygdala is overactive, then we’re in that sympathetic fight or flight that can shut down digestion enzymes, hydrochloric acid can cause cortisol and adrenaline fluctuations that can cause more stress, the more you dump out your electrolytes, your potassium, magnesium that causes the heart to go go faster so you can see this downward cycle with this sympathetic nervous system response with all the different hormonal systems, digestive system, what’s the when you talk, when you do breathing, right? What’s the type of breath pattern that you find to be the most effective that you incorporate?

Ashok Gupta: Right, so there are several. The first is deep diaphragmatic breathing during the 4-4-6-2 pattern. So that’s when people put their yeah, one hand on the stomach, one hand on the chest. Many of us are breathing very shallow from the chest, and we know that, parasympathetic breathing or from the belly, the belly is going out and in as we breathe. And so this is actually a technique that’s taught in the art of living cause, art of living breathing, which is, if you’ve heard about it, a very powerful breathing technique. Yeah, part of their breathing technique is to actually breathe in for four. Hold for four. Breathe out for six and hold for two. All through the nose, all through the nose. So we know that it actually comes in and out through the nose. What that’s able to do is a combat nervous system has been used for millennia. And another technique is alternate nostril breathing as well. So you breathe it in through one nostril, breathe out through the other nostril, then in through that nostril out through the other one. So that’s another very well known breathing technique called alternate nostril breathing. In Sanskrit it’s called 90 shorthand.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And these are breathing in and out to the same and then switch in and out then switch.

Ashok Gupta: Yeah. So. So now when you do that, you’re breathing in from through what? And breathing out through the other. Oh, okay, they’re breathing in through that one. And then breathing out through the other. And then breathing in through that. And then breathing out.Yeah, yeah.And what people find is gradually as they control the breathing, but not control in an anxious way, but just observe it great breathing becomes slower and deeper. Easing that process is balancing the left and right hemispheres of the brain. That’s one of the roles of alternate nostril breathing. And so that’s kind with regular meditation as the starting point. What that is able to do is to tell the brain, hey, just calm everything down at the generalized level and then we’ll be ready to retrain those specific neurons that have got caught in this vicious loop.To indicate that we’re in danger. And so that is the, you know, a very complementary approach. And I think what happens is in modern medicine we have this reductionist philosophy of OK, nothing to do is test breathing techniques over here and see what impact they have. And now going to test meditation techniques over here in a separate randomized controlled trial. That actually is the cumulative effect of all of these things together, which is able to persuade the brain to switch off these dangerous purposes. So, that is the most important thing is to have all of these things operating at the same time.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s excellent. That’s very cool. So I like the breathing aspect, and the goal of that is to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. What should your brain be focusing on to just be focusing on the breath? When do you start to incorporate the trauma or whatever that memory is that’s triggering you? I don’t know. Let’s say you got in the car accident. Every time you jump in the car, you’re reliving that trauma. When do you start bringing those pictures or that experience into work?

Ashok Gupta: So first of all the program is not necessarily a trauma relief program, yeah although people use it for that and they do find trauma, and as you say, the purpose of the way that we teach breathing and meditation is that yes, images will come up as you meditate. Some of them might be frightening. People sometimes spontaneously burst into tears as they’re experiencing these techniques. And the most important thing is not to get caught up in any imagery or any emotions, just to observe it. So we’re not pushing away any of it, and we’re also not trying to obsess about it. We are staying calm and centered as we observe with a curious mind the images and the negative things that may come up. And that is one way and one technique of releasing trauma is to simply observe with a neutral friendly mind. Allow it to just come up with that. Trying to pick it apart or try to analyze or understand it. And what we say is that actually people can heal from chronic illness without actually having to heal their trauma. This is so important because I think this is a missed thought sometimes. For most people, they had trauma in their lives, but they didn’t have chronic illness that layered on top. So the best thing is to remove that layer of chronic illness and then deal with the underlying trauma. At the same time, there’s no fixed up, you know, dogma here. Of course, if people want to address their underlying trauma at the same time, that’s absolutely fine. And some people do. Alternately, Uh, treating and healing the chronic illness first we find is most effective because if you have a chronic illness and you’re trying to overcome trauma at the same time, that’s a lot to actually process and and and deal with.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. And so you get the breathing stuff going on. You’re really working on self love, right, that’s important. And do you incorporate any tapping or eye boob and stuff? I know there’s a lot of big techniques like EFT or EMDR or different things. Do you incorporate those modalities in your program?

Ashok Gupta: We have another technique called the accelerator process, which is something that we’ve created and that does not involve tapping necessarily. But a lot of our coaches trained in EFT and other modalities. So we give a core set of techniques to the patients and if they want tapping, if they want some of these other things and many of our coaches are trained in those modalities as well. So that’s if people need one-on-one support. So our program is an online program in which people can go through it at their own time at their own pace and there’s extra support from coaches as required.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. What other modalities? We’re going to put links down below, so if anyone listening wants to try the 28 day course, that’s going to be an option down below in the links as well as the whole 6 month program. If you feel like you’re getting success and you want to continue with that good consistency, we’ll put links down below. What’s another good thing for listeners at home to start to incorporate, to start improving their mental health and calm down that amygdala response, that fear response?

Ashok Gupta: So I think regular meditation first of all is incredibly important and then secondly, I missed the core point of retraining is just awareness of the noise. Yeah, to regularly check your stuff. And that’s a mindfulness technique, say, to think about what you’re thinking about. Ah, how interesting. I’m thinking about that. And to actually write these things down to have what we call a worry diary. Yeah, not that we want to reinforce it, but kind of getting stuff out of your head and onto this worry diary, almost like a journaling type process. So what kind of thoughts have I had today? Let me get it out of my head in general. OK, I’m worried about this. I’m thinking about this, I’m thinking about this. Just that process in of itself is amazingly therapeutic and healing because you’re no longer got this churning going on. You’ve exhausted it. Get out of your system. And with journaling then you recognize all of these patterns and then say what do I choose to substitute these patterns where this churning thoughts and emotions. What I choose to kind of say, what we call the love messages, what loving messages do I choose to give back to my unconscious, to oppose or heal these kinds of patterns that are going on? I think that’s something that we can all do in the general public and what we’re doing in brain retraining with a seven step process that we have.That’s more when the patterns are extreme. When we’ve got such an extreme, almost traumatic pattern that actually self-talk isn’t going to shift it, we actually need something really powerful to train the brain. Not just rethinking but training the brain out to these responses, and that is that deep work, that deep repetition of these neuroplasticity techniques.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s very good, excellent. Now when I work with patients, you know, I look at physical health, right, which could be structure of the body, injuries under exercise over exercise, the chemical help which is important, that plays a big role, diet, nutrition, sleep, hydration.Um, gut health. Of course. If your nutritional health is poor, your physical health is poor and you’re inflamed, you’re sore, your diet is junky, you’re not sleeping, that obviously spills into your emotional health. I mean, try dealing with your taxes after you haven’t slept for a night. Emotionally, you’re going to be a wreck. How much do you plug in the nutritional component or the chemical stressors, how much do you try to plug that in to also help the emotional health?

Ashok Gupta: Yeah, definitely. We’re a holistic approach, absolutely. So we kind of focus on the brain retraining but we say that as you say, if you have all of these things not working in your life then it’s not going to make the difference. So we have something called the anti-inflammatory diet, but we call it the 80% diet because some people go on this very strict diet and get even more stressed by having to stick to this very strict regime. And so we have the anti-inflammatory diet then we have natural anti inflammatories. So turmeric, ginger, all those, Umm and so plenty of supplements. And then the things that generally are missing in diets where people have over stressed and so. So that’s things like vitamin D, that’s magnesium, that’s all of those types of natural supplements, the omegas, all of these things we know are generally good for our health. And then so this anti-inflammatory diet and supplements and there’s also the sleep hygiene. So getting the sleep hygiene right and when we’re overstimulated and over stressed then our sleep is one of the first things that gets compromised and regular meditation, regular breathing has been shown to improve our sleep rhythms. So that’s part of it. And then also, what we do in those last two or three.Hours before you go to sleep is incredibly important. And so we look at, you know, the things that people can do that have been shown to deep sleep and lengthen sleep as well, and then also the importance of getting out into nature. Nature is incredibly healing, and so walking in nature. And the importance actually of UV rays and the importance of being sunlight, especially during, you know, the summer months, it’s fine, but in the winter months, how difficult it is and how people feel worse during the winter months simply because two things, number one, you know, getting exposure to daylight at the right times. And then secondly, their physical body is not absorbing the UV rays and therefore not producing vitamin D but also all of the other aspects of sunlight that are incredibly important for our bodies. And so we look at how people can can, you know.Be the best during the summer, at the winter months as well. So those kinds of things are definitely incorporated. But ultimately what we find is when people have come to us, they’ve already been down these avenues. So they’ve been to a nutritionist, they’ve been to dietitians, they generally have been on top of their diet.They’re trying to sleep as well as they can, right? Peace. Their brain is overstimulated no matter what they do. How can they focus on that and retrain that and and sometimes we find people retrain their brains and then they’ve spent thousands on supplements. And they can just stop all the supplements and it makes no difference, right, because the supplements are there, important when our system is overstimulated, but once it’s reset itself and we’re calm.That actually, our bodies don’t need so much of this supplementation. It’s just very natural.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. Well, anything else I Ashok you want to share with the listeners that you think would be powerful or something else they could be working on incorporating?

Ashok Gupta: Uh, yes. I think one of the most important pieces of advice that gives people is there can be very well meaning support groups and doctors and whatever who have kind of put it kind of negative approach, which is hey, there’s no cure for this, there’s nothing that they can help these conditions and you know you’re on your own and and don’t believe it that people get better. So, sometimes we have people getting better through brain retraining and they’ll go back on these forums. And people will say, oh, well, you didn’t have the condition in the first place. That’s the only way you guys got that. And the hope that I want to give to people is that whether it’s through our program or through other modalities, people do heal from these chronic conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, mold illness and long COVID. People do heal. People do get better. So never give up on the ability of your body to heal and the great news is I believe there is nothing actually fundamentally wrong with the body in that there’s not organic damage in the longer term. That’s what we’ve certainly noticed. It’s a functional issue whether the body and the brain itself is over stimulating its own systems, creating a vicious cycle, which is keeping the body in this altered state. But if you fix that, the body can actually go back to health. And that’s the hope that I want to give to people. Don’t think that my body is weak. It can never get better. Once you get the right key to the right and the right lock, you can unlock your health. Unlock the healing potential of your body.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. I love that now. I mean it’s really interesting because you know, you see conventional psychiatry with a lot of people that have trauma, you know, for the most part they’re going to recommend some kind of an SSRI or antipsychotic or benzodiazepine, which is really just dampening or numbing.The body’s response to that, and a lot of times that brain response is there for a reason, and just numbing it out tends to over time, that problem tends to get worse because you’re just ignoring the reason why it’s there. How do you work with patients that are already on conventional medicines? That are just kind of dampening and covering up the issue versus getting to the root. How do you make that transition?

Ashok Gupta: It’s a huge scandal. First of all, you know, we have many people come to us, we’ve been on benzos and have benzo withdrawal, SSRI’s and it’s a huge scandal because these things even when they’re usually prescribed are supposed to be for a few weeks at a time. They’re not supposed to really. Yeah, long term dependency. And then when that dependency is there, when people try to come off these medications, they feel even worse than they did when they first started. So it’s kind of licensed drug dealing to an extent. Now of course if anyone’s listening, I don’t want anyone to stop the medications. Of course you do that in the auspices of your doctor or psychiatrist. But actually what we do is say keep your medication as safe at the moment, work with brain retraining, get your system calm and stronger. And only then very slowly come off the drugs in association with your doctor. That’s incredibly important because some people get super excited and then suddenly have cold Turkey withdrawal and it can actually cause more problems. So they need to come off these drugs very, very slowly. And so we actually have in benzo forums, you know, many people using our program to come off benzos, so they’re slowly coming off benzos. What’s using our program to calm the nervous system and retrain any negative patterns that are coming from it. And once again, this dampening that you’ve described, when the brain is dampened down, it over responds and says, hey, I’m trying to alert you to danger, but you’re dampening down.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, exactly.

Ashok Gupta: Responses from the immediate to keep warning you. So emotions are warnings that either an emotion hasn’t been resolved, or there’s an attitude that we’re taking to life which is non conducive, or a belief system which is non conducive. And the problem with modern psychiatry is that it’s following the same reductionist medical model of come to see me, you’ve got 10 minutes with me, let me figure out what’s going on, and let me prescribe you drugs. But that model is not even fit for purpose for modern medicine and medical conditions, never mind psychiatric and emotional conditions. You know, it’s even worse for that. And so actually, you know, recognizing that there’s nothing wrong here, when we experience those types of extreme emotions, it actually just requires a lot more talking therapies and neuroplasticity approaches to help us understand the deeper messages of these conditions.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes a lot of sense. Now, what if we kind of take the, you know, connection with modern day psychology where it’s kind of cognitive behavioral techniques and talk therapy. Why is that not enough sometimes? People can be in therapy for years and years and years and it’s like they haven’t even gotten over it. Obviously it’s good to have communication and it’s good to have dialogue, it’s good to talk about the issues, but why is that not enough all the way?

Ashok Gupta: Now CBT is very effective at certain things such as mild to moderate depression. It’s shown to be effective, certainly anxiety. It can be useful, but the issue is the difference between CBT and brain retraining or neuroplasticity approaches. First of all, when people are going through CBT, they are rewiring their brains as well. So let’s be very clear. You know, any therapy that we’re taking ultimately is rewiring range change or shift that we’re making. But we often find that some, you know, CBT is like taking a fire extinguisher to a house fire, right? It can certainly help, but in certain instances if the house fire is very very powerful and huge. It actually requires, you know, the fire truck to turn up and actually deal with the blaze.Yeah. And so.The difference between CBT and some of these neuroplasticity brain retraining approaches is the intensity and the repetition of it. So, you know, imagine learning to drive a car, right? So learning to drive a car. Imagine on the first lesson, your first day CBT like thinking, OK, I’m now aware of my negative patterns about learning to drive, and I’m gonna be aware of them and shift some more positive belief systems. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Let me see what’s blocking me. But that isn’t going to train your brain to learn how to drive. But neuroplasticity is saying, right? Let me practice pressing the gas using the gear stickers, you guys call it, you know, moving the steering wheel. And we’re training that into our nervous system through repetition again and again and again and again until it becomes automatic and our brain gets it right. I now know how to drive a car. Yeah. So that’s how it’s different to CBT. CBT could certainly do that, but it would take a lot longer. But this is about actually training the brain repeatedly, intensively to get the message.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s very good. And what kind of movement do you incorporate with your program? Is it just something simple like, hey, just get out and walk it, get out in nature, breathe, get some sun or do you recommend any other specific types of movements like resistance or interval training, how does the exercise component work?

Ashok Gupta: For many of our patients, they have to pace themselves very carefully because they’ve got intense amounts of fatigue. And so initially we’re asking them, some of them are bed bound, so we say initially, gentle stretching is enough, so that might be some Tai Chi and yoga. So as long as you’re moving and stretching the body, people can manage more than walking in nature. So that can be you know there’s two types shown to be effective. So forests and fields and countryside, Yep, or near the ocean they can be very therapeutic. So walking in nature and then as people can get more energy then it might be some gentle, very gentle cardio because what we’re aiming to do is use up the stress hormones that have been triggered, the cortisol and adrenaline or adrenalin. So and certainly resistance training is fine as well but it’s that gentle cardio, mild to moderate cardio which is using up the stress hormones and calming the whole system down. Which we find most effective. And then if people are back to full health, then certainly things like interval training, cardio, resistance training, all the good stuff that we know that people can do. That’s all great stuff to keep the nervous system calm and we know that with the brain as well physical exercise is brilliant at increasing resilience so mental and emotional resilience increases when we have physical resilience which is why all of these things are completely linked together.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you really made a good point about the stress hormones because people don’t realize but that stress hormone response is really about mobilizing glucose and energy reserves so you can fight and flee. The problem is, most people aren’t fighting and fleeing from something where they need that additional fuel for their muscles. So you have all this adrenaline and cortisol that’s mobilized all this glucose, but then you’re not using it and that glucose tends to start getting stored back away as fat a lot of times. That’s why the more stressed you get, the more you could start storing fat because it’s like you’re it’s like you’re eating a bunch of carbohydrate and sugar and you’re not using the fuel and so getting a little bit of walking or movement in there starts to take all that stress hormone and glucose and start to burn it up a little bit so you not storing it as fat. So that makes a lot of sense to me.

Ashok Gupta: Absolutely, and not only that. There’s the feedback loop between the body and the amygdala. The periodontal group, which is the brain, says I’m in danger, triggers these responses, but also gets feedback from the body as to whether we’re in danger. This is the kind of kinesthetic response. And so if the brain detects the muscles are tense, right? We’re physically feeling the effects of that anxiety, it interprets that as a reinforcement that we’re in danger and therefore creates more danger response, which is why when you physically feel anxious you get anxious about feeling anxious, you get stressed about feeling anxious and that’s that secondary loop that occurs. And in fact for us chronic anxiety is that is partly as a result of the anxiety about the anxiety we don’t like. We don’t like the sensations, the physical sensations and the emotional sensations of anxiety itself and therefore physical movement. Physical activity really stops the feedback loop and is able to calm the whole nervous system down and trigger also the parasympathetic nervous system. So we know that in physical exercise we’re triggering the sympathetic system to tighten up the muscles and get the muscles moving and then afterwards the system ratchets down and enjoys a period of parasympathetic response. And you know, people think I was, do I have to go to the gym and have to do a hard workout, brisk walking in nature, which I think most of us, if not all of us can do, has been shown to be highly therapeutic. So 30 to 40 minutes of brisk walking in your local park, in the forest is supposed to be the best, you know, near the ocean or in the ocean. That can be incredibly beneficial for your overall health.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it? Excellent, Ashok. I really appreciate you being on today’s show. We’ll put a link down below justinhealth.com/gupta. G-U-P-T- A. We’ll put it down below so you guys can access the 28 day course. By the way, what’s the time commitment to start the course? Is it 20 minutes an hour a day? What’s the initial commitment?

Ashok Gupta: So some of these videos are five or 10 minutes, so we don’t want to, right? So it’s like taking off 10 to 20 minutes a day watching your video. We give you a couple of free meditations that you can watch as well and that initial set of content is really for you to empathize in terms of does this really resonate with me? Is this my experience? And if so, then you can obviously go to the full program and then start the retraining process.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very good. A shock. Anything else you want to leave the listeners with?

Ashok Gupta: Uh, yeah. As I said, just believe in your, in the ability of your body to heal. It will heal, it can heal and we have that healing ability within us and also to recognize that whatever you’re experiencing, whatever physical assessments you’ve had in terms of someone saying you’ve got high viral titers or you know this particular enzyme is out of whack, those physical things are downstream. Yeah. And you will have those physical abnormalities in your body. But let’s go upstream, let’s go to the source. And we believe that a source of a lot of our conditions is actually in the brain. Even our gut health, I believe, is ultimately decided by our brain and the interaction between our gut and our brain. Fix this up here and all the downstream things will naturally take care of themselves.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it. Very good. Yeah. When someone says your issues are incurable, that just means the cure is within. So I really appreciate that Ashok. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

References:

https://justinhealth.com/

https://justinhealth.com/gupta

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/how-to-retrain-your-brain-amygdala-and-heal-from-trauma-ashok-gupta-podcast-378

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How to Deal With Stress and Feeling Overwhelmed? | Podcast #376

Connections between the brain and gut abound, which can be seen in the dysfunctions that often unite them. Many neurological and mood disorders often have enteric manifestations, GI disorders may present with neurological and psychiatric symptoms, and psychological stress may adversely impact microbiome balance and GI function.

Dr. J and Evan Brand discuss that consideration of the bidirectional relationship of the gut-brain axis will inform individual treatment strategies. Managing external stress-related factors while optimizing gut health may jointly address some chronic health conditions. Specifically, personalized therapeutic strategies that combine stress transformation approaches with gut health interventions, such as functional testing, nutrition, and natural supplements, may help to optimize gut function and bolster related body systems. Learn more about supporting the microbiome and its effect on overall health when you subscribe to this channel!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 – Introduction
0:46 – Stress
6:41 – Brain Chemistry
7:51 – Water Filtration and Organic Foods
13:56 – Cortisol Patterns
23:13 – Stress and Hormones
30:00 – Testing and Functional Strategies

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s doctor J here in the house with Evan Brand. Really excited. We are back doing our live podcast. Really excited to be back in the saddle. Evan, how we doing, man? What’s going on?

Evan Brand: Oh, doing really well. I’m excited to talk about stress. My wife, she woke up this morning.Which is like my jaws tight was like grinding my teeth last night and maybe you need to talk about that today. So I thought, OK, everyone is stressed, there’s a lot on everyone’s plate, but it’s really how you respond to it that really determines whether it makes you and you become someone and something and you get success out of your stress. Or do you just get frazzled and burned out and you resort to alcohol and tobacco and other addictions, chocolate and wine and whatever else to cope with that? And I think there’s a lot healthier coping mechanisms or stress for burnout, for feelings of overwhelm. And you and I have done this for years clinically. We’ve helped people through the toughest of cases. You and I have taken the huge load on our shoulders of, you know, trying to be the helper, be the healer with someone that’s struggling. And that’s a lot, that’s a heavy toll on us. So there’s things that you and I do personally. And then there’s things that you and I do clinically and then we’ve got some studies to kind of verify you know, what we’re seeing.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% So when I look at stress.You have the actual stress issue, like whatever that stress issue is, right? And so feeling anxious or feeling stressed about an issue is a good thing, right? Part of the reason that is there is to get you motivated to get off your butt to solve the problem. So I always look at the issue and I’m like. Right. Why do I feel stressed? Usually there’s you haven’t closed the loop yet. I call it closing the loops. Problem, right? You take action to resolve the problem, the problem goes away. That’s the closed loop, right? And so you have a lot of people with open loops. Meaning they have a problem out there and they just haven’t even figured out the solution. So when it comes to being healthy and having good neurotransmitters, good adrenal function, good healthy diet and lifestyle habits, good anti-inflammatory type of environment, nutrient dense foods coming in. Good nutrition, your ability to process one that stressor when it hits you, it’s not gonna hit you as hard. It’s not gonna knock you off your pedestal to you’re going to be able to adapt and you’re going to be able to think clearly and troubleshoot whatever the issue is. And so I always look at a problem. I said OK, got it, how do I close the loop on that, what’s the action item to execute? That so I always just kind of get clear, have a list. What are the things I can do and set in motion to resolve the issue. I think it’s really important if you just dust it away. The healthiest adrenal glands eventually is gonna eat away at you because you haven’t closed the loop. So always think about closing the loop on your issues #2 get healthier so these things don’t bug you as much, right? If you have good levels of B6, good levels of magnesium, you’re sleeping adequately, you have good blood sugar stability, Good amino acids. It’s gonna allow you to be able to process it. You’re not gonna activate that fight or flight part of your nervous system. That shuts down the frontal cortex and activates the reptilian brain stem part of the brain that’s all about fight or flee, fight or flee, fight or flee. And so the more you can keep this kind of reptilian brain from being activated, and then you can use that frontal cortex, you’ll be able to sit back, become troubleshoot the issue and close the loop.

Evan Brand: And this is hard if you’ve got toxins, if you’ve got lyme, different infections. I mean we’ve seen in the literature that certain infections and toxins. Basically, decrease the blood flow to that front part of the brain. So you become a monkey. You do become primitive as you mentioned. This reptile brain kicks in and you can’t make good decisions and you certainly can’t comprehend the future. You get stuck living in the day, the hour, the minute with that stress and when you say close the loop, I think that resonates for a lot of people, but many people are afraid to close the loop because this means that they have to end a friendship that’s toxic. They have to end a marriage that’s failing. They have to, you know, fire someone that they don’t like. They have to quit their job because they have a bad boss. So.You know, closing the loop sounds so simple, but this could be a huge roadblock. You know, for people, and I’ve seen it, where you’ve got a woman eating perfectly. She’s doing amazing with her supplements. But for example, here’s the case study. She’s in an open relationship and she’s miserable and she hates it. And she’s jealous and her husband’s with these other women and she doesn’t want him to be. And so there’s issues there. I don’t freaking care how much ashwagandha this lady pops. She’s not going to supplement out of this situation. That’s intense. And there is a place for closing the loop. And you can’t supplement your way out of a situation like that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. In relationship, it’s always good to have healthy boundaries, right? It’s like good fences make good neighbors, right? Having good emotional boundaries and how were relationship operates, right? If your families asking 10 times of you, then, then you, then ten times of you, then they help you on the backside, right, this kind of Arctic give and take that. So you always have to have clear boundaries. I think that’s a really, really important one. There’s an awesome book out there. Um, by Henry Cloud called boundaries. That’s a really good woman. I see patients in relationships. They may not even be a relationship with their spouse. It could be a relationship with family or friends where they’re just kind of a parasitic element of people asking many multiples from that person. Then that person’s providing back and there should always be a give and take. Right. I always tell patients like when you play catch, I throw the ball, you throw the ball, right. Emotionally, there’s a give and a take and it’s back and forth and it’s equal. When I start throwing the ball, you don’t throw it back. I run back over, get the ball, come back, throw it again, that, that, that’s, that’s you know very depleting, right? You missed the give and take, and so you gotta make sure your good, healthy boundaries are there. Also, with relationships, it’s always better to try to restructure. Kind of reboundify the relationship, then just exit. I think exiting a lot of relationships is just, uh, it’s an easy way out. It’s, you know, you just go somewhere and end your and go on to your life. I think it’s always better to see if you can repair or give people an opportunity to repair and get on the same page and see what happens from there. But either way, right, you have all these emotional issues. Get healthy. If you’re afraid to deal with these issues right now, put them on the back burner. No, you have to deal with them. Adjust your expectations of healing and try to get healthier so then you have better energy, better focused, better calmness to address whatever the problem is.

Evan Brand: This is great advice and it’s uncomfortable and there are situations that are going to be intense, but I would encourage you just to go face first with those now if you have trouble making eye contact with these people. Some of that’s related to brain chemistry too. I see a lot of people that when they get in a stressful situation.They just shut down. They look down, they look away. They can’t face the person and therefore they can’t fully express themselves. That’s usually tied into low GABA, and so we can’t measure GABA on the organic acids. But we can measure serotonin, we can measure dopamine, we can measure endorphins. So before you and I go into a few of these studies and solutions, you know, let’s just give a little back story on some of this. And so, you know, when I had gut infections down in Texas, I had tons of anxiety. It wasn’t me, it was not my personality. It was the gut bugs. And when we looked in my brain chemistry, my serotonin was low. My dopamine was low. I had issues to fully get myself motivated. I still push through, but I didn’t wake up necessarily with that spark like I wanted, and so I know personally and you and I have seen it 1000 plus times clinically the low brain chemistry problem, it’s epidemic and it’s only gotten worse even in the last 10 years. You and I have been looking at these labs.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. And so again, there are some people that have been on board here with us for years listening and they’re super advanced. And so just kind of out of the gate, we’re going to just give a brief overview of foundational things. OK. So first thing out of the gate is an appointment my phone because I just changed my whole house water filtration here, and Evan and I were talking about it earlier today. So check this out. I’m gonna hold up my phone. So you can see here.The clean one on the left, that’s a brand new filter. And that all the way up to the webcam.

Evan Brand: We can hardly see. Go closer. Yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So the one on the left, right, the white one. That’s the new one.That’s the one that was in there for the last three months. I mean that is just nasty, dirty and gross that again that sense. That’s a post filter. So it went through a massive pre filter, went through the huge carbon based filter and then went through that afterwards. And it was dirty. It is nasty. I actually have it over on my on my bar countertop over there. So pretty pretty freaking gross. So, what does that mean? It means, prioritize good clean filtered water. If you don’t have a high water filter water filter system, we’ll put some links down below to the ones that we personally use, but in general, at least get a good quality glass water Topo Chico, Cheryl Steiner, a Perrier, a mountain valley one out of a good glass model was gonna be excellent during the day and then I definitely recommend getting a whole house water filter once you’re in a in a place where you can do it. Some people may be in an apartment, then maybe a temporary housing. You can always get an under the counter filter. There are even some temporary ones that actually go on top but still filter water out pretty well. But that’s pretty nasty. And so 70% of your body’s water in regards to all the liquids. So you need good clean filtered water without all the junky chemicals. Maybe drugs, maybe pesticide runoff? Bull run off, who knows. So the first thing is kind of get your water right. Comments there, Evan?

Evan Brand: Yeah, I mean, this is important because when you’re stressed, you’re gonna be dehydrated. You’re burning through everything. You’re burning through hydration, you’re burning through B vitamins. You and are looking at papers on B vitamins and magnesium for helping with stress. So we know that when you’re burning the candle, and most people in the modern world are.You need good water and the tap water. You can look up EWG and put in your zip code. It’s scary. I mean, almost every single city has insane high levels of trihalomethanes which are carcinogenic as you mentioned pesticide residue, pharmaceutical drugs like heart medications, beta blockers, anti anxiety, antidepressant medications. You know what’s scary? There are studies now being done on bays, some of these inland bodies of water. And there was one down, I think it was in Florida near Miami. Biscayne Bay is one of these most famous bays. They have an issue now where all of the fish. I’ll see if I can pull it up.They now have drugs in them. And it’s because of the runoff from people. So let me pull this up because this is.This is pretty crazy. This was, this actually came out over the summer this year. And I think it’s pretty shocking and most people don’t have a clue.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, there was that famous study on atrazine up at UC Berkeley showing the frogs were essentially having reproductive organ issues like a major. I think they were almost becoming like asexual and their sex organs were like switching some kind of weird dynamic what’s happening. Based on the hormone, like disrupting compounds in these pesticides. And that was atrazine.

Evan Brand: Did you, did this pull up my screen here? Oh yeah, the screen share, I’m going to share with you.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Go ahead.

Evan Brand: Alright, yeah. So here it is. Pharmaceutical drugs showing up in fish from South Florida waters. Yeah, so it’s Biscayne Bay and I know you’ve got 2.5 million Miami residents and a lot of those people are on pharmaceutical drugs and then they’re peeing that out and then some of that runoff is ending up in the water supply and then that runs off into the Bay and then the fish then accumulate those drugs. So they did a three-year study.They found the Valium. They found antibiotics. They found blood pressure medication in the blood and tissue of bone fish. One fish showed 17 different drugs. So here you are thinking you’re getting your fish clean. I’m gonna eat fresh fish. It’s like well. You know you’re looking at antidepressant treatment, medication, narcotics, pain relievers. That’s insane. Now they’re saying good news is that this is a catch and release species. But, what about the other fish that people are eating? So move. I don’t know. Just tuna fish.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So I mean, getting your water clean, getting your food quality clean, organic food. Here’s the atrazine study. And they were talking about it here at UC Berkeley Press release back in 2002. But it was April 16th in the National Academy of Sciences, UC Berkeley, essentially what happened here, the frogs were developing, they were becoming hermaphrodite. They were heading both sex organs. So you could see testes here, ovaries, ovaries, and you could see abnormal gonads and male exposure to this type of frog.The frogs have become hermaphrodites. Both male and female due to the hormonal exposure. So you can see because the atrazine environment basically an uncontrolled experiment this would be no atrazine free environment talking about because herbicides been used for 40 years of 80 countries. It’s effect on sexual development and male frogs could be one of many factors in the global decline of amphibians. So crazy, right? Now we’re talking about lowest levels of 0.1 part per billion. So this is real. So that’s why I’m saying out of the gate, easiest thing out of the gate. Clean water, good water filter, organic food, organic food. And then outside of that, right then we could talk about blood sugar, stability, at least a pound worth of protein at every meal. I think it’s a really good making sure you have good fats that aren’t all pufa-based fats. Seed, nut oil based fats, refined vegetable oils, you know keeping it good healthy saturated fats, coconut oil, avocado, olive, you know cold press. You know most of your good quality fats coming from more stable.Had accelerated fat sources. This is great. And then after that you just adjust the carbs for your activity level and kind of your metabolic type, meaning do you need to lose weight? Are you kind of a skinnier person? Are you really active right? The more active and the more at an optimal weight you are, the more carbohydrates you can handle. So you got to adjust it. It’s not a one-size-fits-all on that.

Evan Brand: Let’s transition. Talk about cortisol. Yeah. This is important for stress. When people think stress, most people think cortisol and you and I’ve run so many of these, probably more than anybody, I pulled up my screen. If you want to pull it up. This is a Dutch panel. That you and I run on almost everyone in regards to hormonal health and what you’re looking for is really the health of the cortisol pattern. So you can see here this particular female, she was absolutely exhausted. You could see for people on audio, you’re missing out, but you could go back to. Uh Justin Health YouTube channel and you can watch this video if you’re listening on the audio and you want to see the the the some of the screen shares. But you want to basically charge your smartphone battery first thing in the morning, get a full charge and that full charge last throughout the day, but in this case this woman, her cortisol pattern was completely shut. She was below range the entire day except for night time. She perked up just a little bit, and that could have been like maybe she was on her phone, she was watching a horror movie or a scary TV show or something an artificially boosted her cortisol. But this is the real issues. So no matter how clean your water is, if your cortisol pattern looks like this, you’re gonna be absolutely exhausted and you were gonna deal with stress terribly. You’re not going to deal with stress. How many people are you seeing like this now versus maybe 5 Years ago, do you feel like it’s becoming more common or no?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s always tough because we’re, I’m seeing a large percent of the population that are have chronic health issues, right. So I’m always gonna get that, that slice that’s going to be significant. But yeah this type of pattern is, is a big deal, right, because not only is this a sign of you being chronically stressed and depleted, but this is a reverse cortisol rhythm, so you’re gonna be tired during the day and it’s gonna be harder for you to relax at night and recharge. So it makes it really difficult to get that good regenerative sleep wake cycle going. And so these are the people that have.Hard time sleeping at night and getting and reestablishing those good healthy lifestyle patterns that should be in place. That’s what makes it really tough. One thing if you’re just tired, but you can work on getting sleep and and recharging if we can’t. And then also this person, I guarantee you there’s there’s stress handling capacities gonna be at Max, so they’re just gonna like flip out on their kids, flip out on their friends at the simplest thing, or they’ll just be an overwhelmed and they’ll just be in flight constantly ignoring and sweeping all their problems under the rug because they jerked their capacity so low.

Evan Brand: Yeah, and I know this particular female here was incredibly histamine intolerant. Someone in the comments said, let’s talk about histamine. So there is a component to that. And in her case, she was sensitive to everything, chemicals, fragrances, EMF food. So this was a, you know a pretty sick middle-aged woman, but I mean everything was completely crashed here and so you and I wanted to talk about some of the herbs. Now if we jump right into one of these papers on. What’s called Magnolia and Phellodendron? This is a blend, actually. And it’s usually under the patented name Relora. Some of the professional products you and I use contain Relora. Now. This is a good option for reducing stress and anxiety, but the problem is you really don’t just want to start taking supplements without the clinical data because if you look back at that woman and the cortisol pattern is completely crashed, if we were to go to something like Relora, I would say this is not an appropriate thing to use because if you look at the results of the study of supplementing Relora for four weeks, the salivary cortisol was18% lower in the Relora group. So what that means is they saw less stress, less tension, less depression, way less anger, less fatigue, less confusion, and a higher mood. But would you say in her case that’s not appropriate because she was so crashed already. We don’t want an 18% reduction in cortisol.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now the question is what type of people were in that group, because a lot of these adaptogens, if someones low like ashwagandha for instance. There’s studies on Ashwagandha on helping to lower cortisol as well as increased cortisol. So I would say that the adaptogens are probably not like a drug where they’re gonna suppress. If someone’s already low, they’re probably gonna more help that HPA access kind of adapt. Now there are certain adaptogens like ginseng or licorice that may be more stimulatory even if someone’s high, it may still over stimulate. So you gotta be careful with over stimulating ones, but usually ones.like holy basil Holy basil, Magnolia, Ashwagandha tend to be more adaptogenic, so I’d be curious about that. What that sample size was? Were they kind of higher cortisol people? If they were higher cortisol people, then that would totally make sense that the herb was working to kind of bring things back into balance. Does it say it all in that study?

Evan Brand: We assess salivary cortisol and psychological mood in 56 subjects, 35 women, 25 or 35 men, 20 21 women. They were screened for moderate stress, so that would have been interesting if they would have came in and did a cortisol panel on all these people and showed the before and after, but that’s OK because you and I have seen this a lot clinically and as you described, we’d like to just give the nutrients to let the body do what it needs to do. Meaning we’re not coming in with Cortef necessarily and cranking her up. We’re giving HPA access support and the body can figure this out on its own in many many cases.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the fact that a lot of these symptoms improved. It’s probably not a low cortisol person making their cortisol lower because that those symptoms would get worse, right? They would actually, you know, they wouldn’t be improving, right. So the fact that they’re coming down, there’s probably an improvement. So imagine these people had higher cortisol patterns.To begin with. And that would make sense. But that’s why we don’t even go all in on just any herb, right? Or making these diet changes. We’re getting the inflammation down. We’re increasing nutrient density. We’re also providing all the cofactors to help your adrenals function better, whether it’s vitamin C, whether it’s pantothenic acid B5, whether it’s B6, I have one study in here talking about B6 and Magnesium actually works better than magnesium alone. And part of that is unique cofactors for these nutrients to work better. And a lot of your brain chemicals actually have cofactors for a lot of these conversions of serotonin and Dopamine and norepinephrine to happen, you need a lot of cofactors. And then we can kind of go more into the category of like, well, if your diets crummy and you’re eating a lot of sugar or inflammatory foods, you can actually deplete those pull factors more. Or if you have mold exposure, you may deplete, you may be depleting your B vitamins in your in your in your folate and your B12 and your B6 for methylation purposes. Because that mold exposure is revving up those methylation pathways, you may be utilizing more of your acetylation and glucuronidation pathways for glutathione and acetyl cysteine right. You’re sulfur aminos may be depleted as well and also chronic stress does deplete sulfur because you need sulfur to actually activate dopamine to norepinephrine. And so when you look at those pathways, the more stressed you get, you will actually deplete sulfur and when you don’t have enough sulfur if you have mold exposure coming in.You see how you have a toxin on this side and then you have stress over here and you’re kind of burning that candle at both ends.

Evan Brand: Yeah.Let’s hit Ashwagandha. And then I like B vitamin magnesium when it’s pretty interesting. So ashwagandha, we hear a lot about it. I’d say it’s probably the most popular adaptogenic herb. I mean, you see it in grocery stores now at the checkout counter, I’ve seen Ashwagandha gummies and Ashwagandha pills, which I think in general is good, I have seen at the high dose and I have seen chronic usage in some people. It gives them a little bit of flatness where they just don’t have as much emotions. I’ve just seen, if you look on Reddit, there’s several threads if you type in like ashwagandha at Hedonia, this is basically just the loss of pleasure in life. So there’s some people that are reporting either high dose or long term use of ashwagandha. They just sort of become numb. So I think you need to watch out for that. But in general, you and I are cycling on and off of these things and we’re rotating. Now out of protocols and not necessarily, always in isolation. Just for a couple months, if they have excessive fatigue, maybe we’re adding in some rhodiola, so we’ll look at that in a minute too. But the Long story short is many, many papers on Ashwagandha. This is just one. But you’re always gonna see an anti anxiety activity and you’re always gonna see anti stress. It’s going to improve symptoms of depression and insomnia and it’s going to help primarily by modulating the HPA access and also the sympathetic adrenal medullary axis, as well as GABAnergic and serotonergic pathways, meaning that it may help boost GABA, which calms you down. It may help boost serotonin, which helps you become less irritable, less anxious, and you may sleep better.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. I just swallow some Gabba and some glycine right now, some amino acids that also help with stress. Love, Mike.

Evan Brand: I took some right before. Yeah, right before we jumped on. I told you about those gummies and my wife. And so I had a couple. It was like Ashwagandha, Rhodiola I think it might have been some Maca too, but, so that was good. So here’s another paper on ashwagandha. This was a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled, which is the best, the best type that you want. And they said, compared to placebo, significant reduction in what they’re calling the Hamilton Anxiety rating scale. So significant reduction in that. In a near significant reduction and the depression, anxiety and stress scale. Also reductions in morning cortisol testosterone levels increased in males. So you and I didn’t mention that but. Stress.Those surprise stress is going to negatively affect your hormones too. Stress is going to reduce testosterone. That’s going to affect your sex drive. So when you see that Viagra is being passed out like candy, now you wonder what all’s going into the stress is a big component.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, we just saw a major study come out last month looking at the effectiveness of antidepressants. And they’re showed to be, you know, no long term benefit with a lot of these antidepressants. I think that was a Lancet study out of the UK and so we kind of look at a lot of the antidepressants, we look at the mechanism that’s happening there. You know, we know there’s data on things like tryptophan and five HTP and B6 helping. So there’s definitely like, there definitely is like a depletion theory where people are chronically stressed and then as they are stressed, they do deplete their serotonin, they deplete their dopamine. We see that in organic acid test. But the medications for that are blocking these reuptake ports, trying to accumulate more serotonin in between the synapses may not be the right school of thought. And there are a lot of doctors and people and pharmacologists looking in the direction of just brain inflammation. And so everything we do in functional medicine is about reducing inflammation. So when we give this nutrient with this herb we’re doing so many things in the background, diet and lifestyle wise to reduce inflammation. There’s so many variables we’re moving so it’s so hard in functional medicine world to do a double-blind placebo control trial because in those trials you have to typically control a variable or two at once. If you control 10 variables at once, 12 variables, there’s just too many things moving in one Direction to know which one was the deal breaker and like in this one, study over here. I’ll show you. Where they look at tyrosine supplementation. And or stress for cognitive demands. I’m going to pull this trial up here. So this is interesting right here. And this is kind of why we like to test and not guess, right, assessing over guessing. So they looked at dopamine, tyrosine which is a building block for dopamine, right. It goes, it goes phenylalanine and tyrosine and then it goes L DOPA dopamine and then under stressed dopamine can get converted to norepinephrine.Then you actually use a lot of sulfur. From dopamine to norepinephrine. But they talked over here that the potential of using TYR supplementation to treat clinical disorder seems limited and benefits. But then it talks about down here tyrosine does seem to effectively enhance cognitive performance particularly in short term stressful and/or cognitively demanding situations, we conclude tyrosine is an effective enhancer of cognitive function, but only when neurotransmitter function is intact and dopamine or norepinephrine is temporary or depleted. So if we have some functional deficiencies and we may see that based on a stress profile or you know functionally, we may see it on a cortisol rhythm test and we may see it with an organic acid panel, looking at vanilmandelate, looking at Homovanillate and we may see some of these markers either go overly high or overly low, which shows that there’s some significant depletion going on here. And so you can see that this the nutrient tyrosine tend to work better when people actually had a depletion.

Evan Brand: Well, you made me think of something and we’ve probably talked about this before, but how crazy is it to think about trying to do a proper, supposedly double-blind placebo-controlled study? Because, think of Sally who woke up and had a GMO Gluten bagel with vegetable oil. Instead of real butter for breakfast, she takes the antidepressant. Or she takes the herb and they’ve got Johnny over here who had a grass fed rib eye for breakfast and he took the same medication. They’re going to get totally freaking different results. So you and I were talking about this before we hit record, but it’s so hard to actually look at and appreciate a study that’s going to give you that outcome because like what time do they go to bed? Are they all going to bed at 10:00 PM or Sally staying up till 2:00 AM? No wonder she didn’t get relief from the antidepressant or the antidepressant herb or whatever. So it’s like, my God, when you really break apart using the functional medicine lens, you break apart the sleep, the stress, the diet, the family relationships, like how many of those people are going through a divorce during the study? Those are the seven people that didn’t get relief from depression, right? So it’s very difficult. And I think that’s why you and I can look at these studies and there’s other people that will talk about studies on podcast, but the reality is when you have the clinical experience that would, that’s what makes the difference because we’re coaching people through some of the lifestyle measures, the sleep, the nutrition, the water, we’re not just throwing the herb and saying good luck. It’s just not going to be that effective.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And also like we just mentioned earlier. We got a test, right? We don’t wanna guess, we want to assess. And This is why someone may have, you know, no experience with this supplement and say it’s it’s joke it’s it’s snake oil and someone’s like no i had a really great experience because there’s one you may Had a really great experience because there’s one you may not need that nutrient as much if you need something more than someone else, right? Then you may have a better benefit, but also a lot of nutrients work synergistically, right? So this one study looks at magnesium with B6 and they found that this study that, right here, many civilizations regard subjects with severe extreme stress study provides clinical support for the greater benefit of magnesium combined with B6. So both groups did well. They had a magnesium group and a magnesium with B6 and they found the magnesium with B6 actually did better and so a lot of nutrients are synergistic. I mean, I think anyone, most people will benefit from magnesium just because a large percent of the population are depleted in it. Our food supply becomes less and less on it. It’s one of those core nutrients it’s hard to get enough of. So I think it can’t hurt to ever take some of these core nutrients, but a lot of these nutrients are synergistic and so magnesium is very important for stress and relaxation. But B6 also helps with, it’s an important cofactor for all of your brain chemicals to work. Very important cofactor and it helps a lot of your neurotransmitters like serotonin and GABA and dopamine and adrenaline all work and convert in the brain. So it’s important that you can’t just ever rely on one nutrient, you got to look at the whole thing and it’s always better to assess versus guests too.

Evan Brand: Yeah, and when you click on the podcast and it says helping with stress or feeling overwhelmed, you may think of us talking about meditation and float tanks and scheduling massages and getting manicures and pedicures.And take it a vacation and taking Fridays off and hugging your kids more and having more sex. All those things are great too. But we’re really trying to get geeky here with you guys, because most people that come to us, as you mentioned, they’ve already been to 5 10-15 20. They done the massage and they’ve been through the talk therapy and they’ve been to so many other practitioners. They need the nitty gritty granular stuff like this. It’s really going to get them better. So if you guys are listening for the lifestyle stuff, we try to integrate that and that is important, but ultimately most people are doing a lot of that, and they’ve tried and they’re still suffering. Let me pull something up on Rhodiola. This is pretty cool. I told you years ago how Rhodiola changed my life. And this is a paper that just concludes that Rhodiola is a very effective potent herb for treating mild to moderate depression. And we’re talking in six weeks. So this is not a long thing. Like people think it’s gonna take years and years and years.I’m not saying that if you’ve got mold, you won’t still be depressed. If you’ve got Lyme, you’re still going to be depressed like that. That can happen. But what if I can just give you a tool, which is gonna boost you. Let’s say it reduces your depression by 30%, enough for you to get back into the gym. And now you’re exercising. Now you get the natural endorphin boost, and then you feel more confidence. Now you go on a date with this woman you’ve been wanting to go on a date with, and now you have more fun and oxytocin cause your bonding. But at this this whole snowball effect happened all because I just gave you this herb to pull you out of a dark place. So that’s really what we’re trying to do.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. So we talked about some of the Earth, some of the nutrients, some of our big favorite ones. Of course, movement is going to be helpful. Again, you got to figure out where your level is. If you’re chronically inflamed, movement maybe too much, too stressful and puts you in a more catabolic place because you’re breaking down tissue. Figure out where you’re at if you’re at a good place.You can lift some weights, do a little bit of interval sprinting, whether it’s a walks, walk, run, walk, Sprint, you can do a rower. We like rowers because of, you know, the extension and also there’s less impact on the joint. So if you’re already inflamed, you’re not going to create more inflammation. You can start with some bands or some gentle lifting of weights to kinda you know find that 8 to 12 you know rep 8 to 12 you know, Rep movement, that’s going to give you a good muscle breakdown, give you a little soreness. That’s good. You know, getting 10,000 steps today, these are all simple strategies. Strategies. We don’t have to overthink it. You don’t need to super crazy customized plan out of the gates. Just get some good movement. Make sure you’re, you have good form. If you’re not sure, you can always start with walking or yoga or something more gentle and you can always check out some YouTube videos and do some band work or some cable work or I like the new tonal that’s another good at home device for lifting is really good so you know just get get enough movement in there to get your muscles a little bit sore.

Evan Brand: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got my roll machine right here. I just try to put it on this heavy of a setting as I feel confident with it’s not gonna injure me where I can still go. And I almost use it like a sprinting device. I don’t necessarily just go slow and steady, I try to just kind of sharp relatively fast. Kind of like a Sprint row movement and I tell you it, it can be depleting, but man, I’ve heard many people talk about this, like when you want to get out of your mind with your ruminating, if you’re worried, if you’re thinking negative, you’re going through all these bad things in your life and bad symptoms and all. I’m so, you do these pity parties for yourself when you’re exercising physically. It almost shuts that brain off completely to where you could just focus on like how hard this exercise, how hard this movement is.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% great 100% now outside of the gates here right? There could be some hidden issues that were not addressing and you have to see a good functional medicine provider over there could be you may need to look at your adrenals. Your adrenals could be more depleted like that patient Evan just show where they have significant kind of reverse cortisol pattern. It’s good to know your adrenal pattern because if you have chronic issues, you want to know, hey, this is where I’m at one it gives you a timeline of how long it may take to heal that person may look at look like a 6 to 12 month journey on that. Also it gives you the ability to have, you know, realistic expectations, good timeline, also something like that. We’d probably wanna do a retest on someone that’s that out of balance to make sure they’re back in balance, but also want to look at hidden stressors that could be behind that, whether it’s mold, whether it’s pests, whether it’s, you know, toxicity issues that aren’t being addressed. Whether it’s gut issues we talked about, a lot of these nutrients have to get eaten, so for our diets poor there’s a problem. But also what if it’s good now but we’re not breaking down and absorbing it? That’s where we’d have to do deeper testing on the functional medicine side to see how you’re doing digestive wise with HCL and enzymes. See if there’s any gut bug issues.And then we can also do other intracellular nutrient tasks for their organic acids or nutrients, look at other kind of intercellular nutrients. So there could be some other hidden stressors going on there. I always say just kind of start from the ground and work your way up, start with the low hanging fruit. Keep it simple because that provides a good foundation anyway, but you know if you have chronic issues, you definitely want to reach out to someone like Evan evanbrand.com or someone like myself,Doctor J justinhealth.com for the deeper issues and we’ll put links down below so y’all can reach out. Evan, anything else you want to add before we wrap things up?

Evan Brand: Yeah, I think for people that are, in a short term, acute stress, they have to travel for a wedding. They’re maybe going on a honeymoon. Sounds fun, could be stressful. Travel, new food, new water supply, their new parents. They’ve got small children, those are situations where you may come in, not small children cause those are long term stress, you and I can attest to that but you know, honeymoon, you know, new marriage, whatever. So, so those acute stressors, you could probably do some of these formulas whether it’s Tongkat or Magnolia or Ashwagandha,Rhodiola, holy Basil, there’s many, many options. Extra magnesium, B6, GABA, taurine and acetone. These things are great, but if you have been stressed and feeling overwhelmed for 1,2,3,5,10,20,25 years and beyond, you really don’t just want to go try to get rhodiola and get your way out of it. It’s not going to happen. I’ve tried. I took so many supplements when I was sick and it helped me to stay alive and it helped me to continue to work and be up on my feet but.I knew that ultimately I was missing something, and it wasn’t until I really cleared the parasite, cleared the H pylori, my energy started to come up like I was on Rhodiola while I had parasites.I was still tired. I was less tired, but I was still tired. And I think the problem is like naturopathic medicine. So naturopaths specifically, they may come in and instead of, you know, quartet for cortisol, they give you licorice and ashwagandha, which is great, but then it stops there. So you really have to ask the question why? Why did I get myself into this? How did I get into this? Was this the bad relationship? The moldy apartment? The college dorm? That got me sick? And I think people need to just ask why a few more times. So, like, I’m tired. OK, here’s rhodiola. But it could be. Hey, I’m tired. Well, why are you tired? Well, because I’m stressed. Why are you stressed? Because I’m in a bad relationship. OK? So we need to work on that. And if people keep asking why, usually you’re going to uncover some stuff. And I just encourage people, don’t be afraid, to look in those dark spots. Don’t, don’t be afraid to look in those corners where there’s some cobwebs of things that you’ve been emotionally shoving away, as you mentioned, dusting in a way or putting it under the carpet. Yeah, eventually those things are going to weigh you down.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, someone in the chat talked about a Epstein barr virus kind of plummeting their energy recently. Well, when it comes to Epstein Barr and some of these viruses like Epstein-barr said cytomegalovirus, it’s very rarely the virus just comes out of blue, comes out of the blue and just knocks you on your pot, right. Usually there’s some level of depletion going on and it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back and so. There’s different supports we can do to address viral issues, whether it’s silver or Monolaurin or Rishi, right? Different herbs and nutrients cats claw. But you’ve got to look at how did your body, how did your immune system become so compromised and susceptible to it. And you tend to have to work backwards and fix all of those issues that led up to this point. It’s very rarely something just coming out of the blue and doing all of it. It’s usually a level of susceptibility that you incurred and then this virus came in. So you have to really address everything, never just one thing.

Evan Brand: Yeah, I’ve seen that too, and I’ve seen it with a lot of things that are probably still controversial on YouTube, but we’ve seen things that people put in their bodies that all of a sudden reactivate Epstein Barr and other problems. We’ve seen this in celebrities, we’ve seen this in clients. So yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely. But guys, we want to give you actionable information. A lot of people out there, it’s just like sales, sales, sales, market, market leave you kind of hanging. I want everyone to kind of listen and be like, all right, here’s some foundational things. When we’re talking and doing a long podcast, it’s super easy to get overwhelmed. So just pick one or two things, execute, execute, execute action, action, action. And then if you’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed that you want to take next steps, you have Evan and I for resources. It’s all about educating. It’s all about empowerment. So we’ll put links down below where you guys can reach out and work on taking the next steps. But worst case, just continue to take action. We’re here to help.

Evan Brand: Absolutely. So go take a bath, do your lavender, your Epsom salt and all that. Get your mind right. But then ultimately you gotta figure out what’s under the hood.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it. Very good. Evan, wait. Great chatting with you man. Glad we’re back in the saddle.

Evan Brand: You too. Take it easy. Talk to you soon, brother. Take care everyone. Bye now.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye y’all.

References:

https://justinhealth.com/

https://drjabanmoore.com/

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/how-to-deal-with-stress-and-feeling-overwhelmed-podcast-376

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The Secrets to Addressing Lyme and Parasites with Dr. Jaban Moore | Podcast #375

Lyme disease is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi. It is transmitted by a tick bite infected with the bacteria. When an infected tick bites you, the bacteria pass into your body through its saliva, then multiplies and spreads.

In this video, Dr J and Jaban Moore discuss the different strategies to address Lyme from food templates and lifestyle modifications, plus medical strategies that effectively address these issues.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 – Introduction
9:09 – Pathways
18:36 – Strategies

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys. It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here. Really excited for today’s podcast with Dr. Jaban Moore. Really excited to have Dr. Jaban here on the podcast. We’re gonna be diving into the areas of Lyme and parasites. Really excited to go over the nitty-gritty of that topic. Dr. Jaban, how are we doing today, man?

Dr. Jaban Moore: Oh, I’m doing great man and this is one of my favorite topics. I love talking parasites. We all got them. We all talk about them in my clinic because well we were sick at one point and it’s just so much fun to get people information so they can get well and feel amazing.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Most people in this field because you’re a functional medicine DC. Most people kind of have a cool story of why they got into this field whether it was like kind of the journey of the wounded healer where you had some health issues and someone helped, to help you, kind of uh step out of them or improve your health and performance. What’s your story like? How did you get to be where you’re at now in this field?

Dr. Jaban Moore: Man, I was a, uh, I thought to be healthy young guy. I went to college as a shot putter ended up becoming all-American and shot-putting college so I was a big boy. I was fit. I was healthy and then when I went to lose that extra weight that I put on for shot put it felt like the floor just fell out from under me, my health crashed and burned and nobody had an answer for. No one had a reason why pain started. I started losing hormone function right so I got erectile dysfunction. My brain didn’t work as well and you know for my whole life, I was so healthy and I just didn’t understand why and I can tell you looking back now, I lived in college like so many people do. We live in and stuff is not as nice so there was mold literally growing up the walls of the basement that I lived in and I can just remember back now looking back like you know my performance started kind of dipping a little bit when I moved in there and I didn’t feel as well and I got sore throats more often, I had more stuffiness but I just didn’t think about it because, right college guy right like I’m not going to think about that. We got things to do, I’ve got school to finish and athletics to do and then what I’ve seen in a pattern with so many people is when they go to lose weight some of those extra toxicities go into their system and then I was also in a stressful situation when I was in school because I’d gone from undergrad to chiropractic school that’s where I lost the weight and that was just finally the straw that broke the camel’s back and for years I searched for an answer and I never found one until I went to Dr. Alan Lindsley, a friend of mine now, who was like hey man you’ve got Lyme and we’re gonna have to work on this but you should be able to get back to normal back to you back to being young and 25 like I was at the time, um, because I looked healthy. I just didn’t feel it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What was your diet like back then? Where you kind of standard American in regards to lots of grains excess carbs those kind of things to keep the weight on a lot of poofas kind of following a standard American higher carb diet or were you more healthy or paleoish.

Dr. Jaban Moore: I mean back in college, I was definitely eating everything. I mean, If I need a lot of sweets but I can remember taking a bag of water of tater tots and um you know the big huge tortilla rolls and just filling full of cheese and meat and that would be lunch because I was trying to gain weight. I drink a gallon of milk a day back in college trying to gain that weight but one when I actually got sick when I felt bad when I was in chiropractic school and I was eating not totally organic but I was eating more of a paleo type diet it was lower carbs, it was no vegetable oils, it was pretty much whole foods so could it have been a little better yeah but it’s not where you think you go from this college diet to eating healthy losing weight getting well and then the floor falls out so it didn’t follow that patten of what most people think until I really stepped away to look what happened.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. Okay. All right so you’re eating this diet that was probably wasn’t as good. You go to chiropractic school obviously there’s more awareness there you’re learning, you’re getting your inflammation down, your nutrition density is going up. What happened next? Did you ever find out if you had any gut bugs or was it more the Lyme and the Mold that kind of took the top priority there?

Dr. Jaban Moore: So, when I was in school, I actually never even thought about Lyme or sorry not Lyme, mold. I never even talked about mold. Dr. Lindsey didn’t talk me about mold because I moved out, I moved out of that basement when I was an undergrad, I moved actually back home to my parents’ house because I was buying my chiropractic school and I was trying to save money just like I was trying to save money when I was in the basement of that horrible duplex back in the day but um so I’m living with my parents so there’s no more mold and it’s probably two years before I lost all the weight and really got myself to a doctor that understood what was happening because I’d gone to others and they just didn’t give me answers so, but, by the time I got to Dr. Lindsey, he found Lyme that was out of control, Babesia and Bartonella and those are the main bugs that we worked on. Now, throughout my journey of health, I’ve worked on parasites. I’ve done a slight amount of mold detox but I think genetically for myself not being HLDR, I’m not MTHFR, so, I think my body was able to clear some of that mold. The years after I left school, I left for my undergrad, right, so, mold suppressed me a loud Lyme in. My body couldn’t handle the Lyme but five years later I had detoxed most of that mold out so that’s why I think that didn’t pop up but definitely parasites and so much Lyme and Babesia and Bartonella work. Those guys, we did a lot of work on and those are the things that really changed the scene for me because treatment for each one those for about a month and I was probably 80% better which is a very rapid healing process but Dr. Lindsey took good care of me and I think genetically my body actually is pretty resilient. I’m more of that warrior genotype but mold man, mold just knocks people down especially when you’re living in a lot of it for a couple of years.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. So, you’re talking about the genotype so not everyone’s going to be super mold sensitive right. Some people could be around a bunch of molds and they can just deal it and adapt, some are gonna be a little bit more sensitive. Any more info on those different genotypes like which ones are more sensitive which ones are less.

Dr. Jaban Moore: Man, there’s so many genes, there’s more than a thousand epigenetic genes that great plains laboratory used to run so I haven’t tried to understand all thousands you look at more at the test that we run these days which is a little bit smaller, I mean, should I’ve seen some that are 100 most are in the 50 range and the problem that I have with epigenetic testing is when I know there’s a thousand and let’s just say for grains right now, right, like, 50 or for methylation and if you have 25 that are hypermethylated and 25 that are under methylated then what are you, are you even, so what I end up doing is I run homocysteine, I run methanoic acid, I’ll run a hair test and urine, yes, that I’ll test bees and I will go this is what is happening in your body so if I see a hair test from somebody that has a lack of let’s say sodium and potassium so your cellular energy is going to be low, you’re not gonna oxidize or you’re not gonna detox well, if I see homocysteine low or cobalt in your hair test low, homocysteine would be a blood test then I know that you probably don’t process B vitamins well so therefore you’re not gonna be methylating, you’re not gonna be able to detox well so these are the things that I’m looking for more than genetic side, I bring up the genetics because some people like, well, genetically I’m just like this or they’ll say well why is it that you could deal with some mold, but if I walk into a house with mold in 30 minutes, I feel really awful it’s because we all are a little different and I think it was Ben Lynch, I was reading his book and it clicked with me when he said you know somebody’s got to fight off the saber-tooth tiger when you’re a nomadic tribe back two thousand years ago, right? Somebody’s gotta fight off the tiger, um, but then some, they need to when they taste the water, they get sick really fast, it doesn’t kill them but they get sick really fast so then they tell everybody else, don’t drink this water. So, those are more of your canary in the coal mine and you guys have people that may be worried or a little bit more anxious so they’re always keeping an alert so that if somebody was invading your tribe that they can wake the warriors up to go do it, I think I’m more on the warrior gene type but honestly I work with all the people that are a little bit more the canary in a coal mine and I think that’s because of the fact that mold knocked me down even though it’s harder to take me down, I still can so I’m sympathetic and then once we can get people that are more of the canary side, if you can actually supercharge your mitochondria, you can pull them from feeling so bad to being actually really resilient, my wife’s a little bit more on that uh canary side and if I give her a bunch of mitochondrial support she can tolerate stay in that hotel room that we probably shouldn’t be staying in but unfortunately we already paid for it we’re in there and you know you’re going to Mexico, how are you going to get a tropical environment at a hotel how can you possibly find a room with no mold.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s almost impossible. It’s gonna be very difficult 100%. So, yeah, I totally agree, right. you want tests that look at function versus the kind of this static genetic genome which is just is what it is. It’s not gonna change but like you mentioned you can look at the different detoxification pathways phase 2 detoxification, methylation markers, right, B6, folate, B12, yeah, and these you know really matter because if you have a poor diet for you’re chronically inflamed or you have gut issues and maybe you just have a lot of malabsorption of a lot of these nutrients, yeah you may see, you may run different functional tests that show these pathways nor working well and that gives you kind of a starting point to kind of work would you agree?

Dr. Jaban Moore: Absolutely. I always tell my clients when they asked me about genetic tests, I’m always more than happy to run these for you and we can talk through them but you know what tests we ran is what is, those tests are what could be.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it’s not gonna change things too. I always say is this gonna change the treatment or the plan if we see you have genetic markers from mold sensitivity if we already know clinically and functionally these markers over here are kind of guiding us in this direction. They really got to change what we’re gonna do.

Dr. Jaban Moore: Yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so, how often are you testing the person’s urinary levels of mold versus the environment like the person’s living? Do you prioritize one over the other and then when do you even jump on the mold bandwagon because you know if someone has a crappy diet and they have adrenal issues and poor digestion you know, any symptom under the sun could look like Lyme, look like mold, how do you prioritize?

Dr. Jaban Moore: So, I definitely run some tests at the beginning uh, day one, before people even walk into my clinic. They call my office, they talk to my new client coordinator and she goes hey he’s gonna want to see just some of these tests based of the things that you’re mentioning oftentimes those tests can include an organic acid test, a hair tissue mineral analysis and then a basic blood panel. I’ve got about nine different types of people that show or blood panel categories that she goes through and just looks at like, okay, this person can fit into this category do you already have these labs if so, he’ll look at those. If not, we’ll order them for you so that by time you get to him, he’ll have information for you to provide a direction and then of course we have assessment tools like a bunch of questionnaires and I also do some muscle testing that will allow me to just understand more about a person but the way that I dive into moles,

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: In regards to muscle testing, what kind of things do you do there, you just kind of testing the organs, you use any vials to kind of get a sense of what’s happening there?

Dr. Jaban Moore: Yeah, I definitely test organs, also test vials, um, to understand what’s going inside their body whether that be if their body would resonate with a toxin or infection that gives me a piece of information that I can then blood test, urine test to prove out

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Gives you an area to look at but they’re like a telemedicine patient, are those still options for you or you go right to the lab testing?

Dr. Jaban Moore: I do both. So, you can do frequency testing or even bioenergetic testing. Some people have machines that are biofeedback machines where you can send in hair or nails, you know, you can send in urine, they can be read by a machine, I do frequency testing, self-testing myself, and then I actually have a friend that will run bioenergetic testing as an additional tool if we need it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Cool, excellent. All right. So, with the mold, what are the top things you utilize to kind of help, let’s say, increase detoxification capacity, binders, nutrients. What are the big things you see kind of in your clinic that really move the needle and work for you?

Dr. Jaban Moore: So, when it comes to mold, the thing that’s moved the needle the most is actually not even addressing the mold itself, it’s making sure that they’re safe. So, you’d ask, um, when do I look for mold, right? When do I even look for? So, if I see tests that suggest you might have mold, I’ll run a mold test on the person as far as their urine, so a DNA test which would be a mycotoxin test from either great plains laboratory vibrant America, from there if I see that that’s positive, I’m immediately gonna ask for a test on their home, I start with a Hermes test and it’s about getting away from the mold so if it’s a high mold test then we’ve gonna do some things for your home to be able to actually address that mold because if you’re living in it and your nervous system is flared up from it, oftentimes you’ve got to get your nervous system to be able to come back down. That is one of the absolute keys so getting you away from mold if you’re highly sensitive, if you’re toxic to it is step one from there I’ve actually started doing neurofeedback with a lot of the clients that I have that are dealing with mold toxicity neurofeedback in a very specific way though I use it for disentrainment so to breakdown that wall that you put up that tells your body to stay in fight or flight because it’s an unsafe place, so one get you to safe place, two, break the wall down that says that you’re not in a safe place because it’s just like PTSD, I call it autoimmune PTSD where your body thinks that it is still in this very unsafe, very dangerous place due to the mold and then the third thing I do is I slowly start to supercharge mitochondria, right. So, I’m gonna bring in things like CT minerals from cell core which are just minerals but they’re fulvic ally bounded so they actually give your cells nutrients to build themselves to flush out that toxin. The second thing that I’m gonna be doing is I’m gonna be opening up the pathways that mold can detox out from so many people don’t do parasites, bacteria or mycoplasma before mold and what happens is that mold starts trying to come out of the body and as it gets to let’s just say if there’s a liver flukes in there if there are bacteria in the gut that are disrupting causing inflammation and that mold can’t come out then if recirculates and it causes your body a tremendous amount of hexing and difficulty if we’re recirculating mold when we’re trying to detox it then you get all your anxiety, depression, panic, and paranoia type symptoms from detoxing mold without being able to get it out so by time I get to mold I use those energy supplements like CT minerals, mitochondria support and binders.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And a lot of those minerals bind to mold toxins too, aren’t they also binders in a way?

Dr. Jaban Moore: Some of them are 2400 trillion. Different combinations of fulvic and human so some fulvic-humic can be supportive to the mitochondria because it’s hydrogen carbon and oxygen and that’s the main components of the human body so some can support your mitochondria. Some can bind mold, some will bind metal but not mold and it really just depends on which ones you get so if you get some from cell core and it comes in it’s carboxy, it says it can bind mold so that one can but if you get it from systemic formulas and it’s in their enrg and it’s designed for mitochondria, and that’s gonna do, it’s not gonna bind mold. So, you got to make sure that you use the right combination that they that and the company’s done the research to prove what it can do because not all fulvic humas created the same.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Because I know they have some ATP products for cell core that are more mitochondrial side but you look on the back of the label. It doesn’t really differentiate you know the different types of fulvic or humic so you kind of look at carboxy and you see similar ingredients but you just kind of have to trust the company that hey these are gonna be better for mitochondrial function. These will be better for detoxification.

Dr. Jaban Moore: Absolutely. There are so many things that we can actually look at that are very similar for instance oregano. Oregano is one of the oldest herbs that people know about. Oregano has more than 200 phytonutrients in it so if you use a leaf versus stock versus stem versus root, it can actually have different effects in you body or have different potencies of what it’s capable of doing and then you see that with medications, they use different parts of a plant to have a medicinal use and they create a medication based off that phytonutrient so when it comes to fulvic and humic, it’s like where did you get yours, what mine did you mine it out and what combination of these carbons and hydrogens and oxygens did you get and that’s how it’s gonna affect your body so you want to make sure that when you’re buying a product that is a product that you know what the purpose of it is for and it’s from trusted information and trusted people so you know I’ve used a lot of cell core products, I know what they do and don’t do I’ve used other products excess systemic formulas, I’ve used so many different ones that have fulvic and humic and they just work differently.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, when you look at a lot of these kind of people that have mold right, you kind of prioritize what’s going on, I almost always prioritize getting the gut better, getting the diet better, getting nutrition better, getting digestion better so I find if those kind of pathways aren’t kind of dialed in, I mean, like you mentioned you kind of push mold but you may have a bottleneck on getting it out, you kind of have a similar kind of methodology and how you prioritize the systems?

Dr. Jaban Moore: I definitely do. You got to be able to poop. That’s definitely water because if you’re not pooping it’s not coming out and then I’ve got to make sure that I get the bigger out first, the bigger organisms out first so I don’t necessarily think it as going after the leaky gut or diet or something. It’s like okay so the bigger organisms because they’re gonna be blocking up your detox and drainage pathways. Now, the diet honestly so many people that get to me are chronically ill and they’ve done both vegan and paleo, they’ve done history, they’ve done all the things so I don’t usually stick so tightly to the real deep diet conversation because they’re already locked in their whole food organic and then x, which is like you know are they carnivore, vegan, paleo, whatever, because diet doesn’t matter, you need to eat clean. You don’t want to be causing retoxification, you want to make sure that you are doing the detox or you wanna make sure that you’re getting the stuff out so I do the open up strange pathways but the biggest one that I have really really stepped into so much now is the nervous system. I make sure that my clients are doing some kind of either neurofeedback, vagus nerve retraining something to deal with the trauma, that has happened to their immune system because so many clients, I’m working with have become sensitive or overreactive, anxious. So, as I work with these people, the nervous system has become a huge key component that I talk about at the very start so it’s get yourself into a safe environment, make sure your body knows it’s safe, make sure you’re doing anti-inflammatory lifestyle and then it’s start getting out the organisms kind of by size, I mean it’s not always that way, seventy percent of the time I find parasites first if they have them but then it goes bacteria, mycoplasma, mold, metal, radioactive elements.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And what type of biofeedback program are you recommending? Is it something that patients can get on their own? Is it something that you’ve been trained in? How does that look and how do you incorporate that?

Dr. Jaban Moore: So, the biofeedback that I’ve used is just the testing site. I don’t recommend necessarily going and doing treatments on it, not that you couldn’t. There are people that do those types of things, but I just have a friend with the machine and if somebody wants a biofeedback reading that can add to our information, I’ll have them go ahead and go over to his office and do that, or send something to his office because I do so much telemed, because I’m working with people all around the world. They’ll just send a sample of, like I said, saliva, fingernail or hair. And then he can use his machine and scan it and let us know what he’s dealing with. There’s more of the testing. Some of the countries that I work with, that it’s really very difficult to get, organic acid test or blood testing. They just don’t have those resources.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. And so, let’s say they’re neurofeedback testing is off, what’s now the treatment to kind of get their nervous system so they feel safe and kind of more relaxed and steady?

Dr. Jaban Moore: So, we’ve said two things. You said biofeedback which is sending the sample, neurofeedback is different. This is a sound light and color therapy, and it is actually the test is a Q EEG. So it’s a cap that you put on the head.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK, got it.

Dr. Jaban Moore: That cap reads the electrical frequencies in the brain. So it tells me what your brain waves are actually doing. And then.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. So how are you doing that? Is that in your office?

Dr. Jaban Moore: That is in my office or I’ll refer people. I’ve used clinics in London, I’ve used clinics in Spain, in California.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’ll just look for like a neurofeedback in that area and essentially, yeah, like lights count, lights, sounds, colors and then essentially it creates different what sound if you got to get into more parasympathetic state.

Dr. Jaban Moore: So it’s actually reading your brain waves so it’s delta, beta, alpha and if they’re too high in energy or too low in energy, it’s going to read that, and then it’s going to create a plan to bring you up. And then while you’re going through the plan, it will actually be reading your brain. And if you use it, it’s like the carrot on the end of the stick, honestly. If your brain energy is too high and we want to bring you down, it will turn the TV screen off and the sound off when you’re too high. So your brain is like, wait, what? What’s going on? What’s happening? And then when it drops back down to the lower level to let you watch TV again. So, you know, we don’t put anything that’ll make you jump on TV while we’re doing it. So it’s like blue planet, and you’re there watching an interesting part and you’re just like, oh, this is great, and then it shuts it off because your brain went too high of energy and then drops back down. So it teaches you to bring that energy level down. But how I’m using, it’s a little bit different. That’s the main type of neurofeedback. What we just described, what I’m doing is actually called disentrainment neurofeedback. So I’m using it to disentrain. So it actually opens up the amygdala, which is a part of your brain. That is usually the part that will protect you from traumatic situations. So, it blocks your memory. It blocks your ability to remember whatever happens. So, if you were at war and you had a bomb drop in front of you and that traumatized you.Then you don’t. You come back and you don’t remember why, but when fireworks go off, you dropped to the floor. You freak out, you get scared, you have anxiety, you don’t sleep. So then what we do is we do disenchantment. So it actually takes the amygdala and it kind of shuts that off and allows you to remember. And now that you’re back home and you’re in a safe place, you can go, OK. That happened to me when I was at war. But I’m safe here at home now. I’m OK. That firework is not the same thing and you can resolve that so that your subconscious isn’t battling your conscious. And then now that can let your fight or flight come down because you’re not in constant what what happened to me in the past? I know something happened in the past, but I don’t know what it was.This is where nervous system get stuck. The same thing happened.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: EMDR and EFT and tapping stuff. Isn’t that kind of similar in how it’s kind of decreasing some of that subconscious type of trauma within the nervous system as well?

Dr. Jaban Moore: I do recommend both of those at times, but neither one have I seen make the massive changes where I’ve had somebody come to my clinical fly and I’ve got somebody here right now from Ohio. I walked right by her to do this podcast and, Uh, she’s done both of those EMDR and EFT, and they’re both phenomenal. But what I’ve seen from neurofeedback, disentrainment specifically the disentrainment part is people will come out of my clinic and they have a 20, 30 50% reduction and their sensitivity or their bodies fight or flight state just by doing 10 sessions and they do those ten sessions from like they started Monday, Monday morning, they do a brain map and then they do two sessions and they do two sessions a day for five days. So, they’re done and within the work week they’re done. They go back home and they’ll get somewhere between 20 and 50% reduction and their fight or flight state, which allows me to be able to do so much more work, so much more faster with them because their body isn’t so reactive to the detoxes or the supplements, their body is able to calm down, which also allows their immune system to function better, their energy system to be able to produce better. It’s so incredible.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, if someone were to find someone like that, right, that’s just neurofeedback. Design, uh, say it again.

Dr. Jaban Moore: Disentrainment.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Disentrainment, yeah, got it. And then is anyone that would have a site that’s kind of trained in that good enough or is there a certain kind of certification or criteria?

Dr. Jaban Moore: So I fell into this on accident to be honest.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Are you trained in yourself or do you have partitioner that works for your clinic?

Dr. Jaban Moore: I am trained in it myself and we have a machine in my clinic and the most common person that does neurofeedback will do entrainment. So they’re trying to entrain you to do something so to like lower your brain or raise your brainwaves like I was talking about earlier. I did the disentraintment with a staff person of mine who had been through a lot of really terrible things. So I called the company, I was like, what would you start with for a person that’s been through all these terrible things? Well, do the PTSD protocols. So I did them. She had a couple flashbacks. She had a couple of memories during the day and nightmares and things and then she just slowly started to calm down and she actually became like a different person almost because her fear and trauma that was leading and controlling her life started to fade away. I was like, well, wow, that’s really interesting. That works so well for you. And I have all these other patients that are coming in that are also in a fight or flight state, but not from traumas that were emotional in their life but from being sick. So I go what if it will work for them? So I I had them do it, which is again, I’m using the PTSD trauma setting. They just and the company that I bought my machine from, they call it disentrainment because it’s breaking the barrier down. The problem is most neurofeedback providers out there, they want to entrain. So what you’ve got to be very careful with your words and say, I wanna disentrainment. I wanna do PTSD, I wanna do trauma. I wanna call my nervous system.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Disentrain. So, there’s entrainment and then disentrainment.

Dr. Jaban Moore: Yes.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And then entrainment is primarily used for what?

Dr. Jaban Moore: For? For trying to solve or fix a testable problem, meaning a higher low energy in the brain based off of the brain waves. So you’re trying to bring the energy down in the frontal cortex so that you have less anxiety or less irritability. They’re doing a symptom based treatment.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. More of a symptom, kind of calming, relaxing, where the disentrainment is more helping with that PTSD type of subconscious trauma?

Dr. Jaban Moore: Exactly.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: OK, that’s cool. And so we have kind of the parasites, the lyme stuff. We mentioned these as being kind of bigger issues on the detoxification side. They can kind of bottleneck a lot of the mold detoxification. When you test for urinary mold metabolites, for instance, do you try to make sure that detoxification pathways are working a little bit so you can actually get some mycotoxins in the urine? Or do you do it without any type of glutathione or anesthetic cysteine challenge? How do you assess that?

Dr. Jaban Moore: So I like actually doing it both ways. I typically do it with no assistance whatsoever at the start because if I test your body for urine test for mold and they get mold positive on the test and you’re doing nothing to detox at all.Then it gives me a hint that you’re probably in the environment still.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. That makes sense.

Dr. Jaban Moore: If I test you when you’re doing a detoxification protocol or push or provocation and it comes out, then I don’t know if it’s now or if it was in the past. And I have no frame of reference on that because if I’m doing glutathione push, then it could be 20 years old and I just don’t know that information. So for me, it’s more important to make sure again that we’re in a safe place today, because if you’re in a safe place today, then I have a good chance of getting you well. If you’re not in a safe place today, then I got to get you to one.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Would you ever want to just test the home first before you do a urinary mold test to see if there’s anything positive with her right now, first?

Dr. Jaban Moore: If I have any suspecting, if they suspect, if they show me a picture of hey look back here on the wall does this look like mold and I’m like yeah it looks like mold. OK let’s just run the test on the home. It’s actually less expensive anyway. But if they’re like I have no idea. I don’t see any mold anywhere else smell any mold anywhere but I see that they’re albumin level is high in their blood work that they’re Methylation, toxic exposure marker and their oat is elevated. I see their oxalates elevated. I’m like, I think you probably have mold. Let’s do some further investigation on your body through a urine test and then from there the home test.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What about colonized mold, like on the organic acid test you may see like fusobacterium or Aspergillus, organic acid markers are really high. Is that just more from yeast in the gut that’s kind of just colonized there and that’s producing a lot of those metabolites. Is that just addressing the gut issues?

Dr. Jaban Moore: That’s not how I’m reading it because I’ve had so many people that have gone through practitioners that have done anti yeast diets, they’ve done the oregano and capric acids, they’ve done diflucan and nystatin and they still have those markers elevated in their body. Umm, so I have not found that those organic acid test markers mean candy to yeast. I found them more to mean mold toxicity. And then I confirm it through running a urine test and then a home test.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. So, that mold is colonized in the gut so that the environmental mold in the home is also affecting the gut. So you’re trying to hit it from both sides either way, right? You’re trying to fix the gut as well as the environment still.

Dr. Jaban Moore: Absolutely. So you get the environment well, but while you’re getting the environment well, you’re going back in and cleaning out the mold, the yeast, and likely the bacteria and parasites. Because, if you get Aspergillus fusarium, Stachybotrys in your body, it suppresses your immune system and it allows every other organism you come into contact with to start to colonize your body also, so it’s never just that one thing. So if you’ve got those positive on your oat test, I’m just going to automatically until proven otherwise, which will run the test, assume that you’re going to have these other organisms and I’m just going to start cleaning, healing and sealing the gut while making sure that you’re getting into a safe environment, rebuilding your mitochondria and your mineral content. Because most likely when you deal with somebody with mold, they’re going to become electrolyte deficient because their bodies so stressed out from the mold that they just constantly urinating out all their good stuff.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Makes sense. And so when do you switch gears and go after lyme? Because I find you have been doing this for over a decade, decade and a half. I’ve seen so many patients that come in and they’ve gone through the Lyme wheelhouse where they just seen so many doctors and they’re like lyme, lyme, lyme. They put them on tons of, you know, antibiotic protocols or tons of lime killing and they don’t really get better. When do you prioritize Lyme? Um, I still find that I try to address everything else hormonally gut detoxification stuff and the idea with that stuff later on. Because I find a lot of times, like you mentioned, when the immune system gets better and stronger, those things kind of tend to take care of themselves. But I’ll still kind of create specific protocols. When do you go after that specifically?

Dr. Jaban Moore: So lyme would probably fall to my third to fourth most important piece. So say you have everything that I’ve mentioned on this on this podcast, right? You’ve got parasites, gut bacteria, yeast, lyme, mold, radioactive elements, heavy metals. I would probably go parasite. So assuming we’re in a safe place, trauma aside, we have parasites, GI bacteria and then I’m going to go to systemic bodily bacteria which would include Lyme disease right there. So that’s about third and then I’m going to go from there to mycoplasma and then into mold. So those would be my first five that I’d be going after.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. And then what are your favorite herbs that you use? I find that when you go after like a lot of gut bacterial bugs, there’s an overlap with a lot of the herbs that you may use, let’s say, for gut stuff that may kind of crossover with lime, whether it’s olive leaf, oil of oregano or noni or neems, there’s a big crossover there. What are some of your favorite herbs? And do you notice that crossover too with some of the gut stuff?

Dr. Jaban Moore: Oh, there’s definitely crossover. So if I test, I’ve got people where I had to give him a little road map. Like these are all things that came back positive. We’re going to work on this many and the rest are probably going to go away. And what I end up seeing is we we clear the digestive track of of parasites. By the time I get that done, if I had a way to tell you zero to 10, which you know energetic. Testing, muscle testing can. So I’d like, okay, zero to 10, Lyme is a 10. By the time I get the parasites out, they’re like, oh, it’s a six, it’s a 5. So then we don’t have to do nearly as much work on those things because you’re stronger. And my favorite herbs, I mean ones that you didn’t mention would be like Japanese knotweed.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think you already mentioned Noni.

Dr. Jaban Moore: Noni is one of my favorite herbs out there, so phenomenal. Gosh, Wormwood I think is another good one. Those are definitely some of my favorite ones that are using a lot of those for lyme too.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You silver at all too?

Dr. Jaban Moore: I really don’t.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You do biofilm busters too?

Dr. Jaban Moore: I do use some biofilm busters so I use some Serrapeptase, nattokinase which are both digestive tract enzymes and then supreme nutrition. I do use a little bit of NAC. NAC is kind of part of my liver support supplement. So it’s already in there. Now that’s obviously a dose that’s not known to be as as biofilm busting. You know some people have really high dose NAC for biofilm. But I found BFB from which is a combination of essential oils from supreme nutrition is actually a nice topical one because people will get where their hands are still really stuck or their elbow still has pain. And I’m like, you know, we’ve been dealing with Lyme and Babesia, let’s put some BFB out here topically, let it absorb through the skin and also the pain starts to fade while we’re going through treatment, whereas just the treatment alone didn’t do it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: On it. You use like a lot of adaptogens as well to help?

Dr. Jaban Moore: It depends on the person. So you know some people that have pots or that are are just really depleted. If I see that albumin being high, I think dehydration you can throw some, definitely some rhodiola, some ashwagandha, the supplement I actually use is from Quicksilver, it’s Nano mojo, it’s a Pump bottle so it it goes in easy, and whether you’re a kid or an adult, there’s no worry about taking a pill. So yeah, I definitely use some adaptogens. I probably would say 30% of people I work with get some sort of adaptogenic or energy type support.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool, excellent. Yeah, it’s all about the priority, right. You got to have that confidence to be able to work people through all the changes so you can kind of get those optimal results. What’s the next thing? So we talked about Lyme, we talked about parasites. Anything else you want to highlight specifically on the parasite side? I mean do you do anything to kind of open up drainage to help with dye off preventatively? Or do you try to just kind of build a good foundation so when you come in to addressing some of these bugs, patients are less likely to hurx and have significant die off issues?

Dr. Jaban Moore: Yeah, so using Mimosa Pudica which become popular the last couple of years, is it really the pair of one? Yeah it can grab hold of whole sized parasites and help to pull it out so that when they die they don’t just decay and let out all the toxins from inside them into your body. They can carry 6 to 8 times the body weight, their own body weight and.That’s a lot of toxins in your body would have to clear if we can’t pull it out whole. But you know I do start clients with detox support. You know we start with just like you mentioned earlier it’s like do you eat right, OK, yes, you eat right good. So we’re we’re we’re peaked out on that being as far as anti-inflammatory we’ve done the neurofeedback work where your immune system is not going to be as reactive. If I can do some sort of nervous system type work. I usually start with something like tudca plus from CellCore or

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Some sort of liver gallbladder thing.

Dr. Jaban Moore: Yeah, liver, gallbladder. So whether that be milk Thistle or even a gallbladder flush, I’ve had people have to do to make sure that we’re moving again. I said earlier, make sure you poop. And then doing things like Castro pack and dry brushing so that when you start doing your body and you start working on it, because these herbs are not just staying in your gut, you’re going to have to get them out of your lymph. So teaching tools and techniques to allow someone to be able to get that drainage moving first and I, you know, some people talk about all you got to do it for two months before. I’m not that kind of person. I’m just like. OK. Do you react to things? Yes or no. And if people know that they do not react to supplements, they’ve been able to take other things that were strong biocide and or otherwise and have no reactions. I’m like OK, well we’re not going to spend a whole lot of time on detox initially because you don’t, you don’t react. Your body probably drainage wise isn’t too backed up or I get the other people like you know, I react to everything. OK. We’re going to spend a little bit more time. We’re going to spend a month making sure your body’s draining appropriately, that your nervous system is calmed down because if you’re hyper reactive, it’s one of those two things is backed up.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s really good feedback on the on the neurofeedback side, that disentangle or disentrainment. I think is a good one that I’m going to work in with some of my patients that are overly sensitive because I do agree, right.That nervous system is just so overly stimulated where everything’s gonna be sensitive. I think it’s really important to kind of have that calming effect. And that’s good that you added multiple drainage kind of modalities to help improve kind of things moving. What about a whole body vibration? You thought about that. You incorporate that at all.

Dr. Jaban Moore: I don’t incorporate that a lot just because I feel like that’s a little bit harder for a person to have, to get to. I love it. I mean, a few of my clients have vibe plates at home and it’s awesome. You’ll find a clinic that they can go to and do it well. The reason why Kate said Castro pack or dry brushing first is because, to be honest, they’re cheap, easy and anyone can do at home.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s good. And so when you do dry brushing right, it’s kind of a light stroking you are trying to go back to the heart, Is that kind of the goal, that kind of keep that circulation moving.

Dr. Jaban Moore: Yeah, it’s always take it back to the heart. I actually have a video and a guy that I give to people when I recommend it just so they know what they’re doing. Because there’s actually like the drainage ducts that are a little bit more out in your packs that you’re trying to go to and then you actually drain the pecks out to those. But the, the rule of thumb for me for most of the time is just frustrate to the heart.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, that’s good. Very good. Anything else you find to be really important, we haven’t really addressed yet today in today’s conversation?

Dr. Jaban Moore: You know a big piece that says we’re on the the modalities, right? It’s coffee enemas. Coffee enemas can be an absolute game change. They can increase your glutathione 7 to 800%. They get you to go to the bathroom, right? So if you’re constipated, they make poop. So those have been a really big tool for me just to get people moving.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s funny.Think about Doctor Bob Rakowski, good friend of mine. Uh best part of waking up is Folgers in your butt. That was his saying for a while, so that’s a good one. Excellent. Anything else, man?

Dr. Jaban Moore: That’s the the majority of the the fun stuff, right? That’s the big topics right there.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Well, drjabanmoore.com is Jaban’s website. We’ll put the links down below if you guys want to reach out. And again, he’s available via telemedicine health. It’s got lots of content. Uh, all the social media links will be up on his website. Feel free and engage him. Very helpful. Great resource of knowledge there. Dr Jaban, excellent chatting with you man. We’ll be in touch real soon.

Dr. Jaban Moore: Yeah, man. Thanks for having me on.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You too, man. You take care.

References:

https://justinhealth.com/

https://drjabanmoore.com/

Recommended Products:

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Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-secrets-to-addressing-lyme-and-parasites-with-dr-jaban-moore-podcast-375

Natural Ways to Reduce Pain, Break Spasms, Improve Motion & Disc Issues Garrett Salpeter | Podcast #374

Pain from injury, accident, or illness can happen to anyone at any time. You can do several things at home to feel better. So, in this video, Dr. J and Garrett Salpeter discuss natural ways to improve motion and reduce pain through physical medicine and Neubie Method.

The primary goal of physical medicine is to help people overcome issues that prevent them from being more active via various techniques. Since increasing exercise and activity can benefit many physical and mental health conditions and reduce overall mortality.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 – Introduction
0:59 – What is Neurobiolectric (Neubie)?
5:58 – Stretching
14:10 – Muscle Testing
16:23 – Neubie Equipment

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani here with Garrett Salpeter. Really excited to have Garrett back on the show. Garrett’s a regular here. Again, Garrett’s in Austin, Texas and he has his clinic called NeuFit. He has a bioelectric biohacking device called the Neubie uh something that I’ve used in my clinic for years. Very passionate about it because it helps accelerate uh inflammation reduction healing, human performance and we’re gonna just talk about injuries, performance uh range of motion just the whole nine yards because Garrett is an expert in Physical Medicine so really excited to have Garrett on the show. Garrett, what’s up man? How have you been?

Garrett Salpeter: Thank you so much for having me on. It’s great to be back on here to catch up with you and uh excited to dive in.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome man. Well, you’re always doing a lot of research. You’re on the cutting edge of what you do because you’re producing technological devices, you’re continuing education; you’re doing research so you’re always kind of have your finger to the win. What’s working best, what’s happening kind in your clinic with some of the research on, with using the Neubie, which is a biologic device and why don’t we just give people a little summary of what it is and just talk about what you’re seeing in your practice.

Garrett Salpeter: Absolutely. So, the Neubie stands for neuro bioelectric and it’s a direct current stimulation device so if people have experience with electrical devices, you know, virtually all of them are alternating current. This is direct current and that’s important for a couple of reasons, the first is that the direct current electric field actually creates this electric gradient that can help orient or align and accelerate the function of the cells that control healing of bone, muscle, connective tissue, so if we have a physical injury, direct current can actually speed up the healing process and sometimes even more interestingly the second part, the second benefit of direct current is the effect that it has on the nervous system because we often have people who will come into our office you know in pain or with limited range of motion and in one session they’ll notice tangible significant improvements and there you know in the span of one session you might be doing only 10 minutes of actual treatment and it’s obviously far too short of a period of time for any meaningful tissue healing to happen right, ligaments aren’t regenerating in 10 minutes, right? it takes time to heal so when we see these changes they’re more functional, more neurological working more on the software of the body instead of just focusing on the hardware and when we see those changes that the nervous system is the software you know of the body and that’s what controls pain, strength, range of motion, movement and also thoughts and hormones and digestion, all these things right? So, the nervous system is so important but when we see these changes when people have pain or spasms or limited range of motion being able to make these functional changes in the nervous system are super important and direct current allow us to bypass a lot of the protective muscle contractions and speak more powerfully and more precisely to the nervous system so we can make these changes more quickly and lead to longer more significant changes in the long term over time.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. So, in summary, you have hardware which is like bone, connective tissue, ligaments, tendons, you know, some of those that regenerate faster like muscles some like tendons, ligaments, cartilage take longer, right? Either way with some of the electrical healing modalities, you can still increase blood flow, drive better circulation and then of course decrease inflammation so that does accelerate healing on one side of the fence and then we kind of have the software upgrade where you’re really helping the nervous system to recruit other muscles around that area which then now can buffer the impact and force and then also were talking about before the show, I had a spasm from a deadlift like a month and a half ago and my body, I just could not get rid, I had to use a little bit of aspirin because it would just kind of buckled me over 45 degrees and I just walking around like I’m bent over and I took my Neubie and I just kind of got it into that area and I just did five minutes of exercising and loosening and it broke the spasm like that and it stayed for days, I did another movement pattern the next day and I was good so it’s just crazy that even though this is what I do, you forget how impactful just something like a few minutes can be when you’re in that much pain.

Garrett Salpeter: Yeah. And the thing about that and why it’s so beneficial is that you’re really getting to the root cause of the problem there which in that case you know it’s very common for people you know quote and unquote throw their back out, you know, you bend down to pick up a pen or something and something seemingly innocuous can cause this reaction where the back you know just is incredibly painful gets into spasm and people think you know oh my gosh there must be some sort of structural issue but in most of those cases there is a minor irritation of the spinal cord or a nerve root and then what really causes the pain is the body’s reaction too. It’s not so much about what happens to us as it is about how we respond.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s guarding.

Garrett Salpeter: And yeah, so the body creates this hypersensitive spasm, guarding state and really tries to lock down that area to make sure you don’t irritate that nerve again and it’s the spasm, it’s the reaction that actually ends up creating the worst of the pain and the limitation and so with the device and this use of direct current and having this effect on the nervous system were able to go map around on the body to identify where that hypersensitivity or that protective mechanism is being imposed on the body neurologically speaking being imposed on the body and then by stimulating that area it essentially creates a lot of feedback to the brain in a way that teaches the brain that It’s okay to actually move that area. Again, it allows the brain to break or you know down regulate or decrease that protective spasm. It’s like if you have a child who’s screaming and you can soothe them either by you know, holding them or giving them a you know a treat or a pacifier or something like sort of like that sort of thing.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, because I have my wife literally doing my precursor on me. I had her doing some soft tissue, I saw my message person I couldn’t even do Chiropractic outside of blocking because the spasm was just too tight but just five minutes on that was enough to kind of reset that software and so when you’re like dealing with someone like that where would stretching come in because I felt like stretching was actually making this extra problem actually worse. How would you incorporate that into someone’s program or like someone’s injured, how would that kind of come factored in?

Garrett Salpeter: So, when we talk about stretching, I think it’s really important to look through the lens of this software versus hardware conversation because when we stretch a lot of times, we think that we can literally, like, pull our muscles apart and make them physically longer, right? What we really want to do like that you know based on the image that a lot of us have of how the body works that sounds promising but what we, you can lengthen connective tissue over time but that takes a long time to remodel but what we really wanna do to increase flexibility is relax the muscles to change the tone or tension and that is 100% controlled neurologically so what we really need, want to do if we’re talking about stretching to increase muscle, you know length or increased range of motion, what we really wanna do is change nervous system signal or tone to relax that muscle so that it can go it can accommodate greater ranges of motion and there because it’s a neurological skill, you really need a neurological input so using a Neubie or using other techniques where you are instead of just kind of stretching and relaxing there. If you’re adding in if you’re adding in some breathing and you’re waiting long enough for the nervous system to relax you know there can be some benefits there or if you’re contracting the opposing muscles some of that is you know some of that can make it can make an impact but in terms of uh in terms of sorry there’s a lot alarm going off over there. No worries uh, I think it’s a smoke alarm from someone making my wife making breakfast uh so the um the uh the nervos system signal really is paramount and so finding ways to finding ways to address that are so important and that’s one of the benefits we noticed using the Neubie is that we often can help people not only break that spasm and guarding to reduce pain but also see increases in range of motion pretty quickly because we can send that signal there to teach the brain and nervous system that can allow that muscle to relax allow it to go through greater ranges of motion and open that up and then there’s an interesting question of okay if you open up this new range of motion then can you can control it because if you go into a new range of motion you know if you could only get your arm up to here and now it’s getting up to here but you don’t have any control up here you’re then at risk of injury also there so then you have to be able to create strength and motor control and coordination in those range of motion and again those are neurological skills and so using a toll like the Neubie can be very beneficial there as can isometrics at the extreme joint angle where you really get to focus on muscle recruitment over a period of time and you know strength training through complete range of motion can be helpful. Some of these more traditional approaches as long as you apply them in the right way and it really helps to keep this software and hardware framework in mind but that’s the main thing is that we only think about stretching more from the hardware side.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I always found that foam rolling was really helpful and just doing a full range of motion of whatever that was whatever it was a squat of a lunge whatever that was so a lunge for instance to work on my hip flexor just doing into that for a couple of seconds and coming out I felt like doing something more dynamic was always helpful because in life you’re typically not holding a move for 20 or 30 seconds. I also found that with the Neubie on my hip flexor and lower back and then going into that lunge for a couple of seconds I felt like just kind of getting it up to the first sensation was very effective as well from a stretching standpoint.

Garrett Salpeter: I would agree with that and from my perspective at least I think a lot of people in stretching are kind of in this no man’s land you know they do like a 20-second stretch where you’re better off doing late like you did either of the extremes so like you did you know go into it in and out in and out like doing movements where you’re just holding maybe a couple of seconds of that end range right shorter time but more repetitions or longer being in a stretch for you know for two to three minutes so that you give the brain time to understand okay it’s not as threatening, you’re safe enough here to be able to let go and reduce tension so a lot of people are in that kind of no man’s land middle range where it’s not as effective as either the shorter ones or the much longer ones.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great and then so when you have people that have pain because a disc is bulging out or herniating out and hitting that nerve at the IVF or at the disc level what are you doing kind of with your techniques to kind of help reduce that disc pain because conventional medicine, I mean, outside of doing surgery I mean maybe you do some kind of decompression or you hang upside down or there’s some different like decompression techniques or tables that chiropractors use. What do you typically do in your clinic when you see a disc patient?

Garrett Salpeter: So, one of the first things that we want to start with is actually education start to start about with talking about some of these really fascinating studies that show for example patients who have herniated discs and back pain you know if they there’s one group that has surgery another group that uses physical therapy or Chiropractic or more conservative care and after 12 months they end up virtually the same so there’s really very little long-term benefit and not to say that there are cases where surgeries you know not required or something like that you know I think it’s overprescribed and overdone but there certainly are cases where it’s the right move and it’s worth doing um the other thing that we like to share with people in this kind of educational process is that there are really fascinating imaging studies that show something like 30% of people in their 30s 50% of people in there 50s and even higher the older you ger have people who don’t have any pain at all you know half or more of them will still have some disc bulges or you know some herniations or different things show up on an MRI okay that you know normally you think oh that would cause pain and yet they don’t have any pain so the question is why why can someone else have the same thing you do and have no pain and yet you are coming here to see us in pain. There’s more to it than just the structural issues so a lot of it has to do with that same protective spasm that you had when you were talking about you’re dead lifted and then you got that you know that thousand mill backs a lot of it has to do with that kind of pattern you know the individual getting stuck in that pattern over time and not being able to break that cycle of spasm and pain neurologically so the first thing that we want to do is go through that same mapping process and identify where the guarding and protection is happening neurologically and do that same process and sometimes we notice people make significant progress even though again you know in one session their disk has structure hasn’t changed, the disc hasn’t healed or significantly moved back into you know back into place or anything like that but a lot of times someone will feel better even in that first visit because you’ve reduced that they’ve reduced that spasm and then we also want overtime to help better balance the structure, get the right muscles working so they’re no longer collapsing into that part of the spine and causing the pressure on the disc that’s gonna make it balls or herniate so we also want to even if someone’s feeling a little bit better right away we want to make sure that we continue to work on proper muscle activation, improve biomechanics so that they can then you know do more and more activity. They can increase the load on their body be more active and have the resilience to be able to do that without slipping back into that you know that kind of painful spasm guarding protective state.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think that’s solid because when you have an injury right you talked about a kind of the study on the x-rays where they looked at x-rays or MRIs and they saw 50% of people that had bulge or issues that should cause pain, had no pain, right? So, there’s something functionally at play here where you look at the structure objectively obviously flip a coin someone could be in pain or not but then functionally something else is going on here and you kind of alluded to it earlier with the shoulder increasing range of motion at the shoulder you may have higher range of motion here but you may not have the stability within your supraspinatus your Pec major your Pec minor, your subscap to be able to stabilize that muscle up here so even if you were to injure, let’s say your AC joint right, acromioclavicular joint right the reason why would you injure that joint right it’s because typically there’s the muscles around that joint aren’t stable and so how are you looking at these joints and assessing is this joint fully stable, how are we assessing the muscles all around it?

Garrett Salpeter: So, I like to do manual muscle testing and we teach a version of muscle testing for that just to kind of check at a high level can this you know this patient can this individual actually turn their muscles on in the first place can they actually get signal there or is there so much inhibition or you know the you know shut down is the muscle shut down or weak because of that habits or previous injuries um so we like to do like to do manual muscle testing just to see if there are any weak links in the areas where they can’t turn on and we like to do the scanning and mapping process with the Neubie were talking about and that lets us know where they’re again where’s that guarding and protection is present which also can mean inhibition or shutting down signal.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How does that work; you mind taking the machine and just you don’t have to put it on how would you scan that?

Garrett Salpeter: Yeah. So, I don’t think you can see that in my frame.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m gonna have you go full screen. I’m gonna make you go big. Let me see if I can make you big here. Just me a second. See, if I can get you bigger on this here. All right. Well, let me see if I can do it. Well, I’ll have you keep on hold on. Let me turn it off.

Garrett Salpeter: Oh, there we go, okay so this is the device right here, the Neubie, and what we would do is take one of the pads and scan around on the body like this so we’re scanning around what we’re doing is actually sending the signal as if that area of the body is being loaded so when it’s on the bicep, it’s as if you’re you know doing bicep curls or using that muscle there and wherever the muscles are working well, the brain sees that and says oh yeah that’s just you know that muscle doing it’s thing normally there’s nothing threatening about that but if we stimulate an area that hasn’t been working well recently because it’s been weak or you have bad habits where you haven’t been using that area or have adjusted around it because of old injuries if we stimulate an area like that or where the brain is guarding and protecting in that area then we have a situation where we send that signal and the brain sees that and says that’s threatening that’s different that’s novel or new and so it’ll protect against that and so most areas that are working well feels kind of pleasant and then when we get that greater reactivity where we pick up on that hypersensitivity and some of those neurobiological issues that we were talking about the body reacts more and that helps us understand where we need to where we need to stimulate and then we stimulate those areas and we teach the brain to take off the breaks so to speak if it’s guarding and protecting it’s sort of like you’re driving a car hitting the throttle and the brake pedal at the same time which of course is inefficient and waste of energy and so we teach not necessarily teach you to like get stronger or put more force down on the throttle but we teach you to be more skillful neurologically and take the other foot off the brake and that’s what this does, this helps us find the reactivity where those breaks are being imposed and then lift them off to an appropriate level you know we have protective mechanisms to prevent ourselves from getting hurt and this just allows us to reset them back to the normal level not to any place that’s going to you know have us in a compromised position.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense and then when you find, you kind of scan, you find some issues some disturbance some may manifest as pain then you anchor one pad and then you search on the, through the other pad right and so when you’re doing that are you trying to cross the joint, are you like, what’s your philosophy when you scan? Is it just kind of looking at the next best area or are you trying to go across the joint where maybe stability or anchoring? What happened? How does that next step work?

Garrett Salpeter: So, I’m trying to find the first domino or the area of greatest impact so when we find, if we have a spot here uh you know on the pectoral muscle for example and then what we would do is yeah we figure out where to put the other pad where you know the grounding pad of the source pad or whatever you wanna call it and we would then find the area that’s gonna typically that’s gonna kind of maximize the impact here sometimes that spot itself might also be a hot spot or an area of greatest or greater need and we don’t necessarily need to go across the joint or more proximal and distal or you know higher up and further down, it’s more about finding the area of greatest need for that person neurologically where they have the greatest amount of protection or inhibition or dysfunction and working on that so sometimes the pads will be, I find another one here I show you something, they’ll be like right next to each other. Let’s imagine this is a pad sometimes they’d be right next to each other sometimes they’ll be across the joint like that and then sometimes they’ll be you know oriented along you know one lower down on the arm so they can be in different orientations, there’s not necessarily a set mechanism of, yeah, we’re trying to go across the joint and have them both longitudinally along the same muscle. It’s more about trying to find what is the area of greatest need for that individual person.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And how many outputs or pads would you put on that joint, obviously, with the Neubie, the cool thing is you have up to eight, I mean, something as a shoulder, would you kind of keep it at two or three uh bigger joints you’d go more like what’s your philosophy on how many outputs, how many you know pads would you put on a joint in a given area?

Garrett Salpeter: It depends on where we are in the process. In the beginning, we are we’re doing that mapping process, we’re finding these hot spots or areas of interest or dysfunctions or trigger points, you know, sometimes we refer them with different words but we essentially want to let the patient’s body be our guide in the beginning and work on however many hot spots show up and so far some people it’s two pad you know it was one spot and we need a grounding pad or a source pad to stimulate that so far some people it’s just two pads and then for some they have you know eight or more hot spots so we might be using all eight pads even on a smaller joint you know or smaller area of the body so it’s more about that more about showing up what that patient is representing with and what their body’s telling us in the beginning and then as we progress once we get out of the acute stage where we’ve worked through those hot spots and those kind of more immediate more acute dysfunction then we want to talk about improving mechanics about strengthening about increasing muscle recruitment or relaxing muscles for greater range of motion and then we can use uh you know all eight pads depending on what we want to do so one of my favorites you know examples of this is to talk about the hip if we want to increase hip extension, we can actually use a couple of the leads on the front side of the hip you know on the hip flexors quads adductors on a setting that’s going to help them relax more and more and then on the back side of the hip so on the glute specifically we’re thinking there um to drive hip extension we can actually change the setting on the device to create more contraction in those muscles and so contraction on one side on the back side and relaxation of the front can help lead to greater hip extension range of motion so it depends a little bit on where we’re going definitely in the beginning we want to not necessarily work on a predetermined number of spots or pads but let that patient’s body be our guide.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, when you work up a patient right and you, kind of like map out these hot spots let’s say someone comes in with their shoulder area let’s say you find some hot spots here and, in the back, and then down here on the tricep are those kinds of your spots you’re going to hit for the next couple of weeks or are you trying to reinvent the wheel every time and then you’re scanning every single appointment and seeing if they change. How often do you keep the original spots going for that first assessment?

Garrett Salpeter: So, that’s a great question most of the time the you know fortunate answer for a clinician is that you typically don’t have to rescan because typically these patterns that people have that are contributing to injuries are fairly deep-seated or deep rooted patterns that are gonna take a little while take several sessions to fully you know we should see progress each visit and yet we should likely need a few visits to really make more lasting even more significant and meaningful changes so typically once we find those spots especially if they’re standing out clearly and there’s not a lot of them typically we’d continue to work those some ones uh. If there’s a lot of spots and we’re having to prioritize we may want to recheck those just to see you know sometimes if when A or B improve then we want to work on C, D and E. Maybe those become the next kind of highest priority areas to work on so um it depends a little bit on the circumstances but generally you know you’re not gonna see significant change in terms of what shows up when we’re doing that mapping, session over session unless someone you know, we definitely want to do it if someone isn’t making the progress that we wish to see or if there’s a new presentation a new symptom or you know they went out and played in a basketball game or tennis match and have some sort of new symptom or problem yeah we’d want to rescan then but generally speaking you’re picking up these patterns that are more than just like oh I slept wrong or more than just oh that’s because my you know my hamstring are sore from the work that I did the other day. It’s usually more uh, usually a layer deeper than that and so when it shows up we can work on it for, you know. at least several sessions.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think that’s great. I mean someone has worked in the physical medicine space for quite a while, I think this is an awesome tool to have. We’ll put links down below so if people on the patient level want to reach out to you Garrett and your stuff there’ll be a link down below that you can reach out. If you’re a practitioner and you or just someone who wants to access this technology at home for better health um kind of biohacking yourself more on a daily basis, we’ll put some information down below for that. Anything else you wanna leave the listeners with it that’s going in your clinics, anything new or cool that you wanna highlight?

Garrett Salpeter: One piece of news is that we just in the last couple of months published our first peer-reviewed scientific journal article on the new bible and it shows that we’re basically using the Neubie to uh without any weight without any external load at all and comparing that to the gold standard of exercise which is lifting weights with about 75 or 80% of one rep max so one rep max would be like the amount of weight that’s so heavy you can only lift it once 75 or 80% of that is you know a weight that you can lift maybe you know eight to ten to eight times or something like that so that’s yeah that’s essentially the gold standard of resistance training and we’re seeing that with the Neubie and no external load, you can get a very similar effects on muscle as using heavier resistance and more traditional exercise so that is something that is really cool because it opens up opportunities for people who can’t lift heavy because they have a joint injury or some other pain or issue they’re trying to work around or they’re in the middle of a professional sports season and this can help them get you know get training while better managing fatigue and stresses of the season also for older people who or people who have mobility problems or various neurological diseases and dysfunction that can’t really do traditional gym exercise weightlifting this can allow them to get metabolic hormonal muscle building benefits and gosh muscle I mean one of the most interesting bodies of research I think is shows the beneficial effects of muscle mass on longevity and how having more muscle helps with so many factors hormonally metabolically overall health wise that you maintaining muscle mass as we age is one of the key one of the biggest factors in all-cause mortality and extending life and health span.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% agree. I think that’s awesome. Guys reach out to the NeuFit N-E-U dot Fit. We’ll put links down below where you guys can reach out. We have some other content with Garrett, we’ll put some old podcast links down below as well. Garrett, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.

Garrett Salpeter: Thank you. It was a blast. I loved it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: All right. Thanks. Take care.

References:

https://justinhealth.com/

Recommended Product:

https://neu.fit/justinhealth

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/natural-ways-to-reduce-pain-break-spasms-improve-motion-disc-issues-garrett-salpeter-podcast-374

Hair Loss Restoration, Improve Testosterone, Inflamm-aging & Inflammation – Jay Campbell Podcast #373

Having a lush and full head of hair is a treasure we all want to enjoy. Having thick hair is seen as a sign of being youthful and having vitality — even being sexy. Millions of people find that they’re suffering from thinning hair or hair loss, called “alopecia” in medical terms. It’s a common problem that affects both men and women. Medical hair restoration is the only way back from thinning hair for many people. For a select number, though, their thinning hair is due to inflammation.

Dr J and Jay Campbell discuss that the good news is you can help your body control the amount of inflammation you’re experiencing by making simple changes in your diet and managing your stress levels. You can take a proactive approach to your hair restoration by eating a diet rich in anti-inflammatory foods. Try anti-inflammatory beverages and foods. While hair restoration is not an overnight process, making these small changes in your diet can support your body’s efforts to heal itself.

Reducing your inflammation can give your hair a chance to regrow. Be sure to reduce your intake of foods that promote inflammation and approach your doctor for a professional and safe course of action.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 – Introduction
3:35 – Hormones
49:27 – Insulin Resistance
55:17 – Peptides

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani in the house with Jay Campbell. Really excited for today’s podcast. We’re gonna be talking about a whole host of things from hair loss to improving testosterone, inflammation versus inflammation as well as just increasing consciousness. Jay, welcome to the podcast, man. How you doing?

Jay Campbell: Doc, man, it’s an honor to be here always when I got a chance to speak with people in our profession who are knowledgeable. I’m privileged and humbled to be here. So, man, let’s make this amazing.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent. Very good. Well, in the functional medicine community kind of where I work, there’s a lot of people that complain about hair loss especially kind of people coming post-Covid, right? We’re doing a lot of nutritional things, diet things, improving digestion, absorption, trying to get inflammation down. But I kind of found you because you have a couple of products out there that I’ve heard some really good things about that kind of improve hair loss, improve hair restoration, outside of like you know your typical like Propecia, Rogaine, Minoxidil type of medications. I want to talk a little bit more about that just kind of out of the gates. Go ahead.

Jay Campbell: Yeah. So, it’s, uh, again, thanks for being here. It’s an honor to be here with you today. I’m very excited always whenever I get the opportunity or the chance to talk about hair loss, um, when I speak about hair loss, I usually, for people that aren’t really up to speed, um, I kind of like dropped the hammer because as you know from reading my articles but you’re one of the few that actually wants to drill down to that rabbit hole because you know that article that was on ben greenfield’s website last summer that was three parts is over 10 000 words right? So, most people today don’t read in that depth but there’s a lot of science now out there that teaches us the real definition and cause of hair loss and drum roll please. Hair loss is caused by blood flow restriction to the scalp. There’s nothing else that causes hair loss but blood flow restriction to the scalp and blood flow restriction to the scalp is actually caused by a myriad, you know, number of things. I mean, there’s probably, I could give you a hundred answers as to what causes hair loss and you know that obviously is covered, uh, that is micro irritants that is you know heavy lead poisoning that is overexposure to the sun, that is stress, that is lack of sleep, that is hormonal related hair loss, right? So, DHT inhibition, uh, you know, women that have autoimmune disorders lack of sleep again causing cortisol spikes and you know over increases of prolactin, I mean, again, there’s so many different answers IGF-1, you know, insufficiencies and overproduction, so there’s so many different things that can cause hair loss but we definitely at least now know that if we can control for the loss or the blood flow restriction to the scalp and do things to increase blood to the scalp, we can actually regrow hair and Justin what’s so cool is you know my product um you know without being a show or sounding like a shill. If you are suffering from a genetic predisposition which is you know androgenic alopecia or androgenic alloresia, there’s other ones you can actually minimize that by doing again the things that you need to remove inflammation from the scalp and increase what you would call angiogenesis to the scalp which is again increasing red blood cells and at some point, you know, as we get deeper into this you know, I’m happy to give people a lot of different things you can do, I have like a really cool meme that I can send you and you can post you know after the fact of like my and my business partner obviously nick with our company but like our inner circle hacks of what you can do to massively increase hair loss as your hair regrowth as you age.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Excellent and I saw this article, I had it up here on the screen as we were kind of chatting. This was a phenomenal article I saw earlier in the year because it talked about DHT, we kind of know DHT is this like testosterone metabolite and so, as you get older, essentially you have these hairs that are naturally prone to be DHT sensitive and we know there’s different medications are out there to block that so just kind of for the average person you have your finasteride medications, you could do oral or topical thing that kind of block that which can be helpful for some people but then you kind of and I always intuitively knew there was an inflammation component because I’ve worked that many patients over the last decade where we improved their diet, we got their gut working better, we modulated cortisol, we did things to help kind of the immune response, glutathione, NAC, things to help with the oxidative stress around the scalp and I saw hair improvements significantly so I know there had to be something more than just DHT in and of itself and then you kind of posted a couple of articles talking about that so just to kind of you know we have like one major track in conventional medicine which is like you finasterides which are you’re like 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors, then you have like Rogaine minoxidil which are your vasodilators. Those are your two major paths but then you kind of come in so just kind of talk about how you took the two major paths and how you kind of had this little side detour that you find to be better.

Jay Campbell: Man, I’m so glad to talk to you today man because I haven’t had a chance to go this deep but this is you know really what we have been attempting to expound and obviously we did a pretty good job myself Nick and Ben and we did Ben’s podcast and you know again, the article was three parts and Ben did a lot of stuff into this but to your questions. Let’s go really big pictures. So, the conventional medicine route was always about inhibiting DHT. But anyone who’s ever inhibited DHT whether it was from the script which is you’ve already mentioned Propecia finasteride or dutasteride, yep, you know topically they realized that those, you know, medications actually attached to the follicular root in the scalp somewhat I always say someone and again you know read the articles that we’ve written if you want to understand the true science but they will prevent further miniaturization but here’s the big gotcha, the big gotcha is that 90% of people who use any of those products to again further miniature or reduce miniaturization. If you stop, all the hair falls out, because they have attached to those follicles in the scalp blocking that conversion so once you stop the you know the actual taking of again the drug or the vasodilator because this also applies to minoxidil and Rogaine, uh, the hair falls out and again anyone who’s used these things has experienced this the other big issue is that there’s a very large percentage. There’s really no number, uh, of men and women sadly because don’t report this like men do but who suffer all sorts of dysfunction. Sexual dysfunction, brain dysfunction, uh, bone mineral density dysfunction from these drugs and again as you know because you’ve read them and you just brought them up but you know we wrote an article about DHT inhibition causing cellular dysfunction over time and the problem and again, I don’t want to worry people and this is a big rabbit hole but again you know happy to point people and you will obviously and you’re doing it now to the articles on our site that provides the science on this but over time DHT, inhibiting DHT, which is again a natural biological pathway causes cellular damage and this can be seen if you do genetic testing, if you do methylated genetic testing, if you go to trudiagnostic.com it’s T-R-U , you know it’s Ryan Smith’s company or if you use the Glycan age test. Any of these people now that are doing this kind of DNA at the cellular level tests can see people who have been using DHT inhibitors and by the way this also extends into testosterone optimization. If you’re using an AI an aromatase inhibitor medication because again, you’re blocking from an x. Yes. Exactly. You’re blocking very powerful and profound biological pathways that should never be inhibited. Now, remember most of DHT medications and AI medications were originally created for people that we’re suffering from cancer, right? And then these medications were extrapolated and one of my good friends in medicine always like says extrapolation does not correlate to causation, right, you know, they’re putting them over into these other fields like hair replacement or hair restoration and of course suppressing estrogen and people using therapeutic hormones, uh, it was bad thing all together and now we have you know five seven 10 15 years of observation and we can see the harm that it’s causing but Justin, a lot of people will come out, you know, who and they’ll listen to this podcast and they’ll say but J I’ve been using a DHT inhibitor, it’s stopped my hair loss, I get my blood work done twice a year, I have absolutely no issues right. Like, I’m low body fat. I’m low inflammation, I take care of myself, I have clean diet and I will say that’s absolutely true but what do your telomeres look like. And so, this is a whole big thing and I would say that like over the next three to five years as more and more people start doing these DNA based tests and they can really look at the end caps and they can see what these DHT inhibitors and AI drugs or medications are doing. It’s gonna be a major reveal and I will just one throw one other thing I there just to like drop the hammer. The majority of men who have died in the last three years, uh, you know pro-body-builders physique athletes, performance athletes, competitors, even strong men of quote unquote heart attacks or sudden death because again, they’re using God knows, what you know in the kitchen sink, those guys actually died of what are called micro fissures in their vascular networks from using AIs. The AI’s literally are causing fissures.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh wow! That’s the reason why, huh? Yeah, I know, they’re doing a whole bunch of medications.

Jay Campbell: I have. I’m the only guy that’s brave enough to come out and say this. And again, there’s nobody doing autopsies on these people and I’m not gonna mention names. I am very connected to people who worked with these guys or work with these guys, previous to them dying and we know what they’re using and

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’re not hearing this from the heart, the heart issues, the heart hypertrophy due to the steroids. Is there any component in that too?

Jay Campbell: Absolutely. Dude, there isn’t a single bit of research in the entire world that shows that testosterone causes anything.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I imagine these guys probably aren’t just on bioidenticals, they’re probably.

Jay Campbell: Exactly, kind of, I mean. Exactly, so we’re talking about that’s exactly right. So, we’re talking about when you’re taking super physiologic levels of all sorts of things, right? And all sorts of things are going wrong and all sorts of harm is being caused but what we definitely do know is it’s the Ais that are causing the blockage in the vascular network and look let me explain the science behind this because this needs to get out there more. You never inhibit estrogen, ever. Most doctors out there today still do not understand that there’s no such thing as estrogen or high estrogen symptoms or side effects. These side effects that are being caused are due to inflammation. People have too much visceral body fat. They’re on, you know, therapeutic hormones. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a man or woman and the exogenous hormones are causing an inflammatory response. Their inflammasomes being released from the visceral fat, normally that causes the quote unquote side effects of like you know water retention or you know irritability or mood disablement. All these people literally extrapolate that to high estrogen symptoms it’s completely a falsehood. All the science and evidence shows that you need healthy levels of estrogen to confer protection to biological systems so whenever you use testosterone whether you’re a man or woman you should never block estrogen, you know, again, through aromatization because that is what is going to convert protection to the vascular network to the brain to bone mineral I mean all of these things need estrogen and I dude, I go on Instagram yesterday. And I’m looking at, I won’t name names because they’ll name names but very very well-respected people with massive audiences way bigger than me who do not understand this still who are still recommending to their patients about preventing or miniaturizing or blocking aromatization. I know, we rabbit whole from hair loos but all of this stuff relates yeah and I’ll take it back very simplistically, you cannot block a God-created or biologically-created system in the body and not think that you’re gonna have if you’re, basically, you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? They’re going to have downstream issues and effects that are going to show up within time, you know my business partner Nick love to call you know he’s a dork. Third order effects, right? But, like, the reality is you’re going to see nasty things happen when you do this and unfortunately medicine, conventional, not you and me, conventional loves to use these drugs to screw around with the biological cascade that was again created, you know in these perfect bodies that we have, not realizing that doing that is going to have long-term damage.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. So, what about using natural compounds because you’re talking about like you know the Aromatase inhibitors, right? You’re talking about some of the pharmaceuticals but just by keeping inflammation down by avoiding processed grains and excess omega-6 oils. That may also have an improvement on things just selenium and zinc and nutrients may have some mild DHT, estrogen metabolizing effects. Eating cruciferous vegetables and some of the sulfur-rich compounds may help with some of that too. So, we kind of draw a line between natural things that may have a more modulating effect versus drugs that may kidn of be in discretionary and kind of go too over the top too high or low on that.

Jay Campbell: So, yeah. So, it’s a great question, so like I get this question a lot all the time, you know, people will ask me well what about natural stuff you know, like doctor, I got one, a question like to days ago Dr. Berg recommends, you know natural, you know using things to naturally suppress estrogen. Okay, so again, let’s go back. We do not want to suppress estrogen. What we do want and you already said it is, we want less inflammation. How we suppress inflammation is not being fat and obviously one of the talking points that we have on this call is what is the greatest strategy for a human being to minimize disease as they age. The greatest strategy and by the way, if you ask a hundred doctors that question one will get it right, the greatest strategy to minimize disease as we age is building muscle because muscle is the greatest deterrent to the disease of aging because muscle is the most metabolically active tissue and muscle does not allow for inflammation. Now, I’m not talking about becoming a huge body builder but I’m talking about being functionally lean as we age when you build muscle you have less fat, the more muscle you have, the less chance you have, the disease, again the less inflammation, the more bone mineral density you have, the more functional strength you have on and on it goes so I mean like the reality is all those things you said are great adjuvants you know cruciferous vegetables, uh, you know minimizing seed oil consumption, living insulin control, I love talking about this kind of stuff but at the end of the day, you have to build muscle and you know, I’m not one of those guys that says oh, you shouldn’t do cardio and you only build muscle, you have to have a holistic viewpoint. You know, if you’re a man, I mean I just got into this yesterday with a very, very big influencer, I won’t name her name, she’s very, very well, now we talk all the time and she’s like not doing cardio and she’s almost 50 and I’m like what, you know, I’m starting to get belly fat, I won’t do cardio, well then that belly fat’s gonna keep coming like there’s no amount of growth hormone or testosterone or peptides or anything that you’re gonna take, if you don’t increase movement patterning, right? So, I mean, at the end of the day, all those things are amazing but build muscle, be functionally strong, you know, we can talk mindfulness and yoga and meditation and doing all that stuff and being pliable but you got to build muscle because the more sick you get it’s not okay.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Let me kind of go rapid fire, you hit a bunch of avenues I want to go down, so from a movement, um, muscle building standpoint are we just talking about functional movements, push pull band, squat kind of lunge type of patterns. Anything more like super slow, certain periodization bands, cables, I mean, kind of what does your routine look like, just you know, what would be that they, if you look at your routine kind of from a thousand-yard view, what would be the key core things you’d want to distill to other people that they can apply to theirs?

Jay Campbell: Dude, man, I love your questions dude. You’re the best. You’re the best interviewer I’ve been on in a long time. Very, very knowledgeable man, so great credit to you. Um, that’s a very open-ended question, and I would say that, the answer is I’ll definitely give my, you know, regimen, my wife and its regiment and I’m 51 you know and I look literally a lot better than most people look at 20. Okay, and obviously grow. Everything but the kitchen sink at my body, you know, I use therapeutic testosterone, I use therapeutic growth hormone, uh, when I’m not using therapeutic growth hormone, I use peptides, uh, I take all sorts of insulin suppressing medications and supplements. I use metformin, I use you know, dihydro berberine. I mean, like I said man, I throw the kitchen sink in my body but I’m also very you know scientifically efficient, I use very precise dosages, I go by the research and of course the research for me is empirical, right? I got 30 years of doing this. I mean, I’ve been treating my body like a raprap for 30 years but to answer your question specifically because it is important, it’s an amazing question is, it’s gonna be relevant to the person’s age. A 25-year-old man or woman can train much more intensely and recover much better than a guy at 51 can, right? No matter, how well I take care of myself and how injury-proofed I am and all the shit that I take to recover and how good my sleep is, I still do not have the synovial fluid in my joint capsules as that 25-year-old does, right, so I have to modulate the intensity and the recovery from that age to a 50-year-old but you know to answer your question I think the answer is yes. You know, I would say all of the above, you know, weight training obvious bone bearing resistance training, you know, a lot of people that don’t have access to a gym with all the bullshit that’s happened in the last two and a half years then yeah, you got to do push-pull, push-ups, you know free standing squats, uh, you know if you have a pull-up bar hopefully if you have bands, I mean again, everything is good. My personal pet belief is it’s really not a belief it’s more of a knowing because I’ve been doing it for so long is, as you age rep range is more important that it when you’re in your 20s in your, let’s say like your early 30s because it’s all about taking the muscle to positive muscle failure, right, not eccentric, not negative but to a place where literally, your fibers cannot do another rep so like I have a formulation of training again I’ve created myself and I call it positive muscle fiber training. It’s PMF training. It’s a system that I sell it’s a video and I’m not here to sell my course or anything like that but I don’t even know about that wow, yeah, I mean I’ll do, I’ll send it to you after this and you can go through it. It’s pretty epic. I got a lot of people on it but and honestly I’m stepping on the shoulders of giants because you know I learned from Charles Poliquin, I learned from Jim Brown, you know, I learned from genius guys but the end of the day, the older you are the more you have to push your body’s ligament you know ligaments tendons and muscle fibers to a place where they reach exhaustion pretty quickly and so for me a couple of warm-up sets, two work sets each work set goes to positive muscle failure, again, I’m not doing eccentrics, I don’t have somebody spotting me and then I move, right and I train my body over usually six weeks, uh, you know, periodized, uh, rotations and it’s either full body Monday Wednesday Friday or it’s um kind of a push-pull split. It’s basically a split, you know, chest, back, leg, biceps and then delts, triceps, always finishing with core depending on where I’m at in the year, you know, I always foam roll before and after yeah. Sometimes, I do some pretty static stretching.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How long is your workout typically?

Jay Campbell: Uh, my wife and I train together and my 14 years old daughter trains with us because she’s like a Mary Lou from Mary Lou Retton and Jim Freeze. So if it’s al three of us probably 50 minutes but today my, she’s actually a cheer camp at woodward academy up in central California so my wife and I trained together this morning and we were like 36 minutes I think.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Nice, nice and in regards to the cardio aspect are you kind of doing more of a tabata interval sprint stuff. There’s a lot og stuff on my twitter feed about people really more into like the zone two type of thing getting your heart rate around 120 for like 30 minutes and just kind of holding a steady state. What’s your thought process on both of those. What do you like?

Jay Campbell: Amazing question, so I’m probably gonna be a little bit different here and you know take it a different direction and you know my background from a research standpoint is low-carb ketogenic dieting 20-plus years ago so I have a lot of experience with energy systems at one time, one time I worked with Lyle Mcdonald, I was kind of his research assistant before he wrote the first book on ketogenic dieting and exercise so you know all the science but at the end of the day a person’s cardio training should be relevant to their diet and the reason I say that is if you’re a faster okay or a very low carbohydrate person and that might be what paleo that could be carnivore keto, you have to use your training, you’re not your lifting but your cardio training should be relevant to your energy demand, right? So, if you’re somebody like me and by way I have a program that I’ve been following since 2010, it’s you know, one of the programs in my book which is called the metabolic blowtorch diet but it’s an every alternate day fasting. So, I fast on the non-lifting days and I eat on my lifting days, right? So, I eat, I train, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, normally and those are the days I eat and then Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, I fast and my fastening intervals are anywhere from 18 sometimes just full 24 hours, wake up early the next day and you know glycogen load before I train and that’s how I do it but in truth your cardio or the people watching this shows cardio should again be relevant to the energy that they have while they’re doing the cardio so that zone one, zone two is it’s great advice, I mean I normally I’m doing my cardio, fasted I’m normally in steady state and my heart rate is somewhere between 150 and 135, okay? Now, if I wanted to do a Fartlek, Tabata interval session, I would do it on my lifting day because I have glycogen and I would do 30, yeah, it depends 25 to 35 minutes of some form of an interval right and I would do that because I know that I have glycogen to fuel and not I’m in a place where I have, you know glycolytic deprivation and I could burn my muscles so here’s the big mistake, the big mistake that people make is they’re fasting and they do intervals and you don’t want to do that especially if you just fasted for 16 hours because your body is very prone tapping, uh, you know through what is it the enzyme muscle creatine kinase, yeah, muscle protein and any more catabolism. Yeah, exactly as soon as you do that, you’re now breaking down muscle tissue and fueling your body’s energy demand from the protein and so I always tell people like you just got to be cognizant where you are from an energy system so you know again if you’re a hardcore carnivore keto person then you should never be beyond zone two it should be always be steady state moderate intensity and let’s not forget depending on your age, low impact, do you know how many people who are 40, who like you know, take up crossfitting and go right into this like high impact ballistic shit and destroy themselves, I always used to I always used to make jokes I was like man if I was an Orthopade, I would put all my centers next to crossfit gyms.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean for my whole cardio approach, like doing rowing because just because most cardio things, you’re in flexion state.

Jay Campbell: Rowing’s amazing.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s the only thing that opens you up and puts you in that extension.

Jay Campbell: Rowing and swimming. Same thing. If you can do broad smoke swimming but I mean how many people have a lot, have access to a lap pool but dude, rowing is amazing. If you have one of those in your house, that’s the best form of cardio.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And so, you recommend most people. Do you like it empty stomach doing your cardio, keep it more zoned too for most.

Jay Campbell: Yes. Yeah. So, like I mean again, it depends because there’s days when I train, I mean again, um, everything is relevant to what that person’s goal is right so like if you’re a 45-year-old person. Yeah. Exactly like you don’t give a shit about being ripped or you’re not in a you know a triathlete or some sort of like crazy weekend competition. It’s how do I look better with my shirt off, you know, how do I have good self-confidence in my job, you know, and then ultimately like as I age like can I bend over and I pick up my grandkids or my children’s kids you know what I’m saying without suffering without pulling something in my spine, um, you know, my wife and I are like really into looking good like we enjoy traveling, you know to exotic vacations so there’s like, you know, usually like three months out of the year sometimes four, we want to look amazing in a bathing suit, you know, I mean, to be an empty nester you know, so it’s like I want to like travel the world with my shirt off and be like, yeah. I feel good about the way I look, right? It’s always about as you know Doc, functional strength as we age and the self confidence to that comes from being lean. I mean you know you look better in cloths you know, you don’t have to worry about like throwing your cloths away, you know, because you’re going down and up and all that stuff so again, inflammation will stay ay bay by maintaining strength, maintaining leanness and obviously you know preparing, you know, again, depending on your diet, the form of training.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. I think it was Charles Paulken, that said that most people’s health goals just revolve around wanting to look good naked right? That’s pretty

Jay Campbell: much honestly, that’s probably the best way you could say it and you know there’s another thing though to do that too is like

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: At a functional aspect

Jay Campbell: Look for the opposite, most people don’t even give a shit not your watchers or mine but most people don’t give a shit about their health until they don’t have their health.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. That’s true.

Jay Campbell: And then they throw everything, you know, including the kitchen sink at it and it’s like dude, you took 35, 45 years to get to this poor level. You think it’s gonna be fixed in a six week or nine-week program or boot camp. No.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Right. So, I want to crystallize. It so your workout, you’re working out for 30 to 45 minutes. What are you picking six to eight movement patterns your foam rollies are working on soft tissue quality and pliability, you know probably during the workout and so is that kind of you want to add a little more detail to that. Does that ring a bell.

Jay Campbell: Absolutely. Let me add more detail I mean I just came from the chiropractor before I got on your show, okay so I mean I see my chiropractor at least once a week. You know my wife and I usually go together, he’s pretty advanced dude, uh, once a month I see my deep tissue lady who does cranial sacral and I did a five and a half hour session on Saturday and you know she clears out all the negative juju. Yeah and then I also have a body worker that I see every other week on Tuesdays which I will be seeing him tomorrow and you know he does the cupping and you know ART and you know just literally just realigning me and stuff so I mean we’re very hardcore, I would say you now most, more than most people and really like making sure that we maintain these physical avatar bodies as we age and as you know dude, it gets it doesn’t get easier, that’s all you can say.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I can imagine so your cardio routine, what does that look like now, give me that

Jay Campbell: That’s another great question, um, so I’m a big biker, I have, I don’t have a Peloton, I have a really nice life cycle. It’s literally, right over to the right of me in my studio. We also have in my house, we have the newest, the latest and greatest, uh, what is it, um, shit, the treadmill that goes up to 40-degree incline. I can’t even think of what it’s called. It’s insane. Like, if you, so we’re going to Peru at the end of July, I’m filming a television series there and it’s my second trip to Peru but I mean, you know, there’s 18-19,000 feet, uh peeks in Peru you know mount humane day is like 19,500 feet. So, you know, I wanna be ready and I mean I’m pretty good I you know, cardiovascular but I’m like, no, I’m gonna buy this. It’s a NordicTrack. I couldn’t think of this, the x32i.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ve seen that.

Jay Campbell: The x32i, it’s like the, you know, the bee’s knees and we just got it like two months ago and it’s amazing, dude. Like, I mean, it’s the most amazing treadmill I’ve ever got, I mean there you have to be an absolute freak to walk for 30minutes at 40-degree incline at like 2.5 miles an hour. I mean, it’ll burn. I’m not exaggerating. It’ll burn 1500 calories in 30 minutes, that’s how insane. But it’s uh, it’s you know, we got it for that purpose but I normally do bike because I like to breed on my bike, okay, and my masseuse, my cranial sacral lady told me on Saturday, she’s like dude you got over patterning in your right, you know, lower quadrant, uh, you know, inside where your, uh, you know, your connective tissue is, uh, your psoas and all this stuff, you just got over patterning, you’ve been biking for so long and doing it so consistently I want you to move to the treadmill and she’s like don’t walk fast, you know, she’s like walk at a wide pace, so I mean I moved to that to do that but normally I’m a biker man, I mean, I should get an ergometer, you know, when you said that you’re like here’s another guy telling me that’s I got to get that in my house but uh, my wife is a treadmill walker on an incline and I’m mostly a bike guy but I mean again, you know, back to the heart rate stuff, I usually ride, at 15 intensity on my life cycle and my heart rate goes from you know, anywhere from at the highest like 142.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: How are you measuring your heart rate? Do you have a wearable?

Jay Campbell: I do have, uh, the amazon, uh, whatever the 60 little amazon thing is because that thing actually works with that new treadmill too. So, I got that like two months ago but besides that I mean my life cycle is you know just a hand meter, but it’s pretty accurate, you know, I’ve been using it for like six years now, I need to get a new bike by the way too because it’s just worn down but, uh

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, you’re lifting three to four times a week, three to four times a week you’re lifting, cardio three to four as well?

Jay Campbell: So, lifting three times, cardio is really just dependent on how much time I have in the day and how lean I want to be like, if I want to be absolutely shredded, I will probably do a second session of cardio on Tuesdays and Thursdays but again it’s just depending on whether I’m at if I’m home if I have access to cardio equipment if I’m on the road and I’m traveling, I’ll never do two sessions usually because you just don’t have access

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Alright. I gotta, I gotta bunch of questions. I’m gonna go rapid fire at you so I’m really interested, I know you’ve done a lot of stuff on testosterone bioidentical supplementation. I want to know how you dose it, I see lots of patients that come into me that are using creams that are using extended release formulas typically if I recommend testosterone supplementation. I’m trying to keep my patients in that top 25% of the reference range. I’ve seen too many patients come way outside of the reference range then you get this receptor site down regulation, I like to keep the injections you know between two or four days, I feel like you can keep the dose more steady on that versus doing every seven days or ten days, I feel like you get this big kind of like you know have the steady levels.

Jay Campbell: You got it right.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I wanna know your, you know, what’s your best dosing gels, injectables frequency? Where do you like people to be in the reference range? Go ahead.

Jay Campbell: Okay. All great questions. Let’s start off with what you can’t do. Okay, and again, this is sad because there’s still so many endocrinologists and urologists that have no idea what they’re doing, giving patients this but you cannot give a bolus of testosterone at 7 or 10 or even 14-day interval and expect it to work because as you know Justin and they don’t and they should know because they went to school for this. The way the half life works of these medications, you cannot put it into somebody’s system, shut down their endogenous, again, with this exogenous supply and then understanding the bio or the half cycle life of that bioidentical hormone thinking that you’re gonna have any kind of efficacy after six days, I mean you’re not. I mean in fact you’re gonna have to crash and you’re gonna have all sorts of again you know perturbations of estrogen going sideways, testosterone crashing, I mean, there’s, it’s just a horrible situation, so two delivery systems that work. What you said is accurate. Now, what we want to understand and again for the people watching the show are not familiar with my work, I mean, this is like you know, my quote-unquote claim to fame and like

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’ll put links below for everything so people can see

Jay Campbell: Yeah. So, from the internet standpoint like you know I wrote a book in 2015 called the definitive TRT manual, it became the number one selling book of all time on testosterone, four years later, I wrote a book called the testosterone optimization therapy bible and it is the number one selling book of all time on testosterone so I work with the top docs, the top researchers, the top endos, the top epidemiologists, like all the people that really are the who’s who in this industry is the people that I work with in this so just to give you guys that clarification and that justification but at the end of the day what we wanna do when we use therapeutic hormones and this goes for by the way women or men is we want to mimic the body’s endogenous postal tool release as closely as we can. Now, you’re going to do that based on using a delivery system that is not spasmodic, right. It’s not a giant bolus, there’s a lot of testosterone delivery systems out there that are absolutely worthless. The only value that they provide is lining the pocket of the doctor who gives it to the patient, okay. I don’t have to mention some of those but at the end of the day you know I have doctors that will argue with me and they’ll be like, that may be true J but some testosterone is better than not been better than none and I can’t dispute that but I definitely argue that you know some delivery systems cause way more side effects than others and should be avoided but back to what you were saying, the best way to imitate or mimic the body’s natural pulsatile and usually diurnal release of testosterone is through every other day or daily uh, delivery systems so if it’s injections, uh, you know, it would be really nice if you were injecting with an insulin needle early in the morning with a bolus of like 25 to 35 milligrams or 15 to 20 milligrams again if you’re going daily and if you’re every other day then you’re looking at again depending on that person, uh, you know I’m mostly speaking about men for right now but you know somewhere between 40 and 60 milligrams every other day.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. What place in the reference range do you like people to be, I mean, it’s are you gonna recommend testosterone if they’re in the bottom 25% and then is there a goal that you want to fall within the range?

Jay Campbell: Okay. So, this is you know very unique stuff here. I’m not a physician. Okay, right? So, I’m not prescribing to men and I’m not also you know governed by state medical licensing.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You’re speaking from your personal experience and people reporting back to you, where they feel about.

Jay Campbell: Well, look, I understand your business very well okay. I’ve not been in the business but I could easily be in the business if I choose to be in business. I’m not in the business but I also with obviously literally hundreds of doctors, I understand this I’ve sat there and listened to the top teachers in the world and you know what happens to guys that are attempting to prescribe and you know again what can happen negatively if you know people are at one low end of the range and they prescribe and then they get audited and blah blah blah so this is what we know again from like a general universal conduct, the only thing that matters when you’re optimizing two people any person’s hormones males or females is if they’re asymptomatic and they feel good. Now, levels are again just a measurement, a qualifier so to speak of you know again various lab corp companies, right? So, what we have to understand Justin and this is big picture for people watching this is that whoever is behind the lab companies have been suppressing the standard mean deviations, right? So, the top and the low are pushing and being compressed and I think you know this. Five years ago, the high end of the range for both companies was between 1240 and 1400s and now between lab corp and quest and you know fact check me if you guys have to on this because they’re lowering them all the time now,

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 800 to 1000 typically

Jay Campbell: Dude, it’s insane. It’s so much lower and if you ask people in the endocrine society or whatever the urology you know uh deal is, they’ll say oh well it’s not conspiracy theory J, it’s fat people are getting fatter and we’re just deviating for the compression of like lower testosterone due to metabolic disorder and dysregulation and blah blah blah but again if you ask the smart people who go to the endocrine society meetings every year and I know somebody who just went and you asked the smart people there like Abraham Morgan Tower who I love and has done more testosterone optimization than anyone he’ll tell you that is doesn’t make sense so in my opinion if you know we want to go full blown put tin foil hats on conspiratorial, they are making men fatter softer, weaker, I mean this is where, this is going, right, so it’s like to answer your question in a long convoluted way I would personally like to see men that have free testosterone levels and again depending on the measuring criteria of somewhere between 35 and 50, okay? and they feel good like they’re energetic, they have dopamine signaling, you know, increased cognition, there’s no brain fog, they’re obviously really goof sexually and have you know, erection, thick you know, firmer erections, morning wood, all that stuff that’s where you want to be from a free standard uh measurement you know is there a total number that’s great? No, but if you talk to the best docs, they’re going to tell you that like depending on when you test them, you know, at the peak or the nadir, you know, you want to see them somewhere between a thousand and 1500 now that’s not to say that somebody who’s at 2000 for you know an hour who’s now gonna function probably between 750 and a thousand during the week is bad. So, it really just comes down to like are they not having symptoms and do they feel good and that’s a shitty answer for you because like you know you want to like be like, okay well when they get tested I want them to be here or here or here but it’s kind of hard to say that because ultimately it depends on when you test them what the delivery system is now let me just also answer that there’s two forms of delivery system that are best okay. Now, I know there’s now oral products on the market and we can go deep down that rabbit hole if you want and talk about that in a second, I feel that they do have promise but they’re not there yet but the other one is trans-scrotal, right? So, a transdermal obviously is on the skin but what we now know scientifically is that the membrane of the base of the scrotum is eight times more permeable than any other skin location so if you’re gonna prescribe transdermal for a man and by the way this goes for women too trans labia right so right in the area of the clitoris and the vaginal lips is where you want to put testosterone cream and obviously with women that’s a little bit more complex you know you might have progesterone cream in there with them too whatever it’s a hold of the thing but at the end of the day the places where they can get the best absorption for the trans nerves is the best and so uh I’ve now been on testosterone therapeutic testosterone for almost 22 years, I was on injectable for close to 17 and a half and since then I’ve been on trans-scrotal and Justin I will never go back to injectable for a couple of reasons. Well, I travel the world a lot and I don’t like carrying needles in my hygiene bag because you never know when you’re going to run into some asshole at international airport who says what the hell is this, right? But then the other person reason is it’s just a lot easier to carry a transdermal cream you know in your hygiene bag as you travel around the word and obviously on the side of it you know it has your script and your doctor’s information and the codes and stuff like that versus like you know you’re going through a what you call it you know a screen point and they pull it out they see needles and they’re like ah I mean you know you’ve heard of stories of like you know just alone and all these guys getting pulled over but at the end of the day that’s why I changed you know there is some biological reasons uh cream on the scrotum increases DHT uh a little bit higher from a standpoint and obviously as you know DHT is the primary anabolic cascade so men will have better uh erections uh you know and but as far as anything else it’s equal, you’re not gonna have better energy or better muscle growth or better stamina or cognition or any of those things. They’re equal. But those are the only two delivery systems in my opinion that are worth the shit uh you know I know that the number one delivery system is pellets and I’ve done videos about pellets. I’ve brought on the best experts in the world about pellets this is what I’ll say about pellets because people need to hear this. This is how you know pellets are worthless delivery system and I know I’m gonna offend people. There has never been a single scientific study on testosterone ever done using pellets. Now, if you knew that why in the hell would you ever consider using pellets for therapy and look I know there are thousands of people in north America right now using pellets especially women and they get great results and the doctors that use them and prescribe them and it might be you if you prescribe them you know, they’ll say hey dude some of these people are in the military and they’re in active duty and they’re in the field and they don’t have an option, they can’t inject you know, they’re being scrutinized they’re you know blah blah they can only get this like every six or eight weeks I get it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. That makes sense.

Jay Campbell: That’s, most cases that’s cool but pellets are bad news from a delivery system because of the way they cleave as an ester in people’s body. Everybody’s biochemically unique Justin. We’re all end of one and a lot of people are hyper excretors and you can put in a pellet that’s supposed to be an eight week life cycle and they have four weeks

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And they’re the last half I always see them just drop out a ton.

Jay Campbell: It’s horrible, dude.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Frequently.

Jay Campbell: It’s horrible. But again, I’m not against it if it’s the only most efficacious path and it’s that person’s only option because again some is better than none.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Now, when do you recommend doing testosterone because my philosophy naturally is all right someone comes in they’re overweight, they’re tired, they’re fatigue, my first thing is get the inflammation down, let’s improve your nutrient density, get your cortisol and insulin resistance in check. Let’s get you moving some cardio some resistance training. Let’s get everything fixed metabolically and then just kind of see where you fit and if you continue to improve excellent we can use some herbs maybe some Tribulus, different you know horny goat weed Epimedium, there’s different herbs you can use kind of when do you transition from herbal diets to going a hormone route and then do you ever use like things like hCG in between. How does that progression look for you?

Jay Campbell: All amazing questions, uh, these are not easy answers and obviously I’m injecting a lot of my opinion on this, um, I’ve done a lot of research on herbs, testosterone boosters. Well, let me just first talk about testosterone boosters and by the way for the people that are new to me that watch this, this is live right? And then you gotta be on your youtube channel, okay, so the people that are new to me are watching this right now and I’m gonna be a chill but I highly recommend you go to my youtube channel and you watch the video that was part one last week with Dr. Keith Nichols and part two today in about two and a half hours and they are I’m telling you guys right now this is the state of the science on hormonal optimization for not just men but for women too today’s video is about 90 mins last week’s was like 48 minutes but I broke up the whole conversation 82 because I was like I want people to digest this we talk about prostate cancer we talk about vascular illness, I mean it is the state of the science, Keith is going to be, Dr. Keith Nichols, who’s interviewed with me, he’s going to probably at some point be the guy that replaces Dr. Neil Roger who’s the number one trainer on the planet for testosterone optimization or just hormone optimization in general and it’s just brilliant. I mean anyone can learn what he is talking about in there but you know to those questions there isn’t a single testosterone boosting herb or supplement on the planet that’s proven to work now as you know because we’re going to talk about consciousness at some point, the placebo effect is very real if a human being takes something and puts their energy and their intention into it that it’s going to work, they probably will create that reality, it’s absolutely possible but from a scientific standpoint if you analyze all of these different supplements and these again Tongkat Ali and Horny goat weed and mocha these things, they don’t do jack shit. Okay? So, are the gonna work if the person believes in them, yes. But if that person that you’re working with and you said all the things decides that they want to stop being fat and stop being inflamed and exercise and eat better and control for insulin that’s gonna do just as much as any of those other things. Now, I’m not saying that adding those things in as you know additional adjuncts won’t help but I would say that you know before you go and we’ll get there a second but before you go the therapeutic adjuvant route like you just said do what you just said. Do what you just said, lower inflammation, lower belly fat, get them exercising blah blah blah but here’s where you know the really smart people in this industry will come in and say that’s great J. And Justin, but how are you gonna get a 50-year-old guy who’s got 30 pounds or 20 to 30 pounds of belly fat and a 135 total testosterone level with no free testosterone. How are you gonna get them the energy to do any of that shit without concomitantly optimizing their testosterone? So, for those people that I’m like well you know what dude like you’re probably gonna have to put them on a mild dose hoping and again this is where you as a physician really has to have discernment to decide whether this person’s committed because like if I’m you and again I’m not you but if I’m you, I’m not putting a fat person who comes in my office who’s a lazy pile of no way on testosterone because it’s not gonna do shitboard. If anything it’s gonna cause inflammation and again look man I want to say this because I’ve never had a chance to say this and someone so educated is you show uh I see a lot of fat guys and when I see fat guys, I mean they got big bellies, right? They got beer drinking bellies and they go on testosterone and it doesn’t work you know quote-unquote and it doesn’t work because they’re inflamed and they’re injecting testosterone into their fat visceral body in their stomach and that out of center adiposity right there and they get supreme inflammatory responses.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s probably aromatizing as well.

Jay Campbell: Well. Okay. It’s aromatizing that’s what you think it’s doing. What’s happening is just okay so let’s go to that because I want to address that so when we inject testosterone and it doesn’t matter the testosterone delivery system. Let’s just say for now when we’re injecting it. We want the estrogen to fall to the level that the testosterone is going to allow it to aromatize so yes we want to aromatize but the aromatization is not bad. The aromatization is providing the benefits. We want healthy levels of estrogen to provide protection to vascular networks to the brain networks to the bone mineral density into the skin. There’s a lot of all these amazing things so the problem is not in the aromatization, the problem is in the visceral fat which is causing inflammation so the inflammatory cascade which is happening for these people that have too much fat is absolutely causing the side effects but 90% of physicians and I’m not saying it’s you. They miss this and they think it’s high estrogen symptoms and side effects. It has nothing to do with high estrogen. It has everything to do with inflammation and the cascade of inflammation and so I’m telling you I’ve seen tons of men who literally quit because they’re like I can’t handle the side effects and their doctors tells them it’s high estrogen side effects. You know, water retention, itchy nipples, I could go on, no, it’s inflammation that you have systemically that the testosterone is adding to because the testosterone is an exogenous chemical that the body is like saying oh great another one. Top of the beer and the pizza, and the cheese and all the peanut butter and ice cream that you’re pounding in, I mean that’s causing the inflammation so ultimately it’s tough dude the people in America today because as you know we have what I mean saw a stat two days ago that says that is insane by the way. Seventy percent of men and women over the age of 40 in the united states are obese. 70%!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s insane!

Jay Campbell: 70% over the age of 40. I don’t want you know people to get confused that but that’s I mean dude we don’t have to worry about like the v or the c I mean that’s diabetes and you know what comes after diabetes I mean right, so I mean at the end of the day man if you’re a fat person and you know this is for you for a physician, if a really fat person comes in man, you got to do a psychological analysis like dude, are you sick and tired of being sick and tired like. Are you truly gonna change like are you gonna fight through this because I’m not giving a really fat person testosterone bro if I don’t think they’re gonna actually do the work because testosterone is just a it’s not a magic bullet as you know, its imagined.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. 100%. It makes sense. Very good. Yeah. I wouldn’t argue I would just say things like insulin resistance are primarily gonna be driven through inflammation and internal resistance would it’s kind of all connected right. Excess carbohydrates, grains process, it’s all connected.

Jay Campbell: So, you know, what, I’m glad you said that because I screwed up and missed that. So, all, so high estrogen symptoms is insulin resistance. That’s 100% the answer and again most people miss this so if you are again fat and inflamed it’s 98.9% likely that you have severe insulin resistance.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think that’s great and you mentioned a bunch of things that you were doing for that obviously all the exercise things, you mentioned the berberine right you might think you mentioned metformin as well I imagine you’re probably doing some B12 with that because they know that.

Jay Campbell: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I take a very, a very, very complex uh I take uh B right from Gyro formulas. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So, let’s talk about bounce. So, yeah, let’s talk about that so if you’re gonna go on therapeutic hormones, what we now know and this is very cutting edge tip of the spear stuff is you cannot optimize the endocrine system without also optimizing the thyroid, the pancreas and the pituitary. Now, you already know these because you’re a functional medicine freak and you know all these things but the average guy prescribing this shit doesn’t know this especially for women. I mean do you have any idea how many people go on, you know, again, testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, you know depending on age, you know, perimenopausal, post-menopausal whatever and they’re not optimizing the thyroid.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yeah. Especially on the hair loss side for sure.

Jay Campbell: Dude. It’s crazy. Though how often you see this so you know I like to say this it’s a triune, if you’re gonna go on hormonal optimization and again for me if you’re 45 and you’re in America with this and we haven’t talked about this before, you know we end the show but at the end of the day we are being bombarded bro. I mean you can’t from the blue light from the plastic in the water I mean this is the best water on the planet it’s still in a plastic bottle I mean I could pour it in metal if I wanted to right but it just will work but I mean we have to be so overly proactive in type a to you know intervene if not avoid this horrific biochemical onslaught to us so at the end of the day if you’re going to look to hormonal optimization in my opinion you have to at 40 to 45 again depending on your level of leanness and your inflammation uh I’m saying the way it’s done right is again depending on your woman or man age it’s looking at free testosterone to see if you’re eligible to start you know obviously therapeutic route it’s supplementing with uh desiccated slash porcine thyroid again relative to your you know relative to your metabolic issues and insulin resistance and then of course you have to control for insulin and you know again I obviously I’m the biggest metformin homer in the world I’ve written an article that’s you know cited on the Harvard education review you know it’s ten thousand words I met Mormon but I am a big metformin advocate because of all the things it doesn’t do outside of the great stuff. It does for insulin suppression right it’s can stop tumor formation and increases aqua Mancy I mean it does so many amazing things but at the end of the day if you don’t want to get metformin you’re afraid of metformin you know you’ve read all the bullshit on the internet about metformin then at least use dihydro berberine because again you’ve got to control for insulin and I know there’s new drugs you know there’s what is semaglutide and literally there’s a new one and they’re coming out all the time now all these things that suppress blood glucose and that’s cool but you know metformin is a plant and dihydro berberine is a supplement so you know I’m all about natural adjuvants but you know between desiccated uh you know therapeutic testosterone maybe some progesterone maybe a little of estrogen depending on your if you’re a woman or a man you know in your age uh and then uh suppressing and controlling for insulin I mean that’s the holy triune for me that’s the three long you know deal you if you do one or two without the other you’re eventually going to throw the balance of the other one off.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No. That makes sense, you said metformin is natural yes from the French lilac flower so for sure a lot of good natural things there I love it. I just want to pivot here one sec before we kind of wrap things up. I want you to kind of five a little bit into the genesis of your hair formulation. We talked about well I’m going to kind of go through a couple of the ingredients, I just kind of want to pick your brain and kind of have you walk us through your thinking of why you put those in there so obviously you chose the grapeseed oil, I’ve heard some really good benefits of grape seed oil blends really well um what why is it you chose that fat I’m just curious

Jay Campbell: Yeah I know so great questions and I’m happy to go through and break them all down you know as much for whatever relative time we have left um so the grape seed so so version one of Auxana was MCT oil and again you know we’re just going and learning as we go and MCT oil as a carrier molecule uh pretty much the same but messy thicker constitution so we changed the grapeseed oil and we then put it in a spray bottle, we originally had a dropper but then all those bottles broke and that’s you know the story that we gave on Ben’s podcast last year but at the end of the day uh grapeseed oil is very texturized, it’s a very thin constituent and so as the carrier oil for you know the primary uh active ingredient which is carbon 60 uh it just settles in the hair as a spray and you can massage into the scalp a lot easier uh obviously grapeseed oil is very inert and there is you know some data in the world as you know kind of it’s like an essential fatty acid that it also helps neutral, it helps from a nutrient density standpoint in scalp but we’re really just using it as a carrier oil for carbon 60.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. Got it. Excellent. I put on screen here just so you can see as well all the ingredients there and then can you talk about a couple other you know more keystone ingredients. How about the peptides you chose?

Jay Campbell: Yeah. Let’s talk about the product. So, the product for everybody is called Auxana Grow uh and by the way you have an affiliate code in that so just make sure you put it in here but um and if you don’t um I think your assistant has it but if not just email me and I’ll give it to you but uh so Auxana Grow is developed or created for people um who do not want to use DHT inhibitor medications, you know, ever or if they’re on it now like how to wean yourself off I just did which is a very long time coming a video on how to wean yourself off of a DHT inhibitor medication while utilizing the natural uh peptide based product of us but so it’s two phase of Zara product, there’s um B and A okay um formula a or formula b. Formula a is the peptide uh copper peptide GHK-Cu, copperpeptide GHK-Cu is what we call the shamwow of peptides. It has so many uh you know modalities to help skin hair um the primary effectiveness of that peptide is that increases angiogenesis which is again uh the simulation or the stimulation of red blood cell formation so when you put it in the scalp and you massage it into the scalp it will increase again angiogenesis so it will bring more red blood flow blood cells to the scalp now as I told you off air I’m not allowed to talk about invasive procedures but if you are a smart person and you ask does microneedling or does uh derma rolling help, well do the math. Right. So,

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. Got it.

Jay Campbell: What would be, you put serum a on first massage it into your scalp and if you want to then add red light, okay, if you have a red light technology in your home

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: LED laser on top. Yeah.

Jay Campbell: Absolutely, uh, infrared and LED together for three to five minutes and then you would put serum b which is the carbon 60 and just let me explain the serum b so obviously you already talked about um the grapeseed oil extract but the carbon 60 does two things. Carbon 60 is a very powerful antioxidant okay but for our purposes it acts as a molecular sponge and it actually will attempt to pull in the serum a which again is the copper peptide but it also as a molecular sponge or as a superoxidative dismutase it’s going to help remove all of the micro inflammatory agents in your scalp so it’s like a two full process so the way it works just is two sprays of serum a, massage it if you want to do something you know quote-unquote with an INV to you know in uh and you know further stimulate you know absorption do that then hit it with red light then put serum b on you know 30 to 40 seconds and by the way for everyday less is more is not better for our product. Less is more because again this is not about spraying it into your hair especially if you’re a woman and you have a long hair. It’s about getting it into your scalp and then massaging it into your scalp and again scalp massage can be 30 seconds it could be three minutes. It’s totally up to you. Scout massage has proven scientifically without formulation without essential fatty acids or you know minerals you can just massage your scalp every day and you increase red blood cell formation it’s a fact right? So, obviously if you wanna massage your scalp after you apply the products it’s a good thing but uh for people that have aggressive hair loss and by the way you mentioned it earlier and this is important that we talked about this uh autoimmune dysregulation and you know hair loss cause which again this the big c causes hair loss we now know that people have c hair. This product dramatically improves covalent related hair loss I shouldn’t have said cova but I apologize but it definitely it definitely improves it again because this is as you said um you know oxidative related hair loss this is caused by you know whatever the big c is and your putting this into your scalp especially for women because a lot of women are reporting you know c-related hair loss more than men it dramatically will improve that hair loss and again we have you know hundreds of reviews on our website from women that have had that issue and they’re like oh my God it’s a miracle you know there’s a doctor you might know her in uh Pennsylvania um Dr. Amy Horman, she’s like the thyroid fixer. She’s got literally thousands of women you know using Auxana now because it’s the only thing that we found that actually will work against autoimmune disorder or dysregulated hair loss.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Interesting. I imagine also too with the oxidative stress that also is what causes the hair to lose. The melanin and become premature gray.

Jay Campbell: So, you know, so the fact that you say that I wasn’t gonna say that but a lot of women and men report that a natural positive side effect of using it is the darkening of the hair and by the way I mean. That’s me too. Okay. Because like I would be and I’m not using Auxana aggressively as I normally would because it is true even though this is crazy when I say this, you can get to a level with regrowth that you don’t need to keep using it although uh a very big influencer and I just did a podcast about this because he’s like hey man I stopped using it for a year and my hair is coming out again. I’m like well yeah, dude, you’re 47. So, at the end of the day age-related hair loss. There really is nothing that can you know completely stop it. Even a great lifestyle even our product uh you’re still gonna have to deal with that so you know the reality is it’s like you know use it every now and then we are going to be coming out with a maintenance product Justin because again so many people are asking for it you know kind of like a uh you know Jay Paul Mitchell pump the sponsor put in your hair when you get out of the shower at night you know go to bed with it or whatever but uh most people who get results and again this is not gonna work for everybody. Some people have really bad genetic hair loss. Some people are stressed you know some people have really severe trauma and inflammation that they just cant overcome but I’d say somewhere between 68 and 75% of men or women who live a clean healthy lifestyle as our uh as a person that runs our influence or marketing likes to say people who are serious about their health you know are going to get really positive results I mean anybody who knows me can just go back two years uh before this product came into the marketplace and I was nearly bold in fact I actually did the Vantis Procedure on top of my scalp which is like a henna tattoo you know to keep me with like the five o’clock shadow hair and you know people see me now in public yesterday I was out and saw hadn’t seen a guy in three years, he’s like bro do you have a hair transplant. I’m like no dude this is my product. So, you know people can regrow their hair with this product you were asking about is it a maintenance product because you have a lot of hair right now it absolutely is for someone like you, you know you would spray it into your scalp like once or twice a week massage it in and it’s an absolutely amazing. Yeah. It’s a very really strong maintenance product. You can also use it on beards we are gonna eventually have a beard problem really probably oh yeah. You can absolutely use on beard. It’s amazing on beard so the serum a is uh you know a water-based formulation so you can absolutely massage it into your scalp, you’re not gonna have any residue it’s gonna grow it’s gonna feel amazing but the serum b again with the grapeseed oil extract, it is slightly oily. It’s not oily oily but it definitely feels noticeable.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is it better at night to do it so it can absorb?

Jay Campbell: Uh, I mean it depends on I think you know the length of your hair like if you were you know something not you but somewhat balding man with patches you’re not gonna notice it. But for a longer hair person like you or a woman and you spray a couple of sprays and you don’t get into the scalp and some of it sits in the hair you will definitely probably notice a little bit of residual. A lot of our patients slash patients a lot of our customers report back that they like it as a texturizer and they don’t have to use quote-unquote product to mess their hair or mousse their hair or anything like that so it doesn’t

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Probably get that benefit going from MCT to the grapeseed I imagine right now

Jay Campbell: Now, yeah 100% on that and that’s why Nick actually did that um the other thing I would say is um the beard product is that’s coming will be similar to serum a now because you’ll see it because it’s harder to use unless you got a big long you know beard which I know a lot of guys have that now the neckbeard people. It’s harder to get to the base because remember again it is a health of the skin product. It’s copper peptides so the longer your beard it’s going to be harder but when we have um the product for beards it’ll be more of like a balm roll on versus the spray now which is for the scalp so but you can definitely use it in the beard now we have tons of people have been using it in their beard for over a year and they’re like it’s the best product to have.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, serum a first and then if you do any laser stuff and then serum b will be the last component.

Jay Campbell: Yeah and you know it goes to mention because I know you have a lot of different patients I mean our skin products which is royal blue serum and sky blue cream are the best on earth. In fact again don’t leave the guy who’s the hype man for the company. Go read the reviews you know we have women who are very well to do affluent sophisticated ladies that use Lemur and Rhode island fields and all the high-end shit and they’re like we threw it all in the trash and we buy the bundle of your guys product every month.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, is the hallmark ingredient in the um royal blue is that gonna be at the peptide as well?

Jay Campbell: Same thing, so GHK-Cu is the shamwow of peptides. It’s the number one skin peptide uh and by the way just so you know so people understand this you can absolutely buy GHK-Cu and inject it in your scalp, I mean if you’re insane enough to inject it into the skin on the top of your hair you know which is gonna hurt like shit but it works I mean I have hundreds of people you know who have messaged me about that and saying man I use your product as like the base and then I inject GHK but yeah it regrows your hair better than anything man

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So how long to get results because like the data on like Medoxomil or um uh with Rogaine or Minoxidil or Propecia usually nine to twelve months, right?

Jay Campbell: You see results, okay so let me temper my enthusiasm. It depends on the cellular health of the end user right so someone like me who’s no inflammation you’re gonna see results in literally three to five weeks. Okay, we have women that see results in 10 days. Women that have covid-related hair loss start regrowth their hair back immediately. Now, as far as like when is the dosing of this we’d never tell anyone to dose more than twice a day and personally and again this is my opinion I already said less is more uh it’s more important that you massage it into your scalp than it is spraying it in twice a day because again so many people think that if I spray two sprays and I get great results then three spray it’s gonna be better it’s not that way it doesn’t work that way so when we sell the bottle we say up to a 90-day supply because it is expensive it’s not cheap to manufacture the stuff. It’s really really high-level GHK-Cu product it’s not coming from China. It’s all USA made It’s expensive um we do not tell people to over apply it and I swear to God Justin it doesn’t matter, you know, we live in a super size. More is better economy. They always want to put more in but like if you’re a guy and you’re hair you’re watching this in the rerun or now or whatever and you have hair like mine literally just do it once a day for a month, see what happens. It’s gonna still last you for three months. I mean, my hair, two bottles which is one order is gonna last 90 days but if you have longer hair and you don’t like you know it’s harder I mean let’s be honest it’s harder to massage in the scalp with longer hair so

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Maybe after a shower when your hair is a little bit wet and you make it more visible

Jay Campbell: Yeah. I mean yes and no I mean it really depends right if you’re a woman and you have a mop on your head like my wife’s got long curly hair you know, it’s still not gonna get into the scalp like it would for somebody like me.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, right.

Jay Campbell: It’s just gonna get absorbed by the hair so no matter how good you are massaging into the scalp it’s still gonna be more difficult but that’s why we say up to 90 days because longer hair people are not gonna get so much out of the two bottles as a short hair person is. It’s just not gonna happen.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, and one other question too I’ve noticed this with a couple of patients where they have DHT patterns of hair loss. Yet we, they’re we working on all the core foundational things. Their DHT levels look really good on the blood test, right? Can you have DHT issues at the scalp level but have it not show systemically in the blood.

Jay Campbell: So, I’m gonna blow your mind with this, if you prescribe this is where it really gets crazy about DHT. If you prescribe them a DHT cream they will grow their hair back on their scalp like a wolf man. So, DHT in that article as we said, is secondary and most likely tertiary effector and causal agent of hair loss. It’s not anything to do with dihydrotestosterone and again that’s how we know that in the article that if you write somebody a script for a DHT cream, and they put it all over their scalp, their hair grows back now the only thing to answer that question though that’s important is um you cannot put our product on a bald patch that does not have active hair follicles. You know, that’s and again we’ve been very transparent from the very beginning that where our formulation is now and you know I’ll shed some light on this in a second it won’t work that way. You know, but as my the genius formulator brainiac Nick Andrews, my partner Nasir says he goes oh eventually I’ll be able to grow hair on a cue ball. And that’s where it’s coming so that’s where we’ll eventually go I’d say we’re integrating stem cells and such exactly we’re that exactly right we’re like two phases away so we’re in V2, V3 is coming and V3 will be a one phase liposomal system so it will literally be bottled squirt it into your hand massage it the oil based carbon 60 will be in a nanomolecule you know incased in the water-based formula and it’ll break open when you massage it into the skin and then version three four will have what you just said it’ll have all sorts of other peptides like micro agents and abrasions and it’ll be like uh it’ll essentially be a derma roller uh you know uh what do you call it uh invasive product just by yourself. Yeah, that’s excellent. yeah awesome. It’s coming. The technology’s amazing but you know we’re not there yet.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani:I love it. Well, it was amazing you have a new on today’s podcast. I really appreciate all the significant knowledge. Any last points you want to make before we end the show.

Jay Campbell: No man. I mean I want you to come on my podcast because I know It’ll be just as awesome um you know for anybody that wants to connect with me uh I actually have a link I always do for everyone I go on podcast you can go to Jay C middle initial jaycampbell.com/freebooks and you can download should I think maybe all my books are free now but I know there’s at least three books up there, the testosterone bible is up there for free uh my book on the fasting the blowtorch diet is up there for free and then I have a book on consciousness which the next time you and I talk we’ll go deeper on that. The only other thing, it’ll say is that uh this week, I finally acquired my domain and jaycampbell.com is gonna be my website so I’ve had a guy cyber squad for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny story, he asked me for a lot of money and I usually delete him and ignore him and I finally wrote him back and I said you know what man this would be the last time I ever responded to you. I will offer you blank and it was a lot less than what he was asking for and if you don’t say yes off and I’ll you’ll never here from me again and I can assure you no one will ever offer you that amount of money again for jaycampbell.com so you actually said yes so anyway I will be on yeah I will be on jaycampbell.com effectively Thursday of this week the transmission or the domain transfer is starting on Wednesday so it’s totally cool for me because whatever I tell people go to jaycampbell.com they’re like jaycampbell or they do j-a-y and then put campbell I mean it’s just a nightmare man so I’m like really grateful that that’s going away but uh no man I mean I’m so blessed to be here today you got me going a million miles an hour because you asked the most amazing questions I wish people could ask questions at the level you could man because then I can actually like talk about things in greater depth but uh I can’t wait for you to have you to come on my podcast brother I appreciate it man, we’ll work that out I really appreciate it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I’m gonna put all the links down below people can get access to my favorite articles some of the products you mentioned as well as the uh the free books to look. Thank you so much Jay for everything. Look forward to connecting with you real soon man.

Jay Campbell: Yeah for sure Justin. Just uh you know let them know it’s you know if they buy it you know if with your affiliate link or uh code, you’ll have a link and a code. It’s 15% off so.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, that’s great. That’s awesome. Well thank you so much man. It was great chatting with you we’ll talk again soon.

Jay Campbell: For sure my brother. Thank you.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Take care. Bye.

References:

https://justinhealth.com/

https://drjockers.com/

Recommended Products:

GHK-Cu Sky Blue Cream & Royal Blue Serum Bundle

Auxano Grow V2 Hair Growth Formula

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/hair-loss-restoration-improve-testosterone-inflamm-aging-inflammation-jay-campbell-podcast-373

The Mold Gut Connection – How Your Digestive Issue Maybe Caused by Mold Toxins | Podcast #371

If you’ve encountered mold from a water-damaged building or contaminated foods, you’ve likely encountered mycotoxins—toxic byproducts of mold. They’re common environmental toxins, and they have adverse effects on many body systems, including the gastrointestinal tract.

While you’ve probably heard about other symptoms that can follow mold exposure, Dr. J and Evan discuss that mycotoxins can also cause severe problems for your gut. They also talk about how mycotoxins impact gut health and the microbiota and what you can do to help restore your gut health once you are exposed to mold.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 – Introduction
1:57 – Mycotoxins
10:16 – Functional Medicine Approach
13:54 – Dopamine Mechanis
15:20 – Mold Inhalation Effects

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live, It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today’s topic is gonna be wonderful for the podcast. We’re gonna be talking about the mold-gut connection and how your digestive issues may be exacerbated by mold toxins, so great topic here Evan, personally been affected by himself and we see lots of patients all the time with these issues so let’s dive in. Evan, how are we doing today man?

Evan Brand: Yeah man, doing really well, and a lot of people have been to naturopaths, they’ve been the functional medicine people they’ve been a conventional doctor, they’ve been treated for SIBO and SIFO, whether it’s Rifaximin or natural SIBO protocols, maybe they’ve done SIBO diets or some of these rotational food diets and that sort of things, maybe they’ve tried berberine, oregano, garlic, and maybe they’ve made some progress, but then they’re still stick, they’re still suck, I’m gonna mix up my words, they’re stuck and sick so that’s a bad combination of essays and this is likely due to a mold toxin problem because I’ve seen it too many times and I suffered on my own and even the labs now tell us they give us a cookie-cutter report but that cookie-cutter report nonetheless is still valuable because even the lab has painted the connection between mycotoxins which are essentially mold farts that you breathe in, in a water damage building and the connection to certain bacterial overgrowth, specifically Clostridia but also Candida and the mechanism of why this is so damaging especially to young children is because we know that Clostridia bacteria screw up the organic acid levels called HPHPA and this affects levels of neurotransmitters, so when you get these children, they have behavioral issues, they may be diagnosed with something like PANS, which is a Pediatric Acute Neuropsychiatric Syndrome. These kids usually have sensory problems, food sensitivity, skin issues, histamine problems, allergies, maybe they’re biting children, maybe they’re angry or irritable, this can all be traced back due to this toxicity.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: 100%. So that’s quite interesting, now you talked about mycotoxins essentially being mold fart, so essentially the mold off-gasses, right? And, your different kinds of mold, right? It could be Penicillium, it could be Aspergillus, right? It could be the black mold, Stachybotrys, these types of things and then they produce various mycotoxins and when we do different tests, like plate testing on homes, supposedly each mold or so can produce about 300 different mycotoxins, whether it’s Ochratoxins, or aluminum is that correct?

Evan Brand: Yeah, which is crazy because we can only test for a very, very small amount on the urine so really, we’re trying to just look for some evidence of this bonfire, we’re looking for the ashes, Oh my god, there must have been a fire here, this big mold exposure, we’re only looking at the tip of the iceberg so yeah, you’re right. Our testing is good but it’s still very primitive compared to the amounts of mycotoxins that are being produced.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Yeah. And the type of organic acid testing that we’re doing is on the great plains. We’ll look at some of the organic acid compounds that correlate with, like Aspergillus or different mold toxins. Is that correct? What are those big mycotox? What are the big organic acids again?

Evan Brand: So, it’s all on paper.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Membranes

Evan Brand: Yeah. So, you’ll see oxoglutaric. You’ll see citric acid can be high in a fungal overgrowth too so it’s all page 1. Oxaglutaric, you got hydroxybenzoic which is related to bacteria. I could pull up an O but in general it’s just page one. It’s typically numbers 1 through 18. If you see any big red flags on that either a combination of a bacterial overgrowth specifically a clustering problem and or Candida or fungal colonization and the lab indicates that so tartaric acid would also be on there, carboxy citric acid is also on there. So, in parenthesis, you’ll see under these organic acids now which is great because this has improved over the years that you and I’ve been running these labs. It now says Aspergillus so on number 6, which is tartaric acid under number six, it’ll now say Aspergillus. And you’ll know if that’s elevated, you’re colonized for Aspergillus which means that you’ve now been exposed to a couple situations could have happened either you had a large enough amount of mold, you were exposed to mold, long enough or your immune system was weak enough where now you become a mold factory. So, you can be a mold reservoir, more specifically a mycotoxin reservoir where you just have this exposure at the moldy hotel in Mexico and then you come back home and you’re sick or if you were weak enough, now you’re growing mold. Even if you move to the desert to avoid mold, you stay sick because you’ve got that colonization so with

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Ionization, that’s happening.

Evan Brand: Yeah. So, you can prove that which is very important because now that would justify the use of herbal antifungals to try to remedy this situation.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: That makes sense. Let me go pull up one of my old tests. Let me see if I can find it. Hold on.

Evan Brand: Now, the conventional treatment is typically antifungal medications that are gonna knock this out. But, as you and I with our functional practice, we don’t like to use that. So, number 4 would be classified as the fungal, the ferran-2,5-tricarboxylic, you’ve that Ferran carbonyl glycine. Yeah. So, number six. Yeah. So, this is old enough where they didn’t have the molds but on the new ones in parentheses

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Let me say Aspergillus. It is primarily Aspergillus for all three of these.

Evan Brand: Yeah, and the number nine tricarboxylic is Fusarium.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Fusarium. Yep. And then Arabinose and Tartaric are also correlated with yeast overgrowth. This test here for instance, I did a great plane and a Genova test at the same time and this one actually came back much higher on the Arabino side than the great plains. then the Genova tested. So, it’s interesting you know different samples and such. But yeah, this one Arabinose is strongly correlated with Candida but then

Evan Brand: I just ran my own, I’ve got Candida right now too so I’m on a protocol, right? Now, I just run. Yeah. I showed up with Candida and I want people to know because you were a speaker on the event. It was called the Candida summit which I ran like five years ago and you know we had like 30 people talking about it and I could look back but I tell you I don’t think anybody had made the connection here which was the mold Candida connection back then and now what I’m finding is basically you’re just playing whack-a-mole with Candida until the mold’s gone meaning you may rotate through various rounds of antifungals but out the back door, you’ve got to be using the appropriate binders to pull out the mycotoxins so if you’re just beating Candida down and it keeps coming back. It’s probably the mold, not the Candida that you need to be after.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Yeah. And, that’s where it’s good to run a test like this. Also, maybe a urinary mycotoxin test or just make sure your environment’s good because I always tell patients if the environment’s not good and you’re having reoccurring issues then you’re just not getting to the root cause. So, the first thing is to isolate the environment. Make sure the environment, your home, your apartment wherever you’re living run a high-quality mold plate test on there. We’ll put links down below where you guys can access the plate testing. Isolate that, right? Make sure there’s no water damage or if there’s been leaks. Make sure it’s been addressed and dealt with. Make sure that’s dialed then the second thing is you can run a test like an organic acid test with your functional medicine provider. See if there’s any colonization. And, it that’s chronic, yo can get to the root on that and then you can always run urinary mold where you’re looking at mycotoxins coming out in the urine that can also be helpful but typically if this is good and there’s nothing at the home then you’re probably in pretty good shape and it’s probably more of an acute kind of dysbiosis thing probably from poor diet, poor digestion other bugs, other infections, etc.

Evan Brand: Yeah. And the cool thing is that you can kill two birds with one stone or even three birds with one stone and what I mean by that is let’s say you run that oh and you showed the elevated Arabinose, you know, there’s a Candida problem but if we see tartaric above that’s high and then down below, we see some of the bacterial overgrowth markers, the blends that you and I formulate and have, we might be able to kill bacterial overgrowth, fungal overgrowth and a Candida problem. All in one fell swoop and that’s incredible and you know your gastroenterologist or even your mold doctor is likely not gonna be able to do that. They may come in specifically with itraconazole or fluconazole or nystatin. But as you know, we’re facing this big problem of antifungal resistance just like we’re finding with antibiotic resistance and so now, you’ve got these very virulent strains which are difficult to kill with conventional medications. You and I have talked about this before but the long story short of it is all the different alkaloids and terpenes and beneficial nutrients in the plants, those don’t have this resistance problem. And if you’re mixing this herb and that herb, it’s not one plus one equals two, it’s one plus one equals ten. You get the synergistic effect.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Yeah. You see the same thing with addressing bacteria and other bigger bugs and berberines and Artemisia Wormwoods have synergistic effects. Also, the fact that you get a lot of antioxidants in a lot of these herbs. And so, especially if they’re high-quality, you get a lot of antioxidant support because when you start killing bugs, it’s a lot of oxidative stress that’s happening. And then, when you provide like an antifungal like Diflucan or an Amphotericin or a nystatin or a ketoconazole, obviously, there’s no antioxidants in those drugs and so you’re gonna have a lot of oxidative stress so it’s nice to have a blend different herb in there. One, to prevent the resistance. And then, also, people have yeast issues and a lot of times they have bacterial bugs as well and efflux pumps are a big thing that a lot of bacteria and bugs use to kind of protect themselves. So, I cannot say, like bacteria is like a sinking canoe, right? and essentially, you poke holes in that canoe with a lot of the herbals and think of the efflux pumps as the person in the canoe, baling water, right? So, they try to keep on bailing water, bailing water, so they don’t sink, right? And so, think of the herbals when you inhibit the efflux pumps whether it’s a ginger or different antimicrobials, it’s like taking the buckets away from the bacteria that’s bailing water and allows then to sink that allows them to effectively be destroyed that along with addressing biofilms too.

Evan Brand: Yeah. That’s awesome and the cool part too is you can minimize the die off if you’re doing this right. You know a lot of people when they hear these conversations, they get afraid. They go oh my God, Candida, mold, bacteria, parasites, worms like oh my God, this is a lot of stuff in me. I want it out of me but now I’m afraid. Am I going to feel worse before I feel better and the answer is if you do it properly that should be minimal to a nonexistent problem? I think you and I have refined our protocol so much over the years now that we have these tools and these other therapies in place that are standalone products but we often add those in or if we see that we hit a roadblock or a big bump in the road like a die off, we can change dosing. We can rotate. We can add in other support. We’re always talking about liver and gallbladder and binders and hydration and biofilms. These other pieces, these other variables, these are the make-or-break things for some people.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: 100%. And when people kind of want to go after the gut, we live in an antibiotic like kill, kill, kill generation so people tend to, when they find out they have an issue, they want to go kill, kill, kill and that can be very stressful in the body so it’s always very important to calm down the inflammation, get the immune system stronger, get the hormones that help with anabolic metabolism which is healing, recovering, anti-inflammatory support that kind of sets the table because the more stressed and inflamed you are, your lymphatic system, your detoxification system, your immune system won’t work as good and plus people forget your detoxification system, right? The cytochrome p450 oxidized pathways, especially the phase two pathways, they’re gonna run off of a lot of sulfur-based amino acids and so if we don’t have great digestion and we’re not eating you know good healthy animal protein or good healthy plant cruciferous vegetables. If we can’t tolerate them, we can’t break them down. May not have a lot of those sulfur building blocks to run those phase two pathways and so that’s why kind of getting the deck set so to speak so we can really hit phase two better just not with support but just getting digestion working better and a good diet working better sets the table and allows us to effectively kill so much better.

Evan Brand: Yeah and I know we’ve talked about a lot in a short amount of time, we’ve gone fast so listen back as needed but I want people to understand the connection because of the title of this episode, I want people to understand the mold-gut connection. So, the connection is the following: the mycotoxins weaken the immune system and allow the opportunistic bacterial overgrowth to thrive along with the Candida. So, if you’re working upstream at the SIBO-SIFO situation but you’ve got an underlying mycotoxin problem, you’ve got to address that if you fully wanna get better. The other mechanism of the mycotoxins is a couple. Number one is they damage the microbiome so we know specifically that mycotoxins do the same thing as, like food allergens, they disrupt the gut barrier and create intestinal permeability. So, that’s another reason you want to pull those out of the circulation by using specific binders based on your labs. And then the other mechanism too is we know mycotoxins affect the brain chemistry and specifically lower dopamine so when you get into pain signaling, you get into motivation and mood and just your overall vitality. If your brain chemistry is affected, we can also measure that but it could be directly attributed to the toxin for example in like rat studies when they inject them with mycotoxins or expose them to mold toxin, the dopamine levels crash. So now, all of a sudden, you’ve got this brain chemistry piece to address too, now people have heightened pain sensitivity, they’re depressed. They may be just more flat with their life. Once again, they go to their psychiatrist. They’re not gonna bring up mold toxicity, they’re putting them on an antidepressant medication. They’re never gonna say, “hey, oh your basement is flooded, that’s why you’re depressed and anxious and you have diarrhea”. So, the connection of the gut symptoms too, the diarrhea, any type of bloating, burping, digestive pain especially in children. Children don’t use the same language as adults. So, if your child is complaining about stomach pain that could be one clue that there’s something related. That was my issue for my daughter, Summer. She was complaining of tummy aches so we did run stool on her. She did have H. pylori when she was two. We tested real high. Maybe I gave it to her by sharing water bottles or something but either way, we took care of that and then stomach pain was continuing that was when we had got exposed to mold. Luckily, I got her on binders. Now, she’s in a better place. So, I’ve seen it unfortunately with my own kids and it’s stressful to see your kids suffer but it’s a good lesson. It’s a good learning lesson that your children are not crazy and if your kids are complaining of a chronic issue like this with pain, you know, consider this as a possibility especially if you as the mother are toxic because the toxins go through the placenta and they also go through breastmilk. So, if you have your own digestive skin, whatever problems, mood problems in your kid, has similar issues as you, well, it could be the generational passing of toxins.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: So, let’s go over that mechanism one more time with dopamine. So, obviously dopamine is a neurotransmitter and when we’re chronically stressed, physical, chemical or emotional, dopamine can go downstream and get converted into adrenaline which kind of helps manage the acute stress response. Is it just a fact that the mold is inflammatory and creating a stress response and activating the sympathetic nervous system that the dopamine is being taken and depleted downstream or is there something else? I want to make sure I get that mechanism hammered down.

Evan Brand: I don’t know. Type in rat dopamine, mold or rat dopamine, mycotoxin. See if you can find it. There were several papers on this. I don’t know if they discussed the mechanism in it or not. My assumption would be that it’s multifactorial. I think the big mechanism would be that the mycotoxins affecting the gut barrier then affecting nutrient absorption then there’s likely less amino acid conversion to dopamine. So, I’m thinking, it’s more of a malabsorption problem but also we know that ochratoxin for example damages

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Like malabsorption, like it’s affecting the absorption of protein in the gut?

Evan Brand: Yeah. I think that’s one mechanism. I think the other mechanism would be direct brain damage. We know that okra toxin for example damages the cerebellum. We know that the Verrucarin and the Stachybotrys mycotoxins affect the brain and the prefrontal cortex which impairs, like your ability to think clearly. So, I think it’s both. I think it’s the gut damage and I think it’s the direct brain damage too. I am going to pull it up here. Can you see it on screen?

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Yep.

Evan Brand: Let me make it bigger on my side here.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Yeah. So many mycotoxins, trichothecenes. We test that in some of the mycotoxin tests. Yeah. Induced neuronal cell apoptosis so some of that could be you’re just causing the cells in the brain and especially in the substantia nigra of the midbrain. That’s where dopamine cells are being produced. Some of it could be apoptosis that means programmed cell death and or inflammation in the olfactory epithelium.

Evan Brand: Interesting.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: So, it seems to be a neurodegenerative and then look it says it caught ochratoxin A causes acute depletion of dopamine and its metabolites.

Evan Brand: Look at that.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: So, I wonder if that’s a, it sounds like it’s possibly a stress response, right? Because dopamine can, tends to go downstream to adrenaline. It could be almost like an autoimmune response because you’re having apoptosis. This is neuronal cell death, program cell death. This is part of the reason why apoptosis is important, right? Because if you don’t have good immune function, this is how cancer forms, right? Your immune system helps program cells to die when they need to die. This is apoptosis but if you can’t do that then cells can overgrow hence you have a tumor, right? And so, this is actually happening to unhealthy or the very healthy tissue that you need to be functionally healthy that produces dopamine in the midbrain. So very interesting.

Evan Brand: Yeah. Talking about the hippocampus too, we know that hippocampus, I’ve got two of them. Remember, that’s why a lot of people have brain fog problems and also I would say that short-term to long-term conversion is impaired.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Can you see this one here? The mold inhalation one

Evan Brand: I’m just seeing that you’re highlighted on the hippocampus word for now.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Let me switch back to the other one here. This is mold inhalation. This is interesting. Let’s go pull this up. All tight. Mold inhalation causes innate immune activation, neural cognitive and emotional dysfunction.

Evan Brand: So, this is pretty new. July 2020 paper here so relative.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Yeah. Yeah. So, the ability of mold to cause such symptoms is controversial since no published research has examined the effects of controlled mold exposure on the brain. Patient symptoms following mold exposure are indistinguishable from those caused by innate immune activation by bacterial or viral exposure. Interesting. So, in this study here they added in. See here. Toxic and nontoxic mold stimuli would cause innate immune activation with concomitant neural effects and cognitive and emotional behaviors. We internationally administered intact stachybotrys. This is black mold extracted non-toxic stachybotrys spores and a saline vehicle to mice.

Evan Brand: You don’t want to be that mouse.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Wow. No. As predicted, intact spores increase interleukin 1 beta, immune reactivity in the hippocampus both spore types decrease neurogenesis. This is forming new neurons in the brain and causing striking contextual memory deficits in young mice while decreasing pain thresholds. So, this is another word saying, causing more pain in the body. So, if you have mold exposure, joint pain could happen, right? And enhancing auditory acute memory in older mice. Nontoxic anxiety. Yeah. Also increase anxiety like behavior. Levels of hippocampal immune function correlated with decreased neurogenesis that’s creating new neurons in the brain. Contextual memory deficits, right? Obviously, less memory and or enhance auditory cued feared memory. I wonder what that means. Maybe it’s just like, uh, you’re more sensitive to external stimuli.

Evan Brand: I read that. Yeah. I read that as sound sensitivity which is yeah part of the toxin and light sensitivity too so people will often have to wear sunglasses even when it’s not very bright. You and I talked about that in the context of adrenals years ago but that’s also a mold toxin thing.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Yep. And an immune activation may explain how both toxic mold and nontoxic mold, skeletal elements cause cognitive and emotional decline. So, it’s really important. We don’t wanna be in an area where there’s a bunch of mold toxins and we can do a whole other podcast on how to mitigate mold toxins as a whole. I mean, of course, get your home tested. That’s the first thing. If you have water damage, make sure it’s mitigated by a professional right away because mold starts to form when sitting water in as little as two days. Got to make sure that’s under control and then if you’re on the fence, get yourself tested, right? We’ll run an organic acid test. Maybe run a urinary mycotoxin test and see what your actual load is but again one of the big telltale cue signs is you know, get your home. If there’s mold there and you start feeling significantly better and you go back, you notice an increase and definitely get your internal mold tested as well via urine.

Evan Brand: Yeah. Well. I know we got to wrap this thing up. We got calls to get to but I hope this is helpful for people. We can always get geekier and dive deeper and go longer but I think you guys get the gesture, the connection of the brain toxicity, the gut damage. There’s a mitochondrial element with the chronic fatigue piece. So, if you are suffering from any chronic issue whether it’s mood like depression, anxiety, energy problems like chronic fatigue, low libido, poor erectile function, cold hands, cold feet, increased light sensitivity, blurry vision could be other things but this is a big smoking gun and all of us are inside way too much. We’re not outside like the Amish are all day. They might have moldy homes but they’re not breathing it in the majority of time. They’re outside in fresh air where the toxins are diluted. So, us with our indoor lifestyle as modern humans, we’re at more risk of this stuff and our buckets are already full due to pesticides and other toxicity in the environment so this is a really, it’s an epidemic problem, maybe the biggest one.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: And not everyone is as genetically sensitive, right? Some people, they go into a moldy area. They get brain fog, right away. Some people do fine. Either way, it’s definitely a stressor in the stress bucket and if you know it’s there, you definitely wanna pull it out because it’s gonna help give you more resiliency and more adaptability. Great podcast today Evan. Everyone listening on the audio version, we pulled up some studies and some lab tests on the video version. We’ll put the link down below so you can see the video version. We’ll put some links to some of the labs and the products that we talked about today so you guys can take a look at those. Evan, great chatting with you. Head over to evandbrand.com to reach out to Evan via functional medicine nutritional support worldwide as well as justinhealth.com, Dr. J myself at justinhealth.com for me myself. We are here to help and support you guys wherever you are. Have a phenomenal day everyone.

Evan Brand: Take it easy. Bye-bye.

Dr. Justine Marchegiani: Take care. Bye now.

References:

https://justinhealth.com/

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-mold-gut-connection-how-your-digestive-issue-maybe-caused-by-mold-toxins-podcast-371

Recommended Products:

GPL Mycotox

GPL Organic Acids Test (OAT)

Deluxe Mold Test Kit

Genova Organix® Dysbiosis Profile

Genova SIBO Breath Test

Genova Organix® Comprehensive Profile

Probio Flora 60 caps

The Root Causes of Anxiety – A Functional Medicine Approach | Podcast #370

Conventional medicine labels anxiety as a neurotransmitter imbalance and relies on pharmaceutical drugs to dampen the symptoms. Although, prescription medications can be a helpful and even necessary tool in periods of overwhelming anxiety. But we have so many more tools at our disposal than just medications!

Dr. J and Evan explain that they recognize that anxiety is often the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” in functional medicine. It’s the clear and present warning that something is going on below the surface that needs our attention. Our current circumstances may have been the breaking point, but the anxiety manifests in underlying issues. That’s why rectifying these issues is necessary to make anxiety more manageable or even eliminate it!

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 – Introduction
2:06 – Acute and Chronic Stress
4:06 – Amino Acids and Herbs
11:24 – Gut Issues
16:26 – Functional Medicine Approach

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And we are live. It’s Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the root causes of anxiety, a functional medicine approach, and how to get to the root cause. Really excited about this topic. We see many functional medicine patients with these exact issues and we always want to get to the root cause of why that is so. Evan, how are we doing man?

Evan Brand: I’m doing good. You know the anxiety story for you and I talking about anxiety goes back literally eight years. It would have been late 2014 when I was in my luxury apartment in Austin and I was calling you and I was saying, “dude, I can’t stop this”. My heart is pounding. I’m freaking out. What the heck is going on and you said, “man, if you go to the emergency room, all they’re gonna do is they’re gonna give you some sort of anxiety medication. So why don’t you go and take about a gram of magnesium and see what happens.” And so, that’s what I did. I think I might have had some pharma GABA or some other tools on hand, maybe some passion flower and luckily, I calmed it down but little did I know back then that I had some of the big root causes of anxiety that were unresolved which included mold toxicity, Lyme, Bartonella, some of these tick-borne infections that drive up the nervous system, unfortunately. Now, knock on wood, anxiety’s been a minimal to non-existent part of my life and It’s incredibly freeing because anxiety can be so debilitating that people become housebound or they become afraid to travel, they become afraid to go on planes. They become afraid to seek the raise at their job. They just want to live in this little cocoon because they’re so afraid and anxiety is also very debilitating for children too. It affects their confidence and their self-esteem and their motivation for school and how they get bullied and so, I mean, we could do an hour on this but think just to open this thing up with a bang, I would say that infections are a big driver of anxiety so whatever that is a tick-borne infection like a Bartonella, Babesia, Lyme situation or gut infections like we’ve talked about a thousand times in the last 10 years together which is parasites, bacterial overgrowth, worms, Candida, anything that’s gonna release a toxin or aggravate the immune system.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. 100%. So anytime you look at anxiety, you always have to get to the root cause, right? Obviously, if it’s unresolved emotional stress, your body is designed to create anxiety for a certain situation, like if you, I don’t know, if you have lived in a forest across the street and there are bears, there should be a healthy amount of anxiety so you know, don’t leave food out and you’re just a little bit more careful with your habits so you don’t get attacked by a bear, right? There’s a healthy bit of anxiety there which is good to kind of keep you on edge so you are alert and you make good decisions. We’re talking about things that are, you know, unhealthy amounts of anxiety where you don’t have those types of emotional stressors, right? Obviously, if those emotional stressors are there, kind of take inventory of them and figure out what that corrective action is you need to kind of close the anxiety loop. I always say close the anxiety loop. What is that action? You have to take that allows you to feel confident that you are not ignoring the reason why there is anxiety there. If you did that, great, awesome. Check that off your list. The next thing is like you mentioned, obviously, any type of chronic stress or acute stress can create anxiety, right? And so, chronic and acute stressors do different things to your body. They’re going to cause B vitamins to get recycled and used up at a higher rate. They’re gonna cause magnesium to get used up at a higher rate. They’re gonna put you in a fight or flight position, where your body goes into fight or flight and then that’s gonna cause increases of cortisol, increases of adrenaline and it’s gonna cause your brain to get hyperactive and obviously at the same time it’s gonna affect digestion too when you’re in fight or flight. It’s gonna decrease your body’s ability to make stomach acid and enzymes and it makes it harder for you to break down your food. And so, and then of course, the more stressed you are, now you’re gonna start craving more processed foods that increase dopamine and increase a lot of those, uh, feel-good brain chemicals to buffer that but so, I always look at like what’s the constructive vehicle to fix this, what’s the destructive vehicle. Destructive vehicle feels good at the moment but creates problems down the road. Constructive helps at the moment. May not, maybe not quite as fast but then actually gets to the root cause over time. And so, some of our constructive vehicles like you already mentioned, magnesium, right? Theanine, right? B6, B5, right? And I always look at nutrients first, like nutrients are in the hierarchy before herbs so nutrients first and then, in the hierarchy coming down would be herbs, Ashwagandha, passion flower, Valerian. Those things are nice herbs that kind of activate and stimulate GABA. So, GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. So, it’s the brake pedal on the nervous system. So, think of the gas pedal as adrenaline, as cortisol. That’s the fight or flight nervous system response and the gas pedal is gonna be GABA and the things that are gonna help with GABA are gonna be Taurine, Theanine, GABA in and of itself. And then on the herbal side, things like Ashwagandha have multi-adaptogenic effects. They can increase cortisol and increase stimulation when things are too low but they can also tamp it down when it’s too high. I like my wife. She was really stressed the other day. We are getting our kids out for an easter party and she’s like, “you have something to give me? I am so stressed.” And I’m like, “here you go”. And I gave her a bunch of GABA, Taurine, and Theanine and magnesium, some B5 and vitamin C and some Ashwagandha and she looked at me like two hours later, she’s like, “what the heck did you give me. I’m on cloud 9.” I’m like, yeah, you know that, the better living through chemistry right there.

Evan Brand: That’s great. Yeah, and motherwort. I love motherwort too. It’s great for the anxiety when you’re having, like, heart palpitations, blood pressure type issues as well.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hyperthyroid too. They use it on hyperthyroid, as well.

Evan Brand: Yeah. That makes sense.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Too high thyroid, it can also be. It can help dampen that down, as well, which is nice.

Evan Brand: It’s great for grief too so like the cool thing about certain herbs is they can be an emotionally calming tool but they can be a nervous system calming tool too. So, like, as you mentioned, there could be an emotional thing like a bad boss, a bad spouse, a bully. You know that type of emotional anxiety driver but it could be a chemical driver too, meaning like a toxin driving the nervous system to be ramped up. Also, we should talk about blood sugar. I know we’ve done podcasts on this before but you know there’s a big impact on issues with blood sugar. Thank the Lord, my blood sugar is so good now, I could eat dinner at five and not eat till 1pm the next day and I’m stable, like, I can fast for extended periods of time as needed and I don’t have any issue but however when my gut was a wreck which I want people to pay special attention to, if your digestive system is compromised, you’re not gonna be tolerating fasting that well because you’re already so likely nutrient deprived because of the malabsorption due to the infection. So, years ago when I tried doing this type of fast, I would have major anxiety and that’s low hanging fruit so do what you got to do but you got to get your gut tested and then fix the infection first.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So, just kind of looking at a bunch of different things. So, on the emotional side, right? If it’s unresolved emotional trauma that’s creating anxiety, you know, someone wrote about DNRS, that’s great. You know, this NLP, where you kind of visualize a stop sign or something to kind of do a pattern interrupt. That’s excellent. EFT, EMDR with eye movement or different tapping on meridian points to kind of dampen down that sympathetic nervous system response. And again, these are gonna be good, you know, uh, more chronic issues. Yeah. If it is an acute issue, you know, a lot of times, just get to the root underlying issue where that issue is acute.

Evan Brand: I was on a plane one time and the turbulence was so bad and I started tapping on the plane. That really helped. I’m like okay. Even though it feels like this plane is about to crash, I love and accept myself and I’m like okay that’s fine.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Especially things like that. You don’t have control, right? There’s nothing you can do outside of just sitting there and getting through it. And so, it’s better when those things are kind of the case but you know, it’s kind of like, I’m just trying to think of you know an example, it’s kind of like, you go upstairs and don’t turn the alarm on for the house or like maybe did I leave the front door unlocked, right? And so, there’s a natural bit of anxiety. You start going down to bed and that little bit of anxiety kind of creeps in, you’re like, I’m not gonna be able to get to sleep fast if I don’t at least just check on the front door, right? So, let me make, oh good, it’s locked. Oh good, the alarm is on. Good. Now, that anxiety can go down because it’s there for a reason, right? So, if there’s a root cause, act on it, right? If there’s isn’t a root cause, right, but it’s more emotional, you can do some of the tapping and you can work with a practitioner to get to the root cause on that and then of course having better biochemistry will get will make every bit of anxiety better because you’ll be able to adapt to it and deal with it better. And so, of course, like we already talked about with cortisol, chronically high levels of cortisol and adrenaline are gonna be big so you have to get to the reason, the root cause why. And again, foods could be a reason why like gluten, too much processed sugar that can drive up that anxiety. Again, you already mentioned blood sugar fluctuations. If you’re on this reactive hypoglycemia roller coaster ride where blood sugar goes up because you ate too much processed carbohydrate, refined foods, junkie, vegetable oil, omega-6 fats. Blood sugars up and then it can crash right back down. The crashing is where you tend to get a lot of adrenaline cortisol stimulation and on the way up, you get lots of insulin so you get this insulin-cortisol-adrenaline kind of tug of war happening and that can be very stressful on the body. And then, of course, if your blood sugar is chronically high and you’re making tons of insulin that can also be a problem too. High levels of insulin can cause all kinds of problems with hormones, especially in women, it can cause issues with ovarian cysts and testosterone problems. And then, high levels of blood sugar deplete a lot of your B vitamins and magnesium. And so, if we have poor levels of B vitamin and B6 and B5 and B1 and B2 and B3 and folate and B12 and magnesium is depleted, that’s gonna cause more stress and more cortisol issues and it’ll be harder for you to deal with and adapt to that.

Evan Brand: And I would say, if you have anxiety longer than the week, I would almost consider that chronic. I mean, it’s crazy to me, how many people you have and I’ve talked to over the years who’ve had anxiety for a decade or longer and sometimes as one person commented that anxiety and OCD together is terrible. A lot of times OCD does come hand in hand with anxiety. We’ve done podcasts specifically about amino acid therapy and we use amino acid therapy in our clinics but if you have OCD, anxiety, low self-esteem, worry, negativity, depression, disturbed sleep, those are all symptoms of low serotonin. So, what you need to do is to get an organic acid test so we can measure this and look at the brain chemistry because if you’re not testing, you’re guessing. So, when you’re listening to this conversation about anxiety, I swear to you, you’re never gonna find a psychiatrist that’s gonna say, “hey, maybe we need to run an organic acids test, maybe you have low brain chemistry because you have bacterial overgrowth. So, we’re also gonna run a stool test. If they’re out there, send them our way, we’ll do a podcast with them but I doubt your psychiatrist is ever gonna consider running functional medicine testing on you to investigate this. I don’t care if you do lorazepam or the klonopin or whatever. It’s not the root cause and it’s gonna dig you.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Any benzo

Evan Brand: Yeah. Any benzo is gonna dig you further in the hole because now you’ve got this dependency issue and now you’ve got his issue of withdrawal and I don’t know if you’ve read some of the stories on this but my God if people try to acutely stop those benzodiazepines, there’s major major major side effects. So, it’s just not around

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Especially, if you’re on doses, you know, above one milligram or so on a benzo, it can be harder to get off and sometimes the taper can be, you know, six months to a year coming off of it. If you’ve been on it for a while or been on a higher dose. Yeah, you need to kind of do a slower type of taper for sure.

Evan Brand: And there’s so much, I mean, just think of how many millions. I didn’t look at the numbers here but how many millions of people are on prescription anxiety medication and they never ever get to the root cause. It’s so sad to think about someone that’s been on like a Lorazepam or another benzo for 20 years and they’ve never once asked about the gut. The question came in, how does dysbiosis cause anxiety. What are the mechanisms? Well, I think, one, right out of the gates is gut inflammation. Number two would be nutrient malabsorption because as you mentioned, a lot of these B vitamins are necessary for many processes in the body including energy production so sometimes you have anxiety and chronic fatigue and that sucks too because now you’re too tired but you’re anxious so that’s not a fun recipe either. What else would you say about the gut anxiety connection?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Well, so anytime you have chronic gut inflammation whether it’s from food, whether it’s antibiotics. Antibiotics are creating rebound yeast or bacterial overgrowth. We could put H. pylori in that category, and other infections, as well. That’s a one you and I already mentioned, creates malabsorption just from indigestion, right? Not enough enzymes, not enough acids, not absorbing things well. Two, you’re gonna have exogenous production of lipopolysaccharides which in and of itself are a toxin, right? They’re produced, they’re part of the gram-negative bacteria in the gut and they’re stressful on the liver and there’s also can go to the blood-brain barrier. And when they’re in the brain, they can create mood and anxiety issues as well. So yeah, lipopolysaccharides, you could have acetaldehyde and mycotoxins from fungus. You could have issues with the parasites producing their own type of internal toxins for sure. Of course, your body also produces through healthy gut bacteria, a fermentation process to make its own B vitamins, vitamin K. Those kinds of things. So, if we have dysbiosis, we typically are gonna have low levels of beneficial bacteria so we don’t have that good endogenous production behind it. And then, of course, that’s gonna over activate our immune system. So now, we have all these toxins kind of slipping through our bloodstream. We have undigested food particles, getting through our bloodstream. Now, our immune system starts becoming hyperactive and that can suck up energy. That can suck up resources. So, there’s studies on for instance H. pylori creating mental health issues, mental, emotional issues, depression and anxiety partly because of the lipopolysaccharides and endotoxins are the same thing by the way. LPS or endotoxins and obviously nutrient absorption problems too.

Evan Brand: Man, when I had H. pylori, I was super anxious. I don’t know if I was depressed as much but I was definitely anxious and you remember how skinny I got, I mean, I lost so much weight too. So, a lot of people, you know, they look at anxiety on the surface right. And everyone looks anxiety is just like this mental thing and you just need to watch some hoorah motivational video and just get over your fears and that I was like no anxiety goes way deeper than that. You just eloquently illustrated this, the aldehydes from the yeast and the fungus toxins and the bacterial toxins and the parasitic toxins and the mycotoxins. You guys, this anxiety is not in your freaking head. It’s not. It may manifest in your head but the root cause is not in your head unless you’re describing like, this toxin getting across the blood-brain-barrier but beyond that, the gut I would say is the biggest driver of anxiety. I’d say, if I had to pick one place to look, it would be the gut.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. So, when we look at this, what’s kind of the hierarchy of addressing this? So, of course, you fix the foods, right? Because the foods are one. You’re gonna decrease inflammation from the foods. And the inflammation in the foods is gonna cause gut permeability so you cut out the gluten, the dairy, the processed refined sugars and flours, the junky omega-6. You focus on good high-quality animal-based fats, good healthy proteins, you know, more carbohydrate from fruit and starch, especially if there’s blood sugar issues and then from there, then you work on digesting it. So, make sure enzymes and acids and good digestion are there. Get your gut looked at especially if there’s any type of chronic bloating or motility issues or indigestion, unadjusted food in your stool, diarrhea, then you get your gut looked at and of course if this issue is more chronic, you want to look at your stress handling system so the interplay sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system in your body and your nervous system is your adrenals and so you can get your adrenals looked at cortisol rhythm wise, you can do a cortisol panel. Look at your cortisol in the morning and throughout the day. Make sure it’s not too high or it’s reversed. On a good organic acid test, we can look at neurotransmitters like Vanilmandelate which looks at adrenaline. We can get Homovanillate which looks at dopamine, right? We can get the DOPA which looks at dopamine. We could also get 5-hydroxyindoleacytate to look at serotonin and then of course we can look at B6 like a kind of urenate or xanthurenate, right? We can look at brain inflammation markers like picolinate and quinolinate so there’s inflammation in the brain that gives us more indications. We can look at oxidative stress markers like 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine. There are good markers out there to look at these different things to give us a window of what’s happening so you know, we work on the food, work on the lifestyle, sleep. Make sure we’re digesting and breaking things down. Look at the nutrient deficiencies, look at the gut, look at the infection, look at the digestion and then of course, you know, we can always branch out and look at mold or mycotoxins or heavy metals or more toxic burdens down the road. That’s the foundation first and then I would say on top of that, if there’s any type of chronic pattern where there’s an emotional trauma involved that’s more unresolved definitely bring in a good practitioner, you know with some tools in their tool bag of NLP or EFT or EMDR or hypnosis. Anything that you want techniques to get into the subconscious but again the healthier you are the better the emotional stuff is to resolve so if you’re doing EMDR and EFT and NLP and you’re eating processed food and crap, it can still work, but it’s gonna be better when your brain chemistry is healthier.

Evan Brand: Oh, yeah. Amen. Well, think about all the people that are in talk therapy and then they go and they go eat a subway sandwich for lunch, thinking that they’re doing themselves a good favor by eating turkey on wheat bread with processed cheese and then they get mayonnaise or sweet and sour sauce on it or whatever the heck they’re doing and then they feel like crap, I mean.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I’m not a big fan of talk therapy in the long term. I think, talk therapy is good did you kind of just consciously process something like how did this happen maybe you’re learning some tools to enter into your life from a habit standpoint to fix whatever that issue was but then most of that trauma sits in the subconscious area of the brain which is where 90% of all your thoughts are subconscious and so that’s where you want some of these techniques like we talked about but I think talk therapy is good to acutely process what you’ve observed whatever your experiences are and then talk about, hey what can you do, you know, as a person today as an adult today, um, you know, from a habit standpoint to address it but then after that then you gotta, you know, if you’re in talk therapy months and months later and you’re still just ruminating over the same thing then it’s a subconscious thing you got to work on next.

Evan Brand: Yeah, and look, don’t let me talk people out of doing it. I’m not trying to do that but what I’m saying is I’ve had people that said, “oh yeah, I’ve been with this therapist for 3 years and I meet with them every week or every other week”. And I’m like, “okay and what do you do with this therapist?” “We talked.”, “Okay and what else do you do?” That’s it. It’s talk therapy and I go, okay, you’ve been doing talk therapy every week or every two weeks for 3 years and you still have anxiety that’s this bad. We got to dig deeper. So, like I said, there’s a role for that but it’s not gonna get you out of the woods. The person who commented about the dysbiosis and anxiety question, they also commented in here said they did have a stool test that showed H. pylori. They have extremely high Morganella which is one of those bacteria we’ve talked about and calprotectin which is gut inflammation over a thousand. Fatigue and anxiety were the main symptoms. We see this everyday all day.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. Exactly. I’m familiar with that case for sure. And inflammation in the gut can definitely create those types of issues and get to the root cause of it too. And then, someone writes in, about Accutane too, I mean, this is super common if you get into the dermatology world. I mean, dermatologists, they either cut something. They burn it off with a laser. They freeze it off or they use some type of antibiotic, topical or internal or they use some kind of like, synthetic vitamin A. That’s it. That’s the dermatology world you know in a nutshell and they tend to not get to the root, you know, we’re talking like more chronic acne, chronic skin stuff. They tend to not ever get to the root cause of how or why that’s even there. Diet, sugars, junky, omega-6, poor digestion, poor fats, poor proteins. They don’t really get to the root cause of what that is and so, they recommend synthetic vitamin A, which is Accutane, which again, will decrease the amount of oil produced by your sebaceous glands which can be helpful in the short run if they’re producing too much oil but they can create chronic skin and eye dryness in the long term and they’re not even getting to the reason why your skin’s producing too much oil to begin with. Usually, it’s too much insulin. Insulin is a huge driving factor of excess oil and then of course, you have different food allergens, gluten, dairy, too much sugar. That can also cause a lot of problems with the skin cells.

Evan Brand: And not to mention, the connection between people that have anxiety and acne. Guess what, they’re both linked to the gut. So, if you have acne and anxiety, you gotta investigate your gut. Please. Please. Please.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep. 100%. And again, you know, outside of that, you know, we look at different toxins down the road. If we look at heavy metals, there’s different tests. We can look at, to do a challenge test on your metals with a DMPS or some kind of a challenge agent. We can definitely look at mold if there’s mold in the environment that’s important to look at. And again, if you’re in an environment where you feel better leaving that environment then there could be some mold in there, especially, if a history of water damage that was unresolved, definitely want to get your mold looked at or just your home looked at too, especially if it’s something that the whole family is dealing with just get the home looked at to start. It’s usually cheaper and more effective out of the gates.

Evan Brand: Yeah. well said. And, heavy metals too. I’m glad you brought that up. You know, mercury and other heavy metals that can stimulate the nervous system and cause issues. So, if you have a bunch of silver fillings in your mouth, you’ve got to consider that. May not be your number one smoking gun, sometimes it is but heavy metals are a big problem and even detox too can make people feel too sick. I mean, you and I have seen this many times. Other practitioners that have handled people before they come to us or they’ve done something too aggressively with chelation or other detox methods and then they’ve ended up worse. So, there’s like a tight rope and that’s where the art of medicine comes in. Everything is not just like cookie cutters. So, too much is a problem. Too little is a problem and that depends on gut and detox and beta glucuronidase and liver and all of it. So, like if your friend got better and you tried what your friend did and you didn’t do well, that might not be your right protocol.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Exactly. And then, just to kind of highlight the nutrients in, compared to talk therapy, Julia Ross is out there. She’s like a family therapist person but she’s done a lot of books on amino acids and diet and she had different clients that she used to use talk therapy for years and years and years and said, “hey, let me just try adding in some amino acid therapy to their protocol and let’s see how they do with their talk therapy when we add in the amino acids”. She started to do that and then these patients would come the next week and they’d be like, “Yeah, just, I’m just good. I just don’t even feel the need to talk about it. I’m over it”. And it’s like wow so it’s like it gives people the equipment to kind of, like, process these issues and again I think talk therapy acutely may be fine. It’s just when you’re talking about the same thing for years and years and years, you’re probably not getting to the root cause, right? This is probably just covering up something else, you know. Now, I think it’s better than being on a drug, right? So, if it’s helpful and you don’t need a drug that’s great but, in the end, you know, if you can do some of these nutritional things along with it, you may find that you can just deal with the issues better you know I, the analogy I get patients is, try dealing with difficult problems around the home and not having slept for a couple nights. You’re gonna lose your patience with your wife with your kids. You’re not gonna be able to think right, you’ll be foggy, get some good night sleep and then wake up and deal with the problem. It’s like you’re gonna be way more equipped to deal with it. I think that’s kind of how brain chemistry works when you’re dealing with these stressors.

Evan Brand: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I remember in that book too, talking about how, like, amino acids were administered, right? At the beginning of a session and then the people would just immediately like, smile or loosen up or relax and so it’s amazing no matter how much you talk. Long story short, I know we’ve beat the drum on this for a minute but last thing, no matter how much you talk. It’s never gonna change your levels of serotonin just by talking it out. If you have a gut problem that’s affecting your nutrient absorption which is affecting the tryptophan and the conversion with the B6 over to 5HTP and then over to serotonin and then to melatonin so sleep issues too. So skin, sleep, anxiety, they’re all connected depression. We’ve already talked about that. This person here’s putting a bunch of question marks like they’re mad at us. What is the connection between Accutane and depression?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It’s just a side effect. It’s a side effect of the drug.

Evan Brand: It could be a side effect. Yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Just the side effects of the drug. That’s all it is. Yeah. So certain drugs, you know, are gonna have side effects. Ibuprofen can cause ulcers and liver issues, right? Just a drug side effect.

Evan Brand: Yeah. Well, we got to wrap this thing up. But if you need help clinically, you can feel free to reach out. We work with people around the world. We send these functional medicine labs to your door. We have an incredible logistical team on both sides where it’s incredible. We can help people in literally every part of the globe where people like us don’t exist or maybe they do but we’re better. So, if you need help, you can reach out directly to Dr. J, that’s Dr. Justin Marchegiani at justinhealth.com for consults or me, Evan Brand at evanbrand.com. We’re happy to help. You guys, don’t give up. We’ve been through it. We are warriors ourselves and we’ve worked on our health for years and we love what we do and we love helping people and there’s so much possibility when you can beat an issue like anxiety. So, like I said in the beginning, whether it’s seeking that raise, that new promotion, that new job, that new spouse, you know, that partner, that relationship that you want to grow but you can’t because you’re held back by anxiety. This is a huge huge problem and you can overcome this. So please don’t give up.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. If you guys enjoyed it too, look down below, you’ll see a little link where you can write us a review. We appreciate the review and if, also, it’s benefiting you, feel free to share with family and friends and there’ll be links where you can reach out to us directly to get that extra bit of help. All right guys, have a phenomenal day. Take care. Bye everyone.

Evan Brand: Bye-bye.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye.

References:

https://justinhealth.com/

Audio Podcast:

https://justinhealth.libsyn.com/the-root-causes-of-anxiety-a-functional-medicine-approach-podcast-370

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