How Lifestyle Medicine Can Reverse Aging & Stress | Dr. Kirk Parsley DSH #1153

Summary

Digital Social Hour: How Lifestyle Medicine Can Reverse Aging & Stress | Dr. Kirk Parsley DSH #1153

Host: Sean Kelly
Guest: Dr. Kirk Parsley
Release Date: January 31, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Digital Social Hour, host Sean Kelly engages in an in-depth conversation with Dr. Kirk Parsley, a leading expert in lifestyle medicine. The discussion delves into how lifestyle interventions can reverse aging and manage stress, particularly focusing on the challenges faced by Navy SEALs and the transformative potential of treatments like psychedelics and hyperbaric therapy.

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Navy SEALs’ Health Challenges

Dr. Parsley begins by shedding light on the often-overlooked health struggles of Navy SEALs. Contrary to popular belief, SEALs are not impervious to physical and psychological tolls.

“There are a lot of people who just think military guys are young and indestructible... but they're not indestructible.” ([01:10])

He explains that the rigorous training, multiple deployments, frequent battles, sleep deprivation, and psychological trauma significantly impact SEALs' well-being, leading to declining performance that is largely repairable through proper care.

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Critique of Military Medicine

Dr. Parsley criticizes the military medical establishment for its overly conservative approach, which often hinders effective treatment.

“Nothing's worse than military medicine... They can't give hormones even when SEALs need them to be at optimal levels.” ([02:06])

He highlights the restrictive policies that prevent SEALs from accessing necessary medications, such as hormones, which are essential for maintaining their health and operational readiness.

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Hormonal Imbalances and Peptide Use

The conversation shifts to the misuse of hormones and peptides among SEALs, leading to severe health consequences.

“There was a SEAL trainee who died after abusing testosterone and growth hormone... all illegal stuff.” ([05:03])

Dr. Parsley recounts the tragic case of a SEAL trainee whose unauthorized use of performance-enhancing substances led to his untimely death. This incident prompted stricter regulations and random testing within the SEAL community.

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Psychedelics in Mental Health Treatment

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the role of psychedelics in treating mental health issues among veterans.

“Psychedelics were a big surprise to me... they transformed his life.” ([15:45])

Dr. Parsley shares inspiring stories of SEALs who, after undergoing psychedelic treatments like psilocybin and ibogaine, experienced profound mental health improvements, including reduced neuroinflammation and enhanced neuroplasticity.

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Hyperbaric Therapy for Brain Injuries

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy emerges as a powerful tool for addressing traumatic brain injuries (TBI) prevalent among military personnel.

“Hyperbarics are an amazing tool... they're a game changer.” ([26:48])

Dr. Parsley explains how hyperbaric chambers increase oxygenation in brain tissues, promoting healing and cognitive recovery even in chronic cases. He emphasizes the need for greater accessibility to these treatments for veterans residing in rural areas.

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The Importance of Sleep in Lifestyle Medicine

The conversation underscores sleep as the cornerstone of lifestyle medicine, essential for overall health, recovery, and stress management.

“Sleep is the foundation for all this... if you don't do sleep, you can't do the other ones.” ([52:26])

Dr. Parsley elaborates on how quality sleep influences hormone regulation, metabolism, and the body's ability to recover from physical and mental stress. He discusses strategies developed with SEALs to improve sleep quality and reduce dependence on medications like Ambien.

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Medical System’s Restrictions and Impact

Dr. Parsley critiques the broader medical system for its restrictive practices that impede effective treatment options.

“Medicine's a mess... money and bureaucratic influence are driving everything, not patient care.” ([46:08])

He highlights issues such as the FDA's blanket bans on peptides, which are vital for his therapeutic protocols, and the challenges clinicians face when trying to provide comprehensive care outside the conventional medical framework.

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Conclusion: Lifestyle Medicine as a Solution

Wrapping up, Dr. Parsley advocates for a holistic approach to health, emphasizing lifestyle modifications as key to reversing aging and managing stress.

“Most of health is lifestyle... sleep is the foundation for all this.” ([52:26])

He encourages adopting practices that enhance sleep, nutrition, exercise, and stress mitigation to achieve optimal health and longevity. Dr. Parsley envisions a future where lifestyle medicine becomes mainstream, offering scalable solutions to widespread health challenges.

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Notable Quotes

• Dr. Kirk Parsley:
  • “Nothing's worse than military medicine... They can't give hormones even when SEALs need them to be at optimal levels.” ([02:06])
  • “Psychedelics were a big surprise to me... they transformed his life.” ([15:45])
  • “Hyperbarics are an amazing tool... they're a game changer.” ([26:48])
  • “Sleep is the foundation for all this... if you don't do sleep, you can't do the other ones.” ([52:26])
  • “Medicine's a mess... money and bureaucratic influence are driving everything, not patient care.” ([46:08])

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Final Thoughts

This episode of Digital Social Hour offers a profound exploration of how lifestyle medicine, through innovative treatments and holistic health practices, can significantly impact aging and stress management. Dr. Kirk Parsley's insights provide valuable perspectives for anyone seeking to enhance their health beyond conventional medical approaches.

For more information and resources mentioned in this episode, visit Dr. Kirk Parsley’s Website.

Transcript

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[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

CT mobile.com yeah, it's a total mess.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I think this, we do some.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Good things, but yeah, it saved my life.

[Podcast Host]

I had pneumonia once. I, I can say western medicine did save my life. They're great for that.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

We're graded infectious disease, like severe infectious, graded trauma. But everything else, yeah, you probably want to, want to take care of yourself.

[Podcast Host]

All right, guys, Dr. Kirk Parsley here. Today we're gonna talk, talk Navy Seals talk peptides and a bunch of fun health stuff. Thanks for coming on.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Thanks for having me, man.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely. We were talking out there. I was just so fascinated that the seals are dealing with some major issues.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, you know, a lot of people, A lot of people just think military guys are young and indestructible and they can just keep going forever. It's like, like any other, any other organization, it takes, it takes years to get really good at it. You know, to get really, to be proficient, to be a leader, to be able to, you know, plan and lead missions and things. You know, you're looking at a decade or more to be in there, which is a lot of training and a lot of deployments and a lot of battle and a lot of injuries and a lot of sleep deprivation and yeah, a lot of, you know, psychological trauma, you know, for lack of a better word, and all that stuff. And it pays. You know, it costs. You know, it weighs on the, it weighs on the individual. And they are very strong, very resilient, very capable men, but they're not indestructible.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And they do start breaking down and their performance does start to decline for reasons that are by and large repairable. But you want to talk about, you know, a stilted, overly conservative medical organization. Nothing to worse than military medicine. I mean, they're just, they're very staunchy old, old school, kind of, you know, anything. Anything that, anything that our troops have to have disqualifies them. Because if they have to have a medication, well, then you can't deploy them, because what if they. What if they don't have their medication? So it's a tough battle, you know, and there's a lot of political stuff in there that upsets people, too, because, like, technically, when. When somebody wants to do transgender whatever and they need hormones, those people are considered okay and they're deployable. But if a SEAL needs hormones to be not above normal, but just to be like high in the, like in the high reference range of where what his age group should be. Yeah, the upper. The upper, say 25 of that range, if you need, you know, or if you just want to take them out of the tank. Like, I see a lot of guys who, you know, they're only in the normal range by one point out of like a 800 point range. Right. So they're one point into it. But you can't. But that's normal. And you can't. You can't give them. You can't give them hormones, even though, you know, it's much different than what people think of when they think of cheating in sports. Like, cheating in sports. Like, a high end of normal would be 1100. Somebody who's cheating in sports is probably going to be like 1500 or 2000 something. They're going outside to be superhuman.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Like, no, we just want to get them up to the 900 range. Right. To be in the high normal, which they had, you know, five years ago or 10 years ago. There's no, there's no logic to saying that that's dangerous. Right. I mean, if you're just putting somebody back to where they were when they were younger. So it, It's a lot of politics. I don't know if you heard about the whole drama a couple of years ago with a seal who. A SEAL trainee or Budge training, not a SEAL yet. He'd gone through hell week and then he died the night. The night of recovery. And they. They were just trying to. They're trying to burn the officer in charge of that command as though it was something that he'd done wrong. And fortunately, he went on Sean Ryan's podcast and that. That podcast caused enough attention to it where they reversed everything. And wow, they're really going after this guy. And the doctor who is a friend of mine, and this kid was abusing drugs, man. He was. He's abusing you know, testosterone and growth hormone and like all sorts of peptides and who knows what else. And it was all, you know, it was all bootleg, illegal stuff.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

You know, he wasn't getting treated by a doctor. He was just doing all this on his own. And that's, that's resulted in seals now being water tested, which is like the strictest, you know, governing board. So I, I don't know if they can get randomly tested like water athletes, but they can, but they have to meet that same criteria, which is crazy. There's like caffeine limits on what I mean, there's all sorts of like, they can't take over.

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[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

A supplement anybody, anybody in America can go buy.

[Podcast Host]

That's a longevity supplement, right?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. I mean and seals can't go buy that, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

They can't go buy that and take that now because it's, you know, political reasons.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. It says this is mind blowing to me because when I think of a seal, I think of someone who's high testosterone, super healthy. But we were just talking out there and you're saying some of these guys levels are super low.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, I mean I, I, so I was the doctor there for about three years, a little over three years. Of course it's self selection bias. Right. But the guys who came to see me, I'd say the average guy was probably early 30s and had not just testosterone but the full anabolic profile. So like growth hormone, testosterone, DHEA, IGF1, like all, all of kind of the markers for anabolic activity. They'd have about the same level of like what a, a fat 50 year old, fat 60 year old man would have. And they're like six pack ripped, you know, great shape. 32 years old. 30 years old. Yeah, saw that all the time. That has to do with the head injuries of the job. It has to do with the sleep deprivation, use of sleep drugs, use of alcohol for sleep and all that.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

So that's kind of like, that's kind of what got me into the career that I do now.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And that was the first problem you tackled, the sleep. Right?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Sleep. Yeah. So you know, the guys were coming to my office and seals don't, seals don't trust doctors because the doctor like a doctor can put you on the bench. He's the most likely person to put you on the bench. And the worst thing you can do to a seals, put him on the bench. Right. That's that's not just his job, it's his identity. It's his, it's his community. It's, it's everything. Like, seals are seals, like first and foremost. And that's all we are when we're seals is like, that's it, we're seals. And we might be a SEAL who's also married, but we're SEAL first, right? That's, and that's the way it goes. And so they don't want to be put on the bench. So they don't, they don't trust their doctors with their problems. And a lot of times they'll go out in the town and they'll spend money out of their pockets to have a doctor outside of the military treat them to help.

[Podcast Host]

So they'll hide their injuries and everything.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And so because I'd been a SEAL and I'd been still recently enough to where there are a lot of seals there that I trained with and deployed with and stuff, the guys trusted me and they would come in and close the door and go, hey, man, let me tell you what's really going on with me. And really, if you just think of like what a kind of fat, pre diabetic, 55, 65 year old man would come and tell you, that's what these guys were telling me. And I had no idea. I was like, I don't know, but I'll help. We'll figure it out together, right? And so I just, the good thing was the seals, like when I was a seal, nobody knew what a SEAL was, so it wouldn't have been helpful.

[Podcast Host]

But hadn't come out yet.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, the movies and bin Laden and all that stuff, like none of that happened. But when I, when I was treating these guys, they already kind of had this celebrity status. And so if I saw somebody's TED Talk or heard him lecture, read their book, I call them, hey, yeah, I'm the doctor for the west coast seals. Can I consult with you, run patients by you? Can I, you know, whatever come train with you a lot? And every single guy would that I talked to was like, sure, I'd love to help. Nobody ever charged me for mentorship. And I just got to learn a whole, whole new way of treating people. You know, it took me out of like sick disease care to into this performance optimization world is what I call it, right? It's like taking people who are, you know, relatively healthy compared to the general population. And seals, of course, exceptionally healthy compared to the general population. But it, you know, there's a, there's a delta between what you're capable of, what you know you're capable of and what you can actually do at this moment. And like, how do we, how do we close that delta?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And, and it's a lot of the same stuff that a longevity doctor would do. But I don't know how long you're going to live, so I can't really promise you longevity. Right. You could work with me and die tomorrow. You could work with me and not die till you're 90, but maybe you're going to live to 95 if you didn't work with me. I don't know. So, so I, I don't, I don't, I'm not comfortable with saying longevity, but a lot of the same stuff.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. You know, you're basically improving their, their numbers.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the way I look at it is if I can make. My goal is basically as I take your lab, but everything that I know how to measure and now there's all kinds of wearables and there's all sorts of stuff that we, there's genetics, epigenetics, there's all kinds of things we can test now that I couldn't do then. But everything that I know how to measure and everything I know how to have impact on, I know what a 25 year old healthy, athletic man looks like. Right. We, if we use that as the baseline and we say, hey, I want all your metrics to look like. If I gave your packet to a colleague of mine and said, who do you think this is? They'd say a fit 25 year old, athletic. Yeah, right. Which means you have, you have the most potential at that point, right? You, you're the most resilient, you know, as far as what we can measure your capability of being strong, your capability of being enduring and your capability of handling injury and recovering from disease, which is essentially youth. Right. What's the difference between a kid who falls down the stairs and an 80 year old who falls down the stairs? What resources do you have to recover from that? Well, when you're 80, not many. And that's why a lot of people die. Right. When you're a kid, just like, oh, you're metabolically healthy, strong, your hormones are up, you're healing is super fast and all. And you know, you're just more pliable, more athletic, whatever. And so a little kid can recover from something that an older person can't. And really what being older means in the sense that we don't like aging is that we have fewer Resources. And we're more vulnerable to disease, we're more vulnerable to death, we're more vulnerable to any kind of serious injury doing the same thing. And so if I can make you stronger and faster and more enduring and you can choose what you want to be good at, this could be all like, you could, like some of my clients, you know, they focus 100% on cognition, right. They just want to be smarter. They want to want their brains to be better. They want to be able to, like they're big CEOs or something. They want to be smarter in the boardroom or better entrepreneurs, whatever. You can drive it wherever you want to. But we know what metabolically physiologically healthy looks like, and that's what I shoot for. And if I'm keeping you physiologically healthy and you're 60 and then you're, you know, you're markers look like that of a 25 year old, I would have to guess that I'm probably extending your life. Right. If we can do this for the rest of your life and you know, the whole health span idea that you just, you're just healthy and healthy and then you just die one day instead of this constant decline to slow, trickle down from, you know, 50 down to 85, where you're just getting worse and worse and worse, we just try to cut that off, like make that a square where you just fall off a cliff one day, hopefully. But time will tell. We, you know, I can't say that's true yet because I've only been doing it for 20 years.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you'll probably need another 46 years.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Do you focus mainly on the physical side or do you do any of the trauma work, the mental side?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

I work with all of it. Like, I'm not a, I'm not a therapist or psychotherapist or anything like that. I mean, I, I'll, I'll talk to the patients to the limit of my expertise, but I work with, like, I work with experts on everything, right. So, you know, I, I'll, I'll send people, there's people I trust that do kind of anything that you're interested in. You know, breath work, yoga, meditation, Kundalini yoga, mindfulness training. I'll send people to that I have therapists, marital therapists, people that I, that I refer to, who I'm really familiar with their work. And I can do maybe 30 of what they do. And then they got to pass them on. If you get more complex than that, psychedelics, you know, I'll send people out.

[Podcast Host]

To psychedelics have you seen success with that route?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Amazing. Really amazing.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Psychedelics were a big surprise to me. Yeah, big surprise to me. You know, I. I grew up rural Texas. Very, very redneck. Like, we do think of just, like, you know, beer was the only good drug. Yeah. In the world. And. And I didn't like anybody who did any kind of drugs. And. And I. I always thought that psychedelics. It's just. That's just a hippie excuse. Different way of getting high. Right. And that's what I thought it was. And then I had a seal who had. He had a really bad brain injury. He was in a. He's in a vehicle that had run over an IED and had blown up, and it broke his neck. He had become a paraplegic, or he wasn't. He wasn't paralyzed from it, but by the grace of God. Like, he. He. He. He had all the. He had a ton of reason to be paralyzed, but he wasn't. But he had, you know, just unrelenting headaches and psychological issues and pain issues and all kinds of stuff. And so he was getting med boarded out of the military, and he was on, you know, the typical cocktail. They start with an antidepressant. They add something else, add another antidepressant. Then they got to give you some Adderall to keep you awake during the day for the depressants they're giving you to keep you. Get you asleep at night, and, you know, end up on antipsychotics and, you know, pain medications in the whole thing. And I. I saw this play out a few dozen times when I was the doctor there guys would be on between 13 to 17 pharmaceuticals. And this one guy that I had was really, really, really bitter. He was scary. Like, the only time I've really been scared as a doctor. And he came in my office every day because he didn't have a job. He was just getting medboarded out. And he came in my office every day and sat in there for hours, and. And I literally thought he might Murder suicide. Like, he. Like his. He was so angry at the system that was taking his career away from him, you know, and then he got out, and I didn't hear from him for about six months. And then I ran into him again. He was. He was so transformed that I didn't recognize him.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

So he's a guy who'd been sitting in my office, you know, four or five days a week for six months. So I. I know what he looks like. I got. I got a lot of experience with him. And I sat this close to him for 20 minutes talking to him, could not figure out who he was. And he finally said something, and I was like, oh, my God. And. And I said his name, and he's like, who'd you think I was? I was like, I don't know. I still don't think you're that guy. Like, you look. You look, and you. I have pictures of him, like, before and after. You can't tell the difference. Like, you cannot tell us the same guy.

[Podcast Host]

Did he lose a lot of weight?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

He lost. He lost a bit of weight because the psychotropic drugs had put some weight on him, but it wasn't huge. I mean, he was. He's a big guy. He's bigger than me. So he. I think he's probably, like, 280 or something in the teams. He maybe got down to, like, 250 or something. So he lost some weight, but still a really big. Really big guy. But facial expression, the way he talked, his posture. I swear his eyes were dark brown or black when he came in my office, and they're bright blue when I saw him. And I was like, I don't believe this is the same guy. And now he's super successful, like, doing all kinds of amazing stuff in Hollywood.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

He's the producer of I don't play video games, Call of Duty.

[Podcast Host]

Like, there was a producer.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

He's a producer of that. Oh, crap. And, like, great, dude. He. He's comfortable with me telling the story. And so I was like, what. What'd you do? Like, what happened? He said, well, I got out of the military, and I threw all my meds in the trash, and I got on a plane and I flew down to Peru, and I lived with a shaman and in the Amazon jungle for 30 days, nude. For some reason, I don't understand that part, but whatever. So nude in the jungle for 30 days. I think, like, he did Kundalini yoga, like, eight hours a day. And then I think. I want to say he said, like, every third night, he did ayahuasca. And I was like, all right, man. Like, I'm. I'm sold. Like, because nothing in medicine that we didn't have anything right. Neurology and psychiatry and psychology all combined, couldn't do 5% of what the change I'd seen in hand. It only been six months, and he had been treated for four or five years when he was sitting in my office, right? So. And he's just getting worse. So I was like, all right, well, I'm. I'LL have an open mind about that. And then some doctors approached me who were doing at an ibogaine clinic down in Mexico which is, they call like the father, the grandfather of a psychedelic. It's like the most harsh, it's the most stern teachers, like you aren't, you aren't escaping. There's not going to be unicorns and butterflies. Like, this is gonna be a hard lesson. And I had a buddy who was just a guy that I'd gone through SEAL training with and been my friend my whole life. And very similar to that guy I was telling you about. And he was just as, he's at his wit's end and I was like, let's go try this ibogaine thing. And amazing transformation. Amazing. Like I watched it because I was there with him.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And then the next day when he got up, I was like, wow, I cannot, I cannot believe this is like he, he became the 18 year old kid I met again. You know, like he just looked lighter. He, like his mood was totally different. Smiling for the first time. And you know, I don't remember the last time it seemed small before that. And, and you know, and it's not, you know, it's not a permanent change, but it gives you an opportunity to make permanent changes. Right? So. So psychedelics increase something called neuroplasticity, right. I'm sure you've heard of that, right? So your ability to change the way you think about things, right? Like I'm not a grumpy old man because of my age. I'm a grumpy old man because my brain is like solidified. Like this is the right way and that's the wrong way and like.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And that makes me grumpy because like I think, well, no, it's this way. Well, neuroplasticity allows. Would allow me to think of different things and well, maybe purple hair is okay, right. Like, you know, but that, that's a, that's a simplistic part of it. And then there's also like. Are you familiar with the amygdala region of your brain? It's like part of it. So it's like the alarm center, right. It tells you what to pay attention to. And primarily dangerous things. Right. But also attractive. Whatever, right. And so you think of any of the primal, you know, feeding, fighting, effing, right. All that. So you could. This region's kind of walnut size on each side of your brain and, and they, it determines what you pay attention to. And it's the sympathetic nervous system. You probably Heard.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Like so it's the stress, it's the fight or flight pathway. When that, when that thing maxes out, that's when you're in fight or flight, that's when all of your hormones shift and all, all that amazing stuff happens. And of course, being in the military, being something like a seal, being a combat veteran, like all that stuff makes you more and more amygdala heavily heavy. Right. And that's the hyper vigilance you hear about people.

[Podcast Host]

Always on, always.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, always looking for threats. Like, where's the threat coming from? Everything's a threat. Every facial expression, like what, what was that eye twitch? Like, is he right? Is he doing something right? And it's almost a paranoia. And the publish hasn't, the paper hasn't been published yet, but a colleague of mine did the research and they showed a decrease of amygdala activity, so called amygdala tone. Decrease of amygdala tone by about 90%.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap. From allergy.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. Well, for all the psychedelics and then the difference is how long, how durable is that change? So psilocybin does it, Ayahuasca does it. Ibogaine does it. But psilocybin lasts a couple of months. Ayahuasca lasts 6, 6 to 9 months. Ibogaine can last up to a year. Damn. As far as that decrease now, it's not 90% for a year, but it's like significantly decreased amygdala tone, which allows you to drop your ego. You have the neuroplasticity, so you have the ability to change. You have the insight of the experience to go, hey, maybe I should, maybe I should not think of that some way. Maybe I should process this differently. Maybe I should consider changing my approach to these things. And it's the ego death that comes with these heroic journeys. Get your ego out of the way. So now I have less stress. I have a brain that I can actually change and my ego's not getting in the way. So if I do the work during that window of time that I have, I can change myself significantly.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

But if I just go do the psychedelic and then go back to my normal life, I'm going to be exactly the way I was.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. It's going to creep back up after a year.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. Because I'm still thinking the same way. I'm still processing the same way. You know, for, for any, for anything you want in the world, for any outcome you want in the world. There's a, there's a specific way of acting, but there's also a specific way of thinking that brings that to you. Right. If you can't change it, like, if you. If you don't have the ability. If you don't have the insight to change it or. Or enough neuroplasticity, enough, you know, good enough sleep, good enough recovery, good enough hormone profile. If you don't have that stuff, you can't make the change.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And so that gives you an opportunity, a big opportunity to do it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And it's, It's. It's the most transformational thing that we have. I don't administer it. I have, like, I. I have colleagues that do, and I refer that out.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

When it. When it's appropriate. But I. I had a super, super successful experience with a long COVID Patient for that. Really Psychedelics. Yeah. So he's a. A guy. When I met him, I want to say when I met him, he'd been out of work for two years and showed no signs of being able to go back to work. Um, and he was, you know, he was seeing Peter McCullough in Dallas, like, you know, the top Kobe guy. And he was doing all the right things and a lot. I mean, 90% of what I would have had him do. The only thing I did is I worked with his hormones and I had him go do psychedelics. And so I can't say it was 100% psychedelics, but he'll tell you that there was a huge shift in his. Because he had a lot of neuroinflammation. That's another thing that they're good for is they reduce neuroinflammation.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting. Yeah. Cause they made all the seals get the vaccine, right?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So that probably caused some. Some long damage.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, there. There's some. There's some problems with that. And they were. They were trying to kick some seals out for not taking the vaccine.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Unfortunately, they. They hung in the battle long enough for everything to reverse.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Shout out to those guys. Because they were facing a lot of pressure.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. A lot of pressure.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And a lot of expense and. Yeah. And that's a. And that's an exceptionally tight community. Right. So if you're. If you're going against your com. Like your community there, like you're going against yourself, really, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

So that was, that was. It took a lot of courage to do what they did.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. I would have never thought psychedelics would help with something like long covet. That's interesting.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. That I. I'm not sure that it would always help, but his I knew for sure that his specific issue was neuroinflammation. And because it decreases inflammation in the brain, I knew it would help him.

[Podcast Host]

And hyperbaric helps with that too.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Hyperbaric is an amazing tool.

[Podcast Host]

I'm literally getting one for my house. Yeah, they're expensive, but they are, but they're.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

They're worth it. And if you get a good one, it'll literally last you your entire life, right? And your whole family can use it and your friends can use it. And, you know, like people. You have friends, you have surgery, you can have them come over and you're like, so. And they've come down a lot in the last five years. You know, know they've gone from over 100 grand. You can get it. You can get a good one now for 50.

[Podcast Host]

Really? The hard shot one.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

A hard one? Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

When I was looking, they were like 100k.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Oxy Health. Oxy Health has a 44 inch chamber that you sit upright in. So it's kind of like a. Kind of like one of these chairs sitting there. And it. It's at least 2 ATA, but it might be 2 and a half. And 2 atmospheres is about where you need to match most of the research. And that has an oxygenator. Instead of having O2 bottles, you only get like 93% oxygen. But it's very. It's almost certain that that's insignificantly different as far as what you're doing. Because what's happening in hyperbarics is because of that pressure, because you have, you know, right now we have one atmosphere by definition, sitting on top of us, right. When I go to 2 atmospheres, I have twice that, right. But it's not, you know, it's a exponential curve. So when I have two atmospheres of pressure, the. The volume that a certain amount of air or a certain amount of oxygen would take up, it's cut down to like a tenth, right? So I have. I can put 2,000% more oxygen to all of my tissues at 2 atmosphere.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

One, because I'm breathing 100O2 or close to 100O2. Now, if you breathe 100O2 right now, it doesn't do anything because your hemoglobin and your red blood cells are the only place you can carry oxygen. But when you go down in depth, when you increase that pressure and you have 2 atmospheres of pressure on you, you can crush those oxygen bubbles down small enough to where they dissolve in your plasma, and then you have oxygen, your plasma, that's going everywhere in your body. And, and capillaries are the only place that red blood cells can exchange oxygen, whereas the oxygen and, and the plasma can leak out anywhere. It can go all over your body. And so you'll get, you get super oxygenation to all of your tissues. And you know, oxygen is what your mitochondria use, you know, to produce energy. Yeah, ATP. So you basically increase the energy production of every single cell in your body.

[Podcast Host]

Crazy. Yeah. I had a TBI and I went to a place nearby.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

They're great for TBI.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And yeah, I paid like 50 bucks a session or whatever and it went away. Dude.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I just got my brain scanned. It's completely gone now. Isn't that crazy?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

What's really crazy is that it works for TBIs. They're like 10 years old.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, mine was old because I don't even remember getting mine.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Okay.

[Podcast Host]

So I think it was from childhood or something.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

So there's, there's a lot, there's a pretty good acceptance in the medical community that will work for what they call an acute injury. So it's like you get in a car crash today, they take you to a chamber about maybe high end, high estimate, maybe 50% of the medical community would say, yeah, that's a good idea, smart use. But if you told somebody to have a 10 year old TBI, they'd be like, it's not going to help. But it does. Because when you're, when your brain's inflamed, it doesn't have anywhere to go. Right. Because your skull doesn't like your brain can't swell. I mean it can swell a little bit, but then it just increases the pressure inside your skull. And when you increase the pressure, you're fighting your blood pressure basically. Right. And so then you get less profusion to the brain, you get less blood flow to the brain because you have pressure pushing on there and reducing the ability of the blood to flow. And that can last for years, I mean decades. And we don't. And it's pretty hard to measure without like cutting a hole in somebody's head. And you know, and so. But when you, when you super oxygenate people with hyperbarics, 10, 20 year old brain injuries, and all of a sudden, you know, cognition changes, hormone production changes because all of your hormones are regulated, you're. By your brain.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. It's a game changer.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. So it's an absolute game changer.

[Podcast Host]

And a lot of military guys have brain issues, right?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Almost all of them. Almost all of them.

[Podcast Host]

Because the explosions.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. So when. When I. When I first went through medical training, this is. This is remarkable how. How fast medicine changes. When I first went through medical training, in order to have a tbi, right. Traumatic brain injury, you had to be physically hit in the head and you had to lose consciousness. So you take either one of those out, and they said it wasn't a tbi.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

As an example, my buddy who I was telling you I took to do ibogaine, he. He had a grenade go off at his feet, and it came up here, and some of it went through the palate of it, like through his soft palate and then through his hard palate into his brain. So.

[Podcast Host]

Damn.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

So he actually has grenade material inside of his brain. Holy crap. But he never lost consciousness. So when he was getting out of the military, his medical record said he didn't have a tbi. And I was like, wait a second. Like, what's more traumatic to the brain than having foreign material? I know that's. That's got to account for more than getting knocked out, right? But, you know, in 2010, I went to a medical conference, and they. And there's a lot of things going on, and. And I. I just saw this one lecture on tbi, and I had one patient. So I was focusing mainly on sleep when I first got to the SEAL teams, because that was such a big mover for everything that was going on with them. But I had. And they'd sent me a guy from a combat zone. They'd sent him home because he hadn't slept in a week. Is. He'd. He'd had an RPG hit right next to his head on a wall. There's enough of a blast where it caused some disruption in his brain where he couldn't sleep. And so I was like, oh, I have a TBI patient. I'm going to go listen to what this guy has to say. And he starts throwing up his case reports. And he had been working with pugilists like MMA fighters, bare knuckle boxers. Boxers and NFL guys. And he starts throwing up his labs. Same labs that I'd been running on the seals. Identical patterns.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Identical. And I was like, whoa, maybe I've missed this, because I'm thinking it's all sleep. And so I talked to him for a little bit afterwards. I got some references. I went home and started studying it. And what they found was that you can get a mild TBI from the acceleration changes on a roller coaster.

[Podcast Host]

Whoa.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

So 1.09 G's was the. Was the minimal force to cause A mild, a very, very mild tbi. And then you dig, you keep going through the literature and they started talking about what they call this over pressurization injury. So a hard room like this with these, you know, very sturdy walls. If, if we were in this room shooting M4s, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Every bullet that comes out is 35 GS of blast force. And if you have four guys in this room and everybody's shooting multiple times and you do that multiple times a day, well, you're getting traumatic brain injuries because what, what some really brilliant guy did, and it was because of one of our seals who had suicided, he came up with this idea to test it. He built a trans, a completely transparent skull out of some sort of epoxy, you know, that, that simulated the density of bone. And he built a brain inside with all the layers with different materials to represent the different densities. And then he fired up a blast and had high speed photography on it. And he could watch the blast wave just like when you see a blast wave on television and all the trees move and the car sways and the dust flies and all this. Well, the brain moves the same way.

[Podcast Host]

Whoa.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

But what happens is the brain, every, every different density moves at a different rate. Just like the car moves at a different rate than the leaves on the tree, right? So different densities move slower or faster. And so it caused a shearing effect. So like everywhere there was two different densities. So like where the, where the duros, where the dural sac, you know, is laying across, say blood vessels, well, that shears off because they're vibrating and moving at different rate. And then where the blood vessels meet the, the gray matter and that shears off. And then where the gray matter meets the white, the white matter or the white matter meets the gray matter, like, and that shears off and then where the vesicles meet. So when, when we're doing autopsies on seals who had suicided, we found these plaques around their entire brain. It didn't make any sense because usually it's like a tbi. You have a folk, a foci, like a focal point of where you've been hit. Like football players will have it. The CT is like right here and right here, depending on what side of the line they play or whatever, right? And they were like, why is it all over the brain? Well, it was, that's what it was. It's an interface of different densities. So every time it sheared. And so we have, we have anti tank weapons that are 200 GS.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

So it's 200 G for the guy shooting it. 300 G for the guy's body.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my gosh.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And you have, you know, if you're in the back of a Humvee with a.50 cal shooting, it's like 65 G's inside. Like I said, the M4 is in a room. 30, 30. 35 G's for every time you're pulling, every time you're pulling the trigger. And you have four guys coming in the room and you move to the next room and move to the next room. And you do that for 10 hours a day for, you know, for weeks and months. And how many thousands of brain injuries do our guys have? So I do a lot of volunteer work now for seals who are getting out. And the first thing, I just assume they have brain injury. So I do all their labs. Their hormones always suck. Their inflammation's always high. Their oxidation is always high. Their insulin sensitivity sucks. Their anabolic hormones are low. Their catabolic hormones are high. Same pattern I was seeing when I was the doctor there. And I just automatically assume, well, you have some, you have some brain injury stuff. So let's do, let's, let's get the hormones in order, see how much corrects, and then we'll start slowly moving down the ladder of immunity. Important. So in an ideal world, I'd have like a fleet of chambers. I could just drive around and drop off at guys houses, you know, because a lot of guys live rurally and you, you know, and it's a big time commitment to do hyperbarics.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it's like an hour.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. So it's an hour a day, five days a week. If you got to drive 30 minutes or so to get there and change clothes, whatever. It's like you're talking about your whole morning every day. And, and it what we call a table eight, which is kind of like a standard treatment protocol that's eight weeks. So fort is 40 chamber dives. And so we have these guys who live, you know, they're not within five or six hours of a chamber.

[Podcast Host]

Jeez.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And you know, they live in some rural community. So I, I've been trying to develop, I've been, I've been trying to raise interest and money to just put chambers and trailers, like air conditioned trailers and just be able to drop them off.

[Podcast Host]

That'd be smart if you could take them portable.

[AT&T Representative]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Drive around.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. And just drop it off there for a month or two and like teach them how to use it. And her Whole family could use it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, there's definitely gab in the market because they're so expensive, so most guys can't afford them. But to rent one, there's not many even in Vegas. There's a good amount here. But if you live in, like, pump or something.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, well, I mean, it. It's not even it. I. You'd be surprised at how many towns, cities don't have them. Like, one of my patients lives in Santa Fe.

[Podcast Host]

They don't have one there?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

No. Close. Closest chamber to him is three hours away.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

That's crazy.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. I have a patient who's up in Maine who's like, on the border of Canada. Like, he's probably 10 hours from a chance, you know, and he, you know, he lives in kind of like Ted Kaczynski kind of cabin, you know, woods or whatever, you know, so it's like. But he. He needs it in a bad way. And there's. There's very few things that I think are as powerful as hyperbarics. Like, hyperbarics. And again, surprisingly, psychedelics are. They're an amazing tool. I don't think you can. I don't. I don't know for sure. Nobody knows yet. We're still doing the research. But I don't think you can, like, continue to use psychedelics and get the same benefit. I think, you know, there's one or two exposures is kind of most of the benefit you're going to get. And yeah, it's the work you do afterwards that matters, but you have to be metabolically and physiologically healthy enough to do the work afterwards.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

So if you just get that. But your hormones are still sucked and you're metabolically broken, you don't have any energy, you can't stay awake, you're depressed all the time. It's like, that's not really gonna. It's not going to help you.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

So, yeah, if. And then. And I'd say the next thing are the peptides. You know, there's peptides that help.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Like something like cerebral lysin does a lot of the same things that psychedelics does. Increases neuroplasticity. You know, the hyperbarics grows new blood vessels in your brain or your whole body. Something called angio neogenesis hormone therapy does the same thing. Some peptides can do the same thing. The psychedelics help with that. So there's a lot of things you can do to recover from brain injury. But, you know, if you look at traditional medicine, they don't have a whole Lot of answers for you, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And it's nuts because I know so many veterans and none of them are aware of this brain injury.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, I have a. I have a friend who. Who he ejected. He ejected from a Navy jet, an F22, I think. He ejected at the speed of sound, pulling four GS.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Zero survivability event until he did it. So he's the only person ever survived anything close to that. And huge long trauma story. I mean, it goes on for years. He actually got healthy enough to go back to flying jets. Nobody even thought he'd ever walk again. They weren't even sure if he'd talk again, the amount of brain injury he had. And then he got back to flying jets and then started having a lot of cognitive issues. Ended up in a psych ward against his will, a ward of the state and on completely sedating psychotropic drugs. And fortunately, he had lawyers and doctors in the family that were able to get him out. And he went back home, but was still psychotic and still had tons of problems. And psilocybin, he had. He had a buddy who had worked with, I think, the Warrior foundation and said, hey, you should try the psilocybin thing. And story I've heard a dozen times now, if not more, he went and did psilocybin, and he never needed another psychotropic drug. Never had any hallucinations again, never had any psychotic issues. He does ultramarathons now and across the country, mountain bike races. And he's written a book. He goes around. He's on the speaking circuit. Be a great guest.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I'd love to interview him.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Fascinating story. Like, I was riveted the first time I heard that story. I was like, what? What? And then what? And like, it. It's just unbelievable. It has to be a movie one day. It's like. It's the most inspiring thing.

[Podcast Host]

That's awesome. Yeah, that one hits deep with me because my dad was in a psych ward. I think that whole system is terrible. I mean, he died shortly after. You know, they put you on all sorts of medication.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's a terrible. And. And. And a lot of. And I don't want to say a lot of, but there's a substantial number of. That's like, medically induced. Like, it's classic. People say it's in the medical literatures. A lot of stuff in medical schools just taught us fact. And you don't know. You're trying to learn as much as you can. You just Repeat the fact and you say it's true. One of the things you learn is that for some reason there's a significant number of people that come out of like a cabbage, right? Coronary artery bypass, grafts of whatever, triple, double, triple, quadruple, whatever. And they'll come out of it and they'll, they'll be bipolar or they'll be manic or that, you know, they'll come out and have like some kind of psychiatric disease that they've never had before. They're throwing clots up to the brain during the surgery, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Because they're so long under. But then. But they don't get treated. Like they have clots, spots to get treated like they have a psychiatric illness.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And they end up in hospitals and stuff too.

[Podcast Host]

I did not know that. That's super concerning.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. Medicine's a mess. Yeah, it's a total mess.

[Podcast Host]

Oh my gosh. Yeah, I think this, we do some good things, but yeah, my life, I had pneumonia once. I, I can say western medicine did save my life. They're great for that.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

We're graded infectious disease, like severe infectious disease. And we're, we're great at trauma, but everything else. Yeah, you probably want to, want to take care of yourself.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I mean, look what they're doing with Peptides. They're banning it.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Most psychedelics are banned.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, we are making some headway with psychedelics, actually. Some, some friends of mine are really involved in lobbying for that.

[Podcast Host]

Nice.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. Like, I don't want to say the battle's won, not by a long shot, but. But there is a lot more buy in than you than people would realize. It's kind of quiet buy in, but lots of congressmen and senators are like, yeah, yeah, like you should keep doing that and we'll, we'll give you a little approval or whatever. You know, you can do a research grant on that. So there's some buy in on that. And that that is getting better. But yeah, the Peptides that, you know, that's a whole big medicine problem that everybody's heard of, you know, big pharma influence. And then, yeah, farm influence is really tied to pharma. Pharma pharmacy influence. Right. So as an example, during COVID a few weeks into Covid, really high ranking officer in the Austin PD called me with COVID and all they had told this patient is, get a pulse ox and go home. And if your pulse ox gets below this, come back. And it was not an acceptable answer. I'm like, and you know, we Already had, you know, this protocol that, you know, with hydro. Hydroxychloroquine and, you know, budesonite inhaling in helmets. You know, there, there's a whole series of. There's a whole protocol out that was being adopted daily. It was being adjusted daily by a team of doctors worldwide. Um, and it was the. Yeah, I, I don't. I'll. I'll mess up the name. Um, but it was, you know, like, that Simone Gold was associated with and all that group. I think there's four Cs, critical care, something, whatever. But that whole protocol, I couldn't prescribe it because the pharmacies wouldn't let me.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And I was like, you're pharmacist. Like, you, you don't, you're not seeing the patient. You don't have any idea what the patient's going through. You have no idea what the patient's history is. You have no idea. Like, you can't, you can't give hydroxychloroquine for, for covet. I'm like, why not? I can give it for scleroderma. I can give it for all, all kinds of other stuff. No, you just can't do it for that. Why? And then that empowered them. And then they started doing the same thing with ivermectin. And then I, I had a pharmacist a few months ago tell me that, Tell my patient that he was on too much testosterone and then ask me for the patient's labs to justify the testosterone level.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

I was giving him 120 milligrams of testosterone a week, which is what the average person, the average male makes in a week. It was not high at all. Not even close to being high. That pharmacists didn't know what they're talking about. But, I mean, we had to come to Jesus talk and that the pharmacist backed down. But, like, you know, the medicine. Medical system's broken. Yeah. Money's driving everything. Like the money and money and bureaucratic influence is driving everything. And not the patient care. Not the doctors either.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I kind of feel bad for the doctors because they, they want the best.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

But of course, like, doctors don't. You know, doctors aren't, aren't into this to screw their patients over sick like they want. They want to. Nothing makes a doctor feel better than solving their patient's problem.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Like, you come to me with a problem and I help you solve it. And like, you, like, I'm totally fixed. I did my job. Like, I'm happy about. Right. I not going to be like, oh, well, secretly I'm only give him half the solution so that he keep buying medicine from me. Like, I don't make money off of pharmaceuticals anyways. That's illegal. So, you know. But yeah, it's. It's a broken system. Yeah, it's a tough, very, very broken system. Unfortunately, I don't really play within it. Like, I don't, you know, I don't really do disease care, so it's not a big issue.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

But them banning, you know, the peptides. You know, the peptides have been. Most of these peptides have been around 50, 60 years. Years. They used in other countries. There's a lot of research on them, but it's competing with drugs and they're like, yeah, we don't want you to do that.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And so, you know, the really, you get. You get one pharmacy that's really good at. Really good at making, you know, the right varieties. They have good quality control, good product. And doctors like me will flood to them and start ordering them. And then they grow and they're super successful. And the FDA comes in shut down, and then they do it over and over and over again. And then about nine months ago now, the FDA just said all of these peptides are banned. And it was. The vast majority of the peptides I use.

[Podcast Host]

Crazy.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Like 80% of the peptides I use.

[Podcast Host]

I thought that was just in Cali. Was that the whole country?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Whole country.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

That's nuts.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

But RFK put out a tweet the day after he got announced to whatever that position is being called, that he's going to. And he's. And it's one of the first things he listed. He said, I'm gonna. I'm gonna work on hormones, peptides, hyperbaric stem cells.

[Podcast Host]

Nice.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Something else. Like all the stuff that I have trouble with and all the stuff that are like, you know, the primary movers of my career. Yeah, psychedelics. You mentioned psychedelics.

[Podcast Host]

That's huge. Yeah. Even stem cells you gotta fly to, like.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, you gotta go out.

[Podcast Host]

It makes no sense because they're not as strong here. Right.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Well, they don't let it. They don't let people do them here. Yeah, right. So you can't. You can't harvest them from the same sources.

[Podcast Host]

Crazy. And then they'll rate a raw dairy farm.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

These poor farmers go kill the squirrel.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Like this stuff they do.

[Podcast Host]

I had that guy on the show.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Oh, did you?

[Podcast Host]

The squirrel guy?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah. That is such a crazy story.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

That Saturday Night Live couldn't write something that stupid, you know, like, you can't parody it anymore. The reality is it's more ridiculous than the parody of it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I mean, he literally had an animal sanctuary, was having kids come and making their day.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, I've read all about it. I saw a few videos you did. I'm like, I mean, that. That was a pure power trip.

[Podcast Host]

It's nice.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

This story's just dumb, too. It's like, oh, what was the story that it bit one of. It bit one of.

[Podcast Host]

Had rabies.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Bit one of the people in the head to put it down to see if it had rabies or something. Yeah. All right, first of all, if you're an animal control, you should have had gloves on handling the squirrel. Right? I mean, come on. You know, you did. You know, they did. And it probably didn't bite them anyway. And they just said, ah, and you don't have to kill it. Like, if you. If you can control it and you put it in a cage, you can observe it for 10 days. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

The poor raccoon, they killed for no reason, too. It's messed up, man. Well, dude, what's next for you? It's been really, really interesting talking to you. I didn't know all this was going on. So thanks for coming on.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, my pleasure, man. Well, what's next for me is just more of the same. You know, I. I. Like I said, I spend most of my time working with veterans, like, primarily seals, but I do. I work with some other veterans. You know, I have my private. You know, my private clients that really pay the bills, like where. But all the same stuff. You know, I've. You know, I don't know that it's scalable. What I do isn't really that scalable, but, you know, would it. Would I. You know, the message I'm always really trying to get out is that, you know, most of health is lifestyle, you know, and so I sometimes call what I do lifestyle medicine because I work with, you know, sleep's a huge one. Right. You know that. That's the whole reason I had any success with the seals is because one of the first things I noticed. Noticed was their sleep problem. And of course, their seals, they don't. They don't complain about. So they never complained about sleep. They came in and they told me other problems. They never complained about their sleep. But it just hit me how many of them were taking Ambien. And I'm like, why are you all taking Ambien? Like, well, you know, they just give us this and, and then you start questioning them and then they'll tell you, oh yeah, like I don't really sleep. I, you know, I take two to three times the recommended dosage of Ambien because I've been taking it so long. I chase that with a few cocktails and then I go to sleep and I wake up at like 3:30 in the morning. I can't go back to sleep. And I go, well, I'm going to go to the gym, workout really hard, not take a nap today, you know, push it till bedtime and I'll sleep well at night. They've been doing that for five or six years. Hasn't worked yet. It's like, probably not going to work. Like we probably need to do something else. And so, you know, when I learned enough about, I didn't, I didn't have any classes on sleep in medical school. I knew nothing about sleep that Cecilist didn't know. But when I educated myself on it and figured out what's going on and how all the hormones are regulated while you're asleep and how that's where you get stronger, that's where you get faster, that's where you're memories are formed, that's where you emotionally categorize, like all this amazing stuff happening during the sleep that could explain all of their symptoms if their sleep was in quality. So I said I got to get them off of Ambien. And that's why we came up with the sleep supplement that we have is just like the seals helped me develop that because I didn't know, I didn't know anything about supplements. And so I just had them go, I just did research like, hey, what helps with sleep and why? And so we just put it all together piece by piece and figured out how much to take of everything. And took us about six months. And then all still use that to get off of Ambien. And just getting off of Ambien and improving their sleep and taking just some daytime supplements that they had already been taking. Triple, quadruple their testosterone.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Decrease their inflammation by an order of magnitude, decrease their oxidation. So sleep is huge. I used to say there's four pillars. Sleep, exercise, nutrition, and then stress mitigation. Now I say there's exercise, nutrition, Stress mitigation sits on the platform of sleep.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. It's number one.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Because if you don't do sleep, you can't do the other ones. Like, you know, what you eat changes, like what your body does with the food you eat changes with how well, you sleep. So if you get a. If you get a terrible night's sleep, what, your body will do this exact same thing. You eat the exact same thing two days in a row, but you sleep badly, sleep poorly one night, sleep well the other night. What your body does with it, as far as, like, does it preferentially store it as fat? Does it use it as energy? You know, it's called fuel partitioning. Like, where, where does it put the calories that changes what you crave, how hungry you are, how much you will eat. Your brain's registration of whether or not you're full when you're eating, all of that's determined by sleep. And so if you don't get good sleep, it's really hard to control your nutrition. Right. Because your brain thinks you're starving.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

The only reason the only animal on the planet that sleep deprives itself is humans. On purpose. Right. Every other animal will only sleep, deprives themselves if they're being stalked, like if they're worried about being prey or if they're starving and they need to wake up earlier to be able to travel further and look for food. And so evolutionarily, our brains believe that we're starving or being stalked. And so we've. We sleep, deprive ourselves, we, our, our bodies. In the next days when we wake up, our body's like, oh, well, we must. Our brain and body are like, we must be in some sort of danger.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

And so we're going to store fat like we're in famine and we want to get as much blood glucose as possible to keep our brains going because we're obviously starving. And so you're going to crave sugar and fat. And that's where the donut comes from, I'd say. Yeah. And then, you know, if. And then, of course, when you exercise, you get weaker. Right. You go to the gym. If you go to the gym, you do anything worth doing, you come out of the gym weaker than you went into the gym. When you sleep, your body uses what you did in the gym as the template for what you need to be better at tomorrow. And it repairs you in a way to where you could do the same work tomorrow that you did today with a little less damage to your cells. And that's how you get progressively stronger. That's how you get progressively more enduring. So if you don't sleep well, you don't recover. Well, exercising the next day is a waste of time because you didn't recover from yesterday. You can exercise again today and Then you know, even if you get a good night's sleep now, there's not enough time to recover from two days of exercise, right? And then the stress mitigation, you know, controlling your stress is the key to all health and longevity like that, like that is imperative. But you know, it takes eight hours to recover, recover from being awake for 18 hours, right?

[Podcast Host]

16.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

16 hours, sorry. So you awake for 16 hours takes eight hours to recover. So you have to repair and then prepare. You have to, like, restock all the nutrients, restock the shelves, so to speak. And that takes eight hours if you choose six instead of eight, because you want to get up early and get after it and be the winner. Well, you didn't. You didn't complete the process. You didn't repair and prepare 100%. Tomorrow still comes at exactly the same time. What do you do? Your body compensates by releasing stress hormones, and stress hormones are what break you down. Stress hormones are catabolic. Stress hormones are what age you. If you could go to sleep and repair and repair and prepare 100% every night, you'd never age. You'd wake up exactly the same every day, right? So to the extent you can't recover, that's aging. So you're choosing to age faster. But the point is, if I sleep six hours tonight instead of eight hours, my body's going to compensate in the morning by releasing more cortisol, more epinephrine, more norepinephrine, more stress hormones, which are catabolic. They're aging me, they're breaking me down. And then I'm going to have a hard time sleeping tonight because I'm going to have too high of stress hormones. So when I say stress mitigation is something like meditation, breath work, prayer, progressive muscle relaxation, certain types of yoga, Tai chi, those things lower your stress hormones. Well, if you wake up with 30% higher stress hormones and you do your stress mitigation techniques today, all you're doing is getting back down to where you would have been if you wouldn't have cut yourself out of sleep, right? You aren't doing yourself any favors. So that's why I say sleep is the foundation for all this, and you have to do that. And all the stuff that I use, and we've touched on maybe 25% of the tools I use. But the most powerful thing I have is like this simple little worksheet to help people get stress out of their sleep. Because everybody, if you, if you sleep poorly in a Western country, it's almost certainly because of stress wow. And it's like this simple little, you know, form you fill out in the video. Yeah. A couple of little, a couple of little, you know, alarm clock tricks and a little bit of psychological coaching of yourself. You know, practice that for three or four weeks, you'll never, you'll never have problem sleeping again.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I, I know when I was younger I could get away with six, five, six hours. But as I get older, I feel.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah, you're so resilient when you're young and, and your body responds so well to stress hormones. Right. So stress hormones actually make you feel good, which is why to an extent, like you think of fight or flight, you get like, you almost get in a car crash, you get in a fist fight or something like that, you're in fight or flight. You're, you're like in the survival mode. You're not going to fall asleep. Like, you're not going to quit paying attention to stuff. Right. You're going to be super alert. You're strong, you're fast, your reflexes are great, you feel great. You might be stressed, but you feel physically great. You feel very capable. So if you're using stress hormones to compensate for poor sleep, you wake up feeling pretty good, especially when you're young and your body responds well to them and you can handle the stress hormones, but when you do that chronically, then chronic, chronically elevated stress hormones like that will actually age you faster, you know, make you sicker, decrease your immune function, decrease cardiac function. All sorts of bad stuff happens from it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

So that's why people will say, you know, I feel great after five hours of sleep because you're running around stress hormones. Yeah, get the stressor on. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that makes sense, man. Well, we'll link the quiz below on your website. Anything else you want to link?

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

No, that's good.

[Podcast Host]

That's good.

[Dr. Kirk Parsley]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Cool. Thanks for hopping on, man. That was fun. We'll have to do a part two for sure. Yeah. Thanks for coming on, man. See you guys.

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