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Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.
But today, our modern lifestyle is driving so much hidden inflammation, systemic chronic inflammation, silent inflammation, it's a silent killer. And it turns out that it's not the kind of inflammation that we are familiar with, like a sprained ankle or a sore throat or something. That's an obvious kind of inflammation.
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Podcast Host/Producer
While I wish I could work with.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
27 million Americans under over the age of 25 have osteoarthritis and the joint that is most commonly affected is the knee. It creates a great deal of morbidity, meaning that suffering. Suffering.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
That's a fancy medical word for suffering.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Pain in the ass.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
So yeah. And our traditional therapies basically help you control the symptoms, but might not necessarily do anything to Reverse it. So using Motrin or Advil or Tylenol are common things people will use. And then your orthopedic surgeon may inject it with a steroid or they may use something like a, a lubricant, like hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid. And so it's only a lubricant effect.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And then you need a knee replacement.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Right. And then you're getting, and then you're getting towards a knee replacement. And then we know that 40% of people that have their knee replaced still continue to have pain and loss of motion. So we don't have a lot of real successful treatments out there that are really changing people's lives.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Yeah, right.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's true.
And I think, you know, we often.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Used to think about osteoarthritis as a.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Wear and tear problem.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
You just beat up your joints too much.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
But it turns out it's really an inflammatory problem as well.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
So what's interesting, it certainly increases with age. And trauma to the knee is certainly part of what creates an inflammation. And that trauma can be repetitive use. It doesn't have to be an ACL tear from a football injury. It can just be repetitive use on a person who's carrying too much weight on their body. So obesity is a risk factor for.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Arthritis, but obesity also is a generally inflamed state.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Right.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So when you're obese, your fat cells are not just there holding up your pants. They're producing tons of inflammatory compounds that are making your whole system inflamed.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Right. And so if you have an inflamed system and you're creating micro trauma to your joints, you're going to have an overreactive response to, in the joint and joints. We, you know, I think we should understand and know about them is that the cartilage and the ligamentous structures of the joint have lower oxygen tension than the rest of your body, meaning that they don't have an enormous oxygen supply. It's a little bit different than the rest of the body. And that plays a big role into why, as we age, that oxygen supply actually decreases. Blood flow to those vital areas of the cartilage and ligaments decrease, so that when you, you injure them, they're less likely to repair, more likely to have an inflammatory response that leads to degeneration.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Yeah, interesting.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So what we're also learning about osteoarthritis.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Fasting to me was that when they're doing, like, biopsies and doing analysis, they're.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Finding microbes in the Joints.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Yeah, not, not an infection, but just like dislocated microbes from the gut. So we're seeing the microbiome gut in the knee, which is crazy. So that's maybe also triggering an inflammatory response, right?
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yeah, yeah. You know, we are only 10% human. We, we understand because we have, you know, 100 trillion bacteria living in and on us. And, and they're only 10, 10 trillion human cells.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So, you know, so, so conventional medicine.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Basically your knee hurts, you go to the doctor and you get an X ray and they go, you have osteoarthritis, here, take some Advil, you know, maybe do some strengthening exercises for your legs.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Maybe if it gets really bad, you.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Get a couple of shots in your knee of steroids, that doesn't work anymore, you need a knee replacement. It's kind of a bad trajectory. There's no way to really sort of recover from this. And from a functional medicine perspective, we do a different approach.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
We do, and you know, we are going to talk about that approach. But exercise does help. Nutrition does help. Losing weight does help. So there are definitely things that we can do with a person's lifestyle and help them intervene. I worked with a patient that was 45 pounds overweight, was eating a totally processed food diet, was drinking too much, and was scheduled for knee replacement in September. I saw them in early July and I said, hey, look, if you do these things, I'm about to tell you, I bet you you could be playing golf in January in Miami with your friends instead of recovering from knee replacement. And he said, okay, I'll take you on. I said, okay, if you win any money in Miami, I get 10%.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Ha ha.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
All right, so, so guess what?
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
You get the 10%.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
He got what he wanted. I didn't get what I wanted. Okay, so he lost 45 pounds.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Amazing.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
I put him in physical therapy with a really good functional physical therapist, strengthened his knee. He canceled. He canceled the, the, the knee replacement and came into an appointment, like walking. Right. And he opened up an envelope with his tickets to Miami.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Oh, right. It's amazing.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And so, but, but you, but just.
Dr. Mark Hyman
To be clear, it wasn't just like.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Eat less, exercise more.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You, you put them on an anti.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Inflammatory diet, which is, is speaking to the point that osteoarthritis is not just.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
A mechanical wear and tear breakdown.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It's a chronic inflammatory multiple, multiple things. And so from functional medicine perspective, we deal with chronic inflammation holistically. So one of the things that you did diet wise and, and, and supplement wise, that actually helped with his chronic inflammation that helped his niece and the weight loss.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
The really key thing was, is to get him to decrease his alcohol and also to decrease his intake of processed foods. These processed foods are fast carbs that go into your body. They have toxins in them and they also create an inflammatory response driven by insulin.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So sugar and starch are inflammatory foods.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Right. And so we took that right out. So we just, you know, basically put them on a Mediterranean diet.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
But not gluten and dairy free.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Gluten and dairy. Oh, absolutely. Gluten, dairy free.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Why is that important?
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Because as we've talked about before multiple times, you know, they're both inflammatory. Right. And so gluten can actually trigger leaky gut which again triggers that whole process of inflammation in the body. And then if you have any micro trauma to your knee, that inflammation, that cytokine response is going to lead to degeneration of cartilage and even bony structures in the knee.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So here's the deal. Like not everybody needs to be gluten, dairy free, but if you were inflamed, you gotta be. If you have a chronic problem, it's number one, two and three on the list.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Right.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
You gotta be gluten, dairy, sugar and inflammatory foods.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yep.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
As the first step. And then you say, well, is it better? Is it not, Is it something else? Because it's sometimes something else.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
But.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
But it's really powerful when you put people on an anti inflammatory diet. So if you have osteoarthritis, its diet is 1, 2 and 3.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
And.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And it's really getting on a whole foods plant rich, good fats.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Absolutely.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Like lots of anti inflammatory foods. Getting off gluten, starch, processed starch.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
So yeah. And you put them on really good healthy fats. Because fats are really important process, part of the anti inflammatory process. I put them. Actually one of my favorite things to do when I'm dealing with inflammation is high dose omega 3s.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So lots of omega 3s, right?
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yeah. So I use, you know, 4,000 or more. So I put them on omega 3s. I use an anti inflammatory botanical called Kirk Curcumin. And so it's sort of like a botanical Advil. So I put them on that. I also use something like. It's a supercharged Omega 3. It's refined from Omega 3. It's called Specialized pro resolving factors mediators. And they are very potent SPMs. So they're very potent anti inflammatories. So between his diet, it's sort of.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Like the, it's like Taking all the.
Dr. Mark Hyman
The good juju out of the Omega.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
3S and concentrating them. And there's a lot of research done.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
At Harvard on this.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Oh yeah.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And your body has this ability to resolve inflammation. It has an auto built in system that's called resolvins. So resolvins are molecules in your body that resolve inflammation. So these are called specific pro resolvin mediators. So they're really effective. They are a lot of research on.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
These and a lot of, and a lot of research with particularly post surgical recovery, post trauma recovery that these will actually enhance recovery and you'll have a shorter recovery time when you're using SPMs.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Yeah.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So they can be very effective.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So diet supplements and targeted supplements.
Podcast Host/Producer
Yeah.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Even vitamin D might be helpful because it strengthens bones.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yeah, Vitamin D and omega and omegas are pretty much standard for me when I'm dealing with anybody with any amount of inflammation because of the impact that vitamin D has on the immune system, inflammatory system, mood. It just, it just does so many things. In addition, physical therapy is very important because we do know that the muscular strength around a joint will protect that joint and keep it from the constant damage that it can get from repetitive use. So.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
I never had any knee problems. Knock wood.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yeah.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
But I, I, you know, I, I have very big thighs because I was a runner most of my life and biker. So I have like really big thighs and my knees, my leg thighs are strong. My knees always were protected.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Right. Yeah. So I, I could tell a personal story. I had my, my right hip replaced. I had no pain and then I fell, I injured it, it got inflamed and within four months I had to get a hip replacement. And I asked the surgeon why did I have end stage arthritis and not know it. Well, I had been running and I'd been racing a bike for 10 really strong legs. And he said a couple things, George. One is you have so much strength in the leg and you may have been a person because of your diet. You're not very inflamed. And so your cytokine response at the joint limited the pain you were going to feel. So strength and anti inflammatory living can actually keep you from even knowing you have arthritis.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's amazing.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
I had a lecture I did recently and there was this woman who's like I did your 10 day reset in. It basically is a, anti inflammatory detox.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
From sugar and starch and sort of gluten, dairy, sugar.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It's a really nice program and you can go to get pharmacy with an F, G, E T pharmacy with an f dot com.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And you can learn about it.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
You can download the program free.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
You can get the extra version if you want. But she did this not seeing me as a patient, just as on her own. And I was scheduled for a bilateral knee replacement. I did this program, and I did it for more than 10 days, obviously. And I canceled them because my knees are fine now, which is pretty amazing story. And I've heard this over and over. So I think if you're, you know, if you're facing that level of surgery, I mean, a knee replacement is not easy. Hip replacement, you get the hip, you're up and going pretty quick. Knee replacement, you're out for a long time.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
A lot of hard work.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Physical therapy, you don't really get back to perfect.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, it can be great for.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
People who need it. But there's some other intermediate steps before you get there. Even if you know your dice great, and everything's great, you've done all these things, and it's still not working. There's another therapy that emerged that is really powerful.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yeah.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And this is.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
This is. Yeah, this is very powerful stuff. And, you know, I wanted to make sure. We talked about that. The lifestyle and there's important thing.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Yes.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
But what we really wanted to talk about was ozone.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Yeah.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
And prolozo and. And what it can do for the. The joints.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Take us through this.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Because, you know, most of your ozone, they. The ozone layer.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And it's bad for you.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
And what. Right.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
So O is a gas. We know that there's oxygen. And oxygen is actually two oxygen atoms that come together. And they have to be together because they're very stable together. Oxygen by itself, it needs another electron. So it shares it with a partner. So you have O2. They're married, and they're very happy together. But if they get any solar activity placed upon them or any electrical activity, they'll split. And that's happening constantly, all the time. But they'll come back very quickly together. But sometimes they come back and there's a third person there. Right. There's another extra oxygen molecule that's latched on because you couldn't find a partner. So now you have this what we call triatomic oxygen, or O3. And now there's not enough electrons for all three to share. So the two oxygens gotta find a way to get rid of this third wheel. So that becomes a very unstable molecule. And it's that very thing that makes it so effective.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Tell.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Tell us how it works. So how would you use that with arthritis?
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
So the way it works is, is that we can actually. We have an ozone machine.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
We have a machine ozone generator. Ozone generator takes oxygen and runs into this machine that was invented by Nikolai Tesla.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
I was just. He did it again.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
I did the same stuff too. It's my podcast. It's my podcast.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
So Nikola Tesla in 1890, I think it was like 1893 or so, he developed, he patented the first ozone machine, which is a really cool thing. So now we have ozone machines and we have an ozone machine that we hook up to medical grade oxygen. And in that machine it will take that oxygen, it will hit it with electricity and create ozone. And it can be modulated as to how much ozone you can actually make. And you can make anywhere from 1 to 5% oxygen ozone mixture in different concentrations. And we can adjust that concentration. So we picked.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's mostly oxygen with a little ozone.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yep, mostly oxygen, a little ozone. And that's really critical because part of the, the, the, it's ozone, it's oxygen ozone therapy because part of the benefit comes from getting oxygen into the joint. And then the ozone plays another role. So we then take this ozone and we inject it directly into the joint. It can be the shoulder joint, it can be the knee, it can be the hip, it can be the an cycle. Any joint you can put ozone in.
Dr. Mark Hyman
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Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
The way ozone works is pretty interesting because it's unstable. It actually has what we call a hermetic effect. It actually by the fact that it stimulates the body to do something better by irritating it.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So it's a little bit like if you're lifting weights, you tear some muscles and you get bigger, stronger muscles.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
So what happens inside the joint is that it will actually modulate the cytokine response. So when you have that damage to your knee and you're constantly moving it, you're constantly creating that inflammatory response. And there are cytokines and those cytokines will then this inflammation will lead to the breakdown of cartilage and eventually even Bone. And it also mediates pain. Ozone has been shown to modulate that response so that it will actually produce more of the anti inflammatory cytokines versus the pro inflammatory cytokines.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It also activates your antioxidant system. So it's like an antioxidant for your.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Knee and anti inflammatory directly in there.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Exactly. So you get anti inflammatory, it stimulates antioxidant, an antioxidant effect. But remember what I said earlier, that the knee and the cartilage anywhere and ligamentous structures don't have a great oxygen supply. And when you have that much inflammation in an older person and that oxygen supply and circulation has been diminished now you have. You don't have any of the healing capacity that you would have had without inflammation or if you were younger. What does ozone do? Ozone actually increases blood flow. It increases oxygen delivery and oxygen utilization.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Wow, that's good.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
And it stimulates chondroblast and fibroblastic activity so that you can actually build up cartilage and build up the soft tissues around the knee. It's pretty amazing stuff.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
I just got to tell a personal anecdote. So I've also been trained in ozone and we do this here at the ultra wellness center. Prolos and other forms of ozone therapy for chronic illness, which are really effective for so many things and definitely on the margins of medicine, but very, very powerful. And I had a broken arm a number of years ago and went to get training on how to do this.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
And my arm wasn't healing.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And then I had a frozen shoulder.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I could not move my arm above, like, you know, like 45 degrees from my body.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It was so painful. And he's like, yeah, I can inject your shoulder. The guy who was training us, and he took ozone and injected into my shoulder joint. And literally within five minutes, I was like doing this. I was completely mobile.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Moved my arm everywhere.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
There was another doctor in the training as well who had had a frozen shoulder. Not just for six months, but for years. Same thing, injected his shoulder. It's a miracle.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Seen it over and over again. It's amazing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I remember a patient, not that was mine, but when I was in training, there was a guy who had.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Been an NHL hockey player and he'd won five Stanley Cubs, part of the New York Islanders.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And his knees were shot, he couldn't walk. And he'd come in for a number.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Of treatments to this doctor. And after the ozone treatments in his knee, which I saw him administer, he.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Just literally was up and walking.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And I've Seen people come in with canes and dance their way out. It's pretty amazing.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
I know it sounds wacky, right? But it's. It sounds sensational, but it is.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
I mean, I was. I mean, that convinced me I literally could not move.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
I know. You know, I had to go to.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Physical therapy for a year and had to maybe go under anesthesia to mobilize my shoulder and all these things. I was getting recommended, and I'm like. It was like five minutes and it was painless.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yeah, it is, it is.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It was a little needle poke, but that was it.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
And when we do it, we not only inject the ozone in, but because we know what's happening and that the joint hasn't been getting the blood supply. It needs the nutrients it needs. We'll add in some nutrients that are part of the healing process. So we'll add in some methylcobalamin, some magnesium and procaine. We use procaine also because it actually changes the action potential potential of the cell and membrane, which has been disrupted by the inflammation, and it allows for the cells to become healthier. So the procaine actually is not just for the anesthesia, but it's also to help the cells heal.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
That's amazing. So tell us about this patient you had who you treated with ozone here at the Ultra Wellness center using prolozone.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Which is a form of ozone that.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
You inject into joints or soft tissues to help with pain.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yeah. So this is a woman who just two years ago went on a pilgrimage and hiked through these very, very high mountains in Spain. And on that hike, she had been having pain in her knee on and off, but nothing that ever inhibited her from doing anything she wanted. But on this hike, suddenly it blew up and she couldn't finish her pilgrimage. So she came home to her doctor, X rays were done, and she had pretty much bone on bone in her knee.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Wow, that's terrible.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
And so over the past two years, she has had steroid injections and she's had a lubricant injection with hyaluronic acid. And she had some benefit, but she still wasn't able to hike. So she asked if I would treat her. And I evaluated her and I treated her with ozone. And after her second injection, just three days ago, she had her second injection almost two and a half weeks ago. Three days ago, she went on her first hike in two years. She hiked six miles.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Wow.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
And went over mountains that were very high and she didn't have a problem. And the day after, she said I didn't have any swelling.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
That's amazing.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
That is amazing.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And you know.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So how many treatments do people often need? It doesn't sound like that usually.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
So, you know, usually I tell people between three to maybe eight injections. Usually somewhere between three and six is the sweet spot.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And then you can come in for a tune up if you need it.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Absolutely.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Is it painful?
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Not at all. Not at all. I mean you'll feel the needle going in initially, but once I'm in the joint it's not painful. You may feel the pressure of the ozone going in. But I monitor that very closely when I'm doing it and I can actually feel it.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
You can feel the knee fill up with gas?
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yeah, you can.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And it's basically a disinfectant.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
So there's microbes in there that shouldn't be there.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It activates the anti inflammatory system. It's a powerful antioxidant and it's like.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
And it manages a cytokine response which causes the inflammation and the pain.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It's pretty remarkable. If I hadn't experienced it myself like that, I would like.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Oh, this sounds really quacky.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And actually it's a real procedure that's being used all over the world for years.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Many countries for years.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It's used here to some degree, but in many other countries like Cuba and South America.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Spain, Italy.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Spain, Italy, Russia. I mean, doing Russia extensively. It's extremely inexpensive. It's super effective. It's probably more effective than most traditional treatments for osteoarthritis.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Absolutely.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It's got very low downside and very low cost. You inject steroids in a knee, over time, it's going to degrade the cartilage, it's going to degrade the knee, it's going to make things worse. You get a temporary benefit, but then.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
You end up with worse.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
10%. 10%.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
This actually helps restore cartilage.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yeah. That study that came out in 2019, 10% of the people that get steroid injections actually their arthritis gets worse.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
And they end up with unexplained fractures.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Yes.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
So.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Because it weakens their tissues.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yeah. So we know that.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And with Prolozone we've seen cartilage regenerate.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Right. And that's the difference. That's what I wanted to make sure he made that point. Because it stimulates chondroblasts. Chondroblasts are the cells that rebuild cartilage. It can rebuild the cartilage. And again, what we love in functional medicine is to find those modalities that just don't maintain disease but will actually reverse it. And prolosome fits the bill.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And you weren't saying this patient, she's.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Hiked six miles and she was told she needed a knee replacement?
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
Yep.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Okay.
Dr. George (Orthopedic/Functional Medicine Specialist)
I'm telling you, it's pretty amazing. And she's pretty near bone on bone.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
That's incredible. Well, it'd be interesting to see her follow up X rays and to continue to do this and track it. But I think people out there suffering from osteoarthritis, the focus really should be on lifestyle. And I think people need to understand they have a lot of power to transform the inflammatory state of their body. And what, what often is considered diseases of aging are often inflammatory diseases. We call it inflammaging, and I think the arthritis is part of that. It's not just a bone on bone mechanical issue. It's an inflammatory issue.
Dr. Mark Hyman
What are the causes and drivers of inflammation? Well, basically number one, two and three is diet. And guess what the number one, two and three in diet thing is.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Sugar. Sugar.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Sugar.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or the equivalent of sugar.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Starch.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Starch.
Starch.
So anything that's sugar and starch drives inflammation, particularly high fructose corn syrup. So that should not be a staple in your diet. Unfortunately, it is about 60% of our calories in America. Soda is the number one source of calories in America, which is terrifying to me. And the average American eats 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour every year. That's enough to kill, you know, most.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Of us pretty quickly.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And it does, which is why we see where the sickest population in the world and so many people die from diet related diseases. So it's in sugar, it's in high fructose corn syrup, it's in processed flours and foods. Also, inflammatory fats may be a factor. So lots of refined oils, 9 of omega 3s, trans fat, which have been ruled not safe to eat by the government, but they're still everywhere in food. I don't know how that works, to be honest with you. I guess there's little loopholes that the food industry gets to give them, maybe years or decades, but this was 2005, seven years ago, they said, hey guys, trans fat kills you. Not safe to eat, don't use it. But if you go to the grocery store, you can find it everywhere, which is terrifying. I mean, more and more companies are removing it, but it's still there. Also, what else can cause low grade inflammation? Sitting on your butt, not exercising? Exercise is A powerful anti inflammatory. Not over exercising, not running a marathon, but doing a moderate amount of exercise every day really helps lower inflammation. Stress, another big cause of inflammation. So nothing we knew about stress. It's out there. Bad things happen. Reading the news. I try to stay away from the news, by the way, it's so stressful. Like, I figure if something really bad's happening, I'll, I'll hear about it. Um, but, but the key is to find habits and behaviors that reduce your stress response. Meditation, yoga, you know, hot and cold therapies, massage, breathe, breath, work, whatever.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Whatever works for you.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Try it. But it's gotta be a daily practice.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
I do it every day.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Today I worked out. I did a sauna and an ice bath and that really helped me calm my nervous system. Also deal with toxins. Toxins are also inflammatory. They're called immunotoxins. Low levels, pesticides, chemicals, petrochemicals, heavy metals. I encourage you to go to the Environmental Working Group's website, EWG and find how to reduce your exposure through food, including fruits and vegetables, animal products, fish, household cleaning products, and even skincare products. I mean, did you know that lead is in a lot of lipsticks, that a lot of skincare products have? Petrochemicals get absorbed through your skin and get in your body and cause harm. Yeah, don't, don't be doing that. So also another source sometimes is latent infections. We might not know we have it, like a virus or tick infection or we mold we're exposed to. So those all can drive inflammation. And of course, our microbiome is probably one of the biggest sources of inflammation in us. We all have an imbalanced microbiome, mostly from our poor diet, lack of fiber, processed food. So we want to cultivate our inner garden. I've written a lot about this. We've created a new product called gut food that helps people actually heal their gut. And, and, and it's like a multivitamin for the gut, so encourage you to check it out. Gutfood.com so really tending your inner garden is so important because there's actually a phenomena called metabolic endotoxemia. This is a phenomena that is resulting from bad bugs that produce these toxic compounds called endotoxins that get absorbed through your gut lining into your bloodstream and then activate your immune system. Like for example, these lipopolysaccharides, which are these little endotoxins. And then your immune system gets activated, triggers inflammation, and there's all the downstream causes, consequences of that. For example, high Levels of TNF alpha, one of the inflammatory molecules, it triggers insulin resistance. So literally, not even by changing your diet, you can become pre diabetic just by the toxic bacteria in your gut. That's why they call it metabolic endotoxemia. So what is inflammation? What's the big deal? Why does it become so dangerous? Well, inflammation is a natural part of your body's function. It's essential.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Yes.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You cut yourself, what happens? The white blood cells gather, they come to the site to rescue, they create swelling, they bring all kinds of healing factors. And what you see is redness and swelling and pain and heat. That is the classic sign of inflammation in the body. We used to call that in medical school.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Rhubar dolorcolor and tumor.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Tumor just means swelling, not tumor.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
You know, know it's anyway Latin, whatever.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But the key is that it's this normal process that happens as a result.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Of dealing with problems that go wrong.
Dr. Mark Hyman
But here's the rough in the past, most of what we had to deal with was acute things that caused inflammation like a cut or an infection. But today, our modern lifestyle is driving so much hidden inflammation. Systemic, chronic inflammation, silent inflammation, it's a silent killer. And it turns out that it's not the kind of inflammation that we are familiar with, like a sprained ankle or.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
A sore throat or something.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's an obvious kind of inflammation, the kind that's good. The kind that we're talking about is the kind that's bad. And that leads to almost every known disease of aging, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, not to mention things like addiction, depression, obviously autoimmune disease, obviously allergies, asthma, all sorts of gut issues. All these problems are caused by inflammation. Of course. Then the question is, what causes inflammation? We're going to get to that. From a functional medicine perspective. I don't care that you're inflamed. I care about why you're inflamed. I don't want to give you an immune suppressant, an anti inflammatory drug, a pile of aspirin. I want to find out what the cause is and get rid of it.
Podcast Host/Producer
It.
Dr. Mark Hyman
In functional medicine, there's a simple rule, and it's this. It's called the tack rule. If you're standing on attack, it takes a lot of aspirin to make it feel better. Take out the tack. And if you're standing on two tacks, taking one out doesn't make you 50% better. So get rid of both of them, okay? And all of them. Maybe there's five or ten Tacks. And that's the secret of functional medicine. It's a method of investigating the body as a system, looking for root causes and getting the body back in balance. All right, so what is the deal with this inflammation? I mean, I think, you know, when I. When I was in medical school, heart disease was a plumbing problem. You know, it was clogged arteries. We now know that it's an inflammation problem, that the reason your cholesterol becomes an issue is cause it gets inflamed and white blood cells scop up soup, sop up the cholesterol and stick it in the arteries, causing plaque. Same thing happens in the brain. Alzheimer's is inflammation in the brain. All those plaques of the brain come from inflammation. So cancer also is a disease of inflammation. And when you, for example, look at various studies, even with cholesterol, if you're. If your inflammation level's high, but your cholesterol is also high, you're at high risk. But if your cholesterol is normal and your inflammation's normal, you're no risk. But if your cholesterol's high and your inflammation is not high, you're really not great risk. And the worst is if you have, obviously, both. So inflammation is a real big issue. They did a study of an elderly population. They found that if their CRP was high, which is a blood test for inflammation, and interleukin 6 and other cytokine tests for inflammation, they had a 260% more likely chance of dying in the next four years. So this is no joke. So you might feel fine.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
I had a patient with me, like.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I don't know what's wrong. I feel fine. I don't.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
I saw.
Dr. Mark Hyman
My blood test says, I don't really care. I feel fine. Why should I change what I'm doing? I'm like, well.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Well, if you don't change what you're.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Doing, it might not go well for you. Now, there's no guarantees. That's true, but it's likely true. So the real concern isn't our response to an injury or an acute infection or something like that, but this chronic, smoldering inflammation that slowly destroys our organs and our ability to function and leads to rapid aging. In fact, I just finished my book on aging called Young Forever, and they talk about the hallmarks of aging. One of the key hallmarks is inflammation, or they call it the aging itself. Inflammaging. And what happens with aging is this runaway inflammation that just degrades your whole body. So understanding what inflammation is how to diagnose it and how to deal with it and get rid of it is so essential if you want to be healthy. Now, what's the problem with the treatments we use? Why not just take Advil or Aspirin or take a steroid like Prednisone? Well, they're fine for acute problems, but, but when things are in this slow smoldering state, they really don't work. In fact, the new data on aspirin was pretty scary about heart disease. Oh, it's going to help you and stabilize your blood and blah, blah, blah and prevent clotting. But it turns out that the recommendations for aspirin were over enthusiastic and that there are certain patients who should be on aspirin, but very few compared to the universal statement that everybody should take an aspirin to prevent heart disease. No, because it causes strokes and it causes bleeding, which is not good, like GI bleeding. So, you know, if you, if you look at those drugs like Aspirin or Advil or Aleve, they're not benign. I mean, they, they really helpful when you need them, but they can cause terrible gut issues. I had gastritis, for example, after taking them for broken arm. And many, many people die. In fact, many as many people die from taking those drugs as from asthma or leukemia. So imagine if we literally eliminated those drugs. We'd basically be essential. It'd be the equivalent of curing leukemia or asthma. So it's not, not a joke. So, you know, statins, for example, even cholesterol drugs like statins like Lipitor, they may not have their main effect by lowering cholesterol. In fact, it may be because they actually lower inflammation. That's what they do. It's a side quote, a side effect of the statin, but actually may be their main effect. So how do you know if you have inflammation? Is there a way to test for it? Is there a blood test? Well, there are and there are more and more coming. So the most common one that people do is called C reactive protein. It's high sensitivity C reactive protein. It's your something your doctor can order. It's on any lab panel you can get. And you can also see that as a sign of hidden inflammation. Now if it's super high, it could be infection, but if it's in the sort of 1 to 10 range, that's usually the hidden inflammation. Ideally it should be less than 1. Any higher than that means you're on your way. Now there are other blood tests you can check. Cytokines, sed rate and so forth may not be as helpful. But there's a new test developed by a professor at Stanford called IH I.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Age, meaning immune age.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And it really looks at your immuno, which are 50 different cytokines, many of.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Which you've never heard of.
Dr. Mark Hyman
There are molecules that are regulating immunity inflammation that he was able to correlate by using artificial intelligence with disease. So he found there really there were about four that highly correlated with your risk of heart attack, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's and so forth. What's so amazing that this test is really not that expensive. It's easy to get and you can track it over time. And then the good news is you can change things and change your inflammation. Anyway, enough with that. So you know, the reason we really don't track this is because doctors just kind of are not thinking about the.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Root causes of disease.
Dr. Mark Hyman
They're like, okay, what's your symptom? What are you suffering from? Okay, let me find the drug that best matches that. You know, if you have a strep throat, I can give you a penicillin. Great, I'll get a cure. But most of the time I'm just managing symptoms and. Or I'm giving you an immune suppressant and that's not the answer, unfortunately. So, okay, so let's say you've identified the causes, you figured out you have inflammation. You know, how do you live an anti inflammatory lifestyle? It's the same old stuff. I hate to say it, but it's eat real food, lots of phytochemicals, all those colorful plant compounds are anti inflammatory. All the, the phytochemicals in food are so powerful for reducing inflammation. Also, you know, just real, whole, unrefined, unprocessed foods, not lots of sugar and starch, no trans fats, no, no refined oils. And get lots of those phytonutrients. Good fats are really important too. Avocados, olive oil, extra virgin olive oil, ideally omega 3 fats, things like sardines, herring sable, wild salmon, they're all really rich in omega 3 fats and they're very healthy for you. Exercise, lots of research on exercise can reduce inflammation, it supports your immune system, it strengthens your heart, it corrects insulin resistance and improves your mood, it helps reduce stress. I mean it's one of those miracle therapies that can really do so much for you at so many levels. Practice active relaxation, which sounds like a contradiction or an oxymoron, but no, you have to actively relax. It's not, I don't mean sitting watching tv, drinking a beer I mean, meditating, doing yoga, deep breathing, getting a massage, doing something where your body just kind of hits down into the parasympathetic state and calms your nervous system. Hot bath, I love that. Last night I was a little. Had a very busy day, lots going on, and I just took a hot bath with Epsom salt and I just kind of floated away.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
It was great.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Also, food sensitivities are another big factor. You might not know this, but a lot of hidden inflammation can come from not allergies, but food sensitivities, things like gluten, dairy, and certain things that people react to that they may not know they react to. So I often recommend an elimination diet like the 10 day detox diet that I've created to help people reduce their overall level of inflammation. And then you can add back foods to see what's really the problem. So maybe I eliminate a lot of things and then you just add back.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
One at a time.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And for example, dairy I know causes inflammation. If I have dairy, I get pimples, my skin's weird, I get congestion.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
So I don't eat dairy.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Although I do manage to tolerate goat and sheep. Okay, healing your gut, you know, doing a gut repair program. That's why we've created gut food that's so important. I think many people would benefit from actually focused gut repair program because a lot of their imbalanced bacteria are causing inflammation. And lastly, take a, take the right supplements, a multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D, all help drop inflammation.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
What are the things in your mind that you go through as a checklist if someone comes in with an autoimmune disease?
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Well, the first step I'm going to go is looking for celiac disease and gluten sensitivity. I mean, that is a do not miss in anybody with an autoimmune condition. I mean, if you just look at the overlap, you see higher prevalence of celiac disease and gluten sensitivity in anybody with any autoimmune condition. I mean, we've talked about this before with Sidney Baker's tack rules. If you're trying to control the autoimmune condition, but you're sitting on that gluten tap, it's going to be really hard to quiet everything down and feel good. You have to remove the driver of the inflammation and the autoimmune upregulations. That is the first place that I go.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Before you go on from that, I.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Want you to explain the rest, but.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
I just want to emphasize that because.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
You know, when someone comes with an autoimmune disease. Getting a celiac panel is like checking a blood pressure. It's just the most basic thing you can do. And often people misinterpret it because the levels are, quote, normal, but they might be in the continuum.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So what if normal is up to.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
20, but your level's 18 or 17 or 15 or 10?
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Is it relevant?
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
And the answer is yes, it's relevant because it means your body's having an immune response to an antigen or foreign protein in the gluten that you're absorbing across your gut and your immune system is seeing and then getting pissed off about and creating a systemic reaction around.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Now.
Dr. Mark Hyman
It.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
How bad is that reaction? Will it cause symptoms? Do you feel bad?
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Maybe, maybe not.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
But it is causing some low grade level of inflammation and it's a low grade hidden inflammation that's driving so many chronic, chronic diseases.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Right.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
I think that's a really important point. And it's another one of those that sometimes, doing more in depth testing, somebody might say, well, I don't have celiac disease, but every single other gliadin or gluten protein is showing up elevated. That might be a big motivator to say, all right, I guess I do need to stop eating the bread and remove the gluten from the diet. So sometimes we do more testing to convince people or really engage them because it's hard. If those are foods you love, it's hard to get people to give up what they're used to eating.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
And of course, there are other foods that could be culprits too, but gluten is the number one in my list.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Yeah.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So go through now the rest of.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
The kinds of things you think about with an autoimmune disease.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Yeah. So I also think about gut health and the health of the intestinal lining because anything that disrupts the health of that lining creates more input to those antibody producing cells. And I think if we quote Alessio Fazano, unlike Las Vegas, what happens in the gut? Does it stay in the gut if it's not healthy? If that wall is more permeable and there's more bacterial proteins getting into the bloodstream or more food proteins getting to the bloodstream, there's that immune system just going, ah. And it's not just acting at the gut level. It can start cross reacting to organs that we should normally be tolerant to, hence an autoimmune condition. So we really want to understand the health of the gut microbiome, the integrity of the intestinal lining. How well are we digesting and absorbing our food. Do we have an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine? That's. That's the second priority.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Yeah.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
So you've got gluten, you've got the gut microbiome, you've got leaky gut.
Dr. Mark Hyman
What else goes through your mind when.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
You see someone with an autoimmune disease?
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Well, so you also think about whether there could be a toxic insult, a toxic exposure that could be upregulating the immune system. We know that. And I won't say that stress per se, necessarily causes an autoimmune condition, but it can certainly perpetuate the cycle of inflammation.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Makes it worse, for sure.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Makes it worse. Just like sleep. Sleep deprivation, the same thing.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Yeah. So toxins, like you said, are actually immunogenic. And there's a word for the role of toxins in autoimmune disease. They're called autogens. They literally cause an autoimmune response in the body, whether it's pesticides, heavy metals. And I've seen this, and I'm sure you have, Cindy, many times in your practice, and you never know if it's that or so, because we've gone through the gluten and we've gone through the microbiome, we've gone through toxins. And there's a few other things I think about, like food sensitivities besides gluten. That can be a play role, which just goes along with a leaky gut.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And then the last thing I think.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
About are infections that are infections, because we often ignore those. And the body's. You know, you're living as a host to all sorts of bugs.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Right.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
And when you have AIDS or hiv, you don't die from the AIDS virus. You die from all the latent infections that you actually have already living in your body, like pneumocystis or candida or CMB or tuberculosis or whatever you've got kind of laying around it just your body's handling. It's.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
It's.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
It.
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's what kills you.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
And in.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
In the autoimmune disease, I think there's an unrecognized role of infectious disease. And, And. And there is some literature about this, for sure.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Absolutely.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
What was interesting to me is that nobody chases it down. So even though if you look at the. The PubMed, the National Library of Medicine, you look at all the data on.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Autoimmune disease, you can type in autoimmune.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Disease and toxins and, and diet and gluten and allergens and. And lyme Disease.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And you can do heavy metal. You can. And you'll find all these papers. But what's striking to me is that.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
When you go see the rheumatologist, they.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Don'T go, oh, we should look for these things.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
They just don't. Sometimes they'll check a celiac panel that's actually more common now. But they don't really look at diet, they don't look at toxins, they don't look at allergens, they don't look at latent infections. And you'll often see dramatic improvements when you actually help people with those issues.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Well, you know, Mark, it's interesting. When we were in medical school, way back in the day, we learned about Reiter syndrome. Right. Or syndrome were where people would show up with symptoms like rheumatoid arthritis, hot swollen joints, and positive rheumatoid markers. And it either came after a gut infection like Shigella or Yersinia, or it came after a genital urinary infection like Chlamydia. So we knew even 30 years ago that those infections can actually trigger an autoimmune reaction.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
That's right.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
More and more recently, there's been a link with Porphyrumonas ginginalis, so an oral bacteria, and rheumatoid arthritis.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So, yes, if you have bad teeth.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
That can also be a source.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Right?
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Yep, yep. Which I didn't mention, so. Absolutely.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So if someone comes from the ray.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Nodes, you're thinking about all these things in the back of your head, and you're wondering, oh, what's this person's story? And you go into their story, and you can usually ferret out what the.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Issues are for them, and then you.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Can start to chase down the things that are really abnormal.
Dr. Mark Hyman
So tell us about Raynaud's. How common is this problem?
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
What are the symptoms? And, you know, what is the general approach with traditional medicine?
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Sure. So you talked a little bit about the symptoms, that it's typically fingers, sometimes toes, sometimes nose, turning white or blue in the cold. And then when they come in, and it can be very painful, and then you come inside, and as it warms up, they can turn beet red blood. So it's small arteries that react to the cold. And there's two primary. There are two types of Raynaud. There's primary Raynaud's, which supposedly is just the Raynaud's by itself. And then there's secondary Raynaud's, which is associated with autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and progressive systemic sclerosis and the second component tends to be more severe. It can even lead to ulcers on the tips of the fingers and things.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Things.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
It's more common in women. It's more common in lean women, interestingly enough. And it can significantly affect quality and quantity of life. And if it's a primary source, it's usually reassurance. Wear mittens, stay out of the cold. If it's the more serious issues, sometimes they'll use topical nitroglycerin, calcium channel blockers, even medications like Viagra.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Wow. So Viagra, which is. Increases blood flow. So it makes sense.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Right? Right.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Yeah. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. With. With some benefit. Right. But I think the important thing is to say, well, what does it actually mean? Either if you have small arteries that tend to react to cold, or if you've got an autoimmune condition, because that opens the door into thinking about things from a much broader, comprehensive way.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And so from.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
From the perspective of. Of the biology of it, you know, you're getting this sort of contracted blood vessels. What. What is the cause of that?
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Well, we don't know 100%. But those arteries, if we think of the importance of artery elasticity, so your arteries are dynamic, they can dilate and they can constrict when needed. Sometimes it's a way to kind of maintain core body temperature. But those small arteries in particular, we think of that inner lining, the endothelium, that's responsible for regulating the tone. It is another one of those proverbial canaries in the coal mine. It's affected by a lot of other things besides cold. In fact, it's affected by many of the other factors that increase our risk of cardiometabolic disease. We know that arteries can spasm in response to an unhealthy diet or hydrogenated oils. We know that arteries can spasm in response to stress or sleep deprivation. Arteries can spasm in response to air pollution. So there are many, many other factors that will make maybe a predisposition become more significant and more relevant. And the other piece is there's some evidence that if you have arteries that are prone to spasm, it may be a marker that you are at higher risk down the road of developing high blood pressure, heart risk, and stroke. So it's really a time to pay attention to the health of your arteries.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So it could be be found in.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Isolation, just as a. As a random condition called random.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or it can be associated with other.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Autoimmune diseases that people have, like Sjogren's or Lupus or other conditions. And essentially, it's an almost an autoimmune.
Podcast Host/Producer
Disease of the blood vessels.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Right. And it creates inflammation. So then the question is, you know, how do we think differently? You know, if you're just giving drugs like Viagra or you're giving drugs to, you know, like, increasing blood flow, like blood pressure pills and so on.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
What.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Do we do differently in functional medicine? How do we think differently about this problem? What are the diagnostic approaches we use to test and figure out what the cause is, and what do we do in terms of treatment?
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Well, I think it's important, number one, to really do a deep dive into vascular risk measurements. We want to know somebody's quality and quantity of cholesterol. We want to know their glucose and insulin and how they're able to manage glucose. We want to know their inflammatory markers like their C. Reactive protein. And do they have evidence of oxidative stress? Anybody with an autoimmune condition, Mark, I mean, you've talked about this for such a long time. We want to figure out what the underlying cause is that upregulating the reactivity and leading to or contributing to the auto condition. So we want to look for food triggers. We want to look at the health of the gut lining and all of the other things that people are familiar with. So it's really looking for upstream to see from a vascular standpoint how healthy that is and what's driving it. And from driving and upregulating the immune system, what we can identify and remove and address.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
How do we assess people?
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Is there a test for Raynaud's, or is it just sort of looking at the symptoms?
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
You know, it's primarily a symptomatic diagnosis, to be honest. There are tests you can do to look at artery elasticity in general. They're not widely available, but some places will do them. They're usually done in the context of cardiovascular disease to look at how resilient these small arteries are. You know, there's one by a company called Itamar, based out of Israel, called an Endopat. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. It's not very comfortable. They basically put a little probe on your finger and pump up a blood pressure cuff to block the blood flow for two minutes, and then measure how quickly it takes for the blood to get back to your finger when they let it down again. So they can tell you about all arteries.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It's like medical torture.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Yeah, medical torture.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Well, that's fine.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So that's good.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
But then it doesn't really tell you why. It just tells you they're not working, which is we're really good at in medicine is figuring out what's not working, but we don't know how to figure out why. Not working. You know, what's not working, but not why it's not working. And I think that's the beautiful thing about functional medicine. So.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
And I. I've seen, you know, patients.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Reynolds, when we start to dig down these issues, we look at toxins, we look. We look at their microbiome, we look at allergens, we look at food sensitivities, we look at infections. We can really start to ferret out what the issues are and often get.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
These people a lot better. So what.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
What.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
What is the approach, then, from a functional medicine perspective for. For Raynaud's syndrome?
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Yeah. So from a diagnostic standpoint, as I mentioned before, we want to look at all those cardiometabolic risk factors. We want to look for the underlying tax that are upregulating the immune system, whether it's gluten or food sensitivities or something going on in the gut, microbiome or an infection. And then from a treatment standpoint, a lot of the same lifestyle things that we normally want to do specifically help those arteries be more resilient, less reactive. So we know, for example, that. That studies on meditation, yoga, biofeedback can show improvements in Raynaud's and artery elasticity after six weeks of a regular, consistent practice.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Wow. Just yoga, meditation.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Right.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
It's great.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
So you can.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
You can basically meditate your blood vessels. Healthier, right? That's good.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Who.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
What was that story years ago of somebody meditating? And they could change the temperature in one hand versus the other, by the way, like five degrees or something. Incredible. Yeah. So we have more control over that autonomic nervous system than what we thought.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
You know, I've often found. You find any other things around diet or supplements helpful for these patients?
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Yeah, there's a lot. So, again, specific food components, omega 3 fatty acids, have benefits on artery elasticity, whether that's fish, fish oil, nuts and seeds. You know, arginine is an interesting amino acid. It's used by the. The arteries to make their own version of nitroglycerin. So it's a precursor of nitroglycerin, which, of course, dilates blood vessels.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Nitric oxide? Nitric oxide.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Nitric oxide, yes. Thank you. Nitric oxide. So getting nuts and seeds, or maybe even supplementing arginine, the deeply pigmented foods that are Rich in bioflavonoids. A lot of those polyphenolic foods also relax the arteries. Things like resveratrol, for example.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Yeah.
Dr. Heather (Autoimmune Specialist)
Folate rich foods, dark leafy greens, another powerhouse for the arteries. So we think of that extra virgin olive oil, another food that has natural benefits on relaxing the arteries.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
So, yeah.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
That'S really a lot of what I use. Simi and I often I'll supplement with arginine if they're very symptomatic, if they're going out, and often even ginkgo, which is a. Another product. And I think the nitric oxide is interesting. You can increase nitric oxide by your breathing, too, just by breathing practices. We had Louis Ignaro on our podcast, who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of nitric oxide and its role in improving overall health, reducing inflammation, and it's incredibly important for lung health as well. And with COVID they're finding nitric oxide being very effective in treating COVID patients, and he talks a lot about that on the podcast. But the. The nitric oxide can also be increased by Viagra or Cialis or any of those drugs that are used for sexual enhancement, but they actually work by increasing blood flow and circulation, so that's a good thing. So maybe if you have Raynaud's, that might help as well. So arginine, you can take, or you can do those drugs, or you can actually use ginkgo and other things. Bioflavonoids, I used to use quite a bit. And combining that with the root cause, the medical detective piece, because you can't just give those.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Someone's got Ray.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Oh, give them Argy. No. Well, why is it have Ray nodes, like, what is the cause? What is the root? And I think that's what often people miss.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Even in integrative medicine.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
They'll say, oh, well, you have Raynaud's. Use Argyn. I'm like, no, no, no. Why do you have Raynaud's? Like, what is the root cause? And this is the part that we often miss in medicine. And that's why at the Ultra Wellness center, we really have such a robust practice, because we are the medical detectives looking for the root cause, you know.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
And I just tell you, I just.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like an anecdote of a patient I.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Just had this week that was just, you know, it's one of those stories. He's really awesome guy, and he developed ticket tick ticks when he was not tick bites, but he developed, like, motor ticks, you know, when he was eight. And I started asking about his story and a Doctor, there's nothing you can do. Take these drugs, whatever. So I said, well, what was it like? What was happening? Did you get infections? Did you have this, you have that? So I started digging into his story, and he had tons of infections and scrap and all kinds of things. And, you know, we know there's a syndrome called pandas, which is pediatric autoimmune disease of neurologic, blah, blah, blah. I don't forget what it stands for.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
But so long.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And, and.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
And that is associated with strep infections that cause behavior issues, ocd, ticks. And when I checked his labs, he had super high antibodies to strep. And on the cutting end panel, he had really high antibodies against some of the components in his brain related to strep.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And yet no one had even thought.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
To ask the question of why. And so whether it's ticking disorders or whether it's Raynaud or whatever.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
If you.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Get into the habit of thinking, which is what I love about functional medicine, because it makes you think, as opposed to just sort of rote memorization and knee jerk reaction. It's sort of what we get in medicine, which is we make the diagnosis, then we don't have to think anymore. We just basically say, here's a Cook protocol that is in 2021 for XYZ disease. And functional medicine is different. We have to start thinking. We call it thinking and linking.
Dr. Mark Hyman
We know why you're. We go, why?
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
We know why your.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Your fingers get cold and turn white and you have no circulation because you.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Have ray nodes like.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
No, that's just the name of what it looks like. That's the name of the problem. It's not the cause of the problem. Right? And so that's what's so beautiful about functional medicine, is you get to actually go into thinking and linking with what Sid Baker talks about, this whole idea of thinking and l. And changing the way that we actually.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Approach diseases by.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Once we get the diagnosis, that's the beginning of the process of thinking and connecting the dots and being a medical detective. And that's what we do in functional medicine.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
One of the first principle, the first pillar, is eat real food, Real whole food. Understand the food is medicine. It's not just energy or calories. It's truly medicine. It's information, it's instructions, it's code that literally programs your biology with every bite. It regulates your gene expression, your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Pretty much everything is controlled by food.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
And if you're eating the wrong food, you're Sending all the wrong messages. If you eat the right food, you're.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Turning on the right message.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
So doing the 10 day detox, you're basically taking out the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff. You're taking all the foods that cause inflammation, that are toxic to your system, that are inflammatory and mess with your gut, and you're putting in foods that actually help reset your system system. And it's pretty much a very simple approach. It's lots of veggies, so mostly veggies. Lots of good fat, lots of fiber, lots of good clean protein.
Dr. Mark Hyman
And what does that look like?
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
It's tons of non starchy veggies like broccoli.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Any kind of veggie you think of.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
That'S not basically a potato. No. Sometimes sweet potatoes are okay for people. Avocados, good shots, avocados, olive oil, nuts and seeds, lots of good protein. Grass fed, organic regenerative meats, fish, chicken. Sometimes, you know, for vegetarians we can.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Or vegans, we can use plant based.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Proteins like tempeh or non GMO or organic soy tofu. Those are the most dense sources of protein. But you do need protein as you detoxify. So for the 10 days you're gonna be getting rid of all the other junk, right? Processed food, other carbs, sugar, dairy, coffee, gluten, alcohol, pretty much actually all grains and beans. And the reason we get rid of gains and beans, they're necessarily all bad, is a lot of people have issues, a lot of people have issues with their gut, A lot of people have issues with inflammation, A lot of people have issues with gluten. A lot of people have issues with insulin resistance and prediabetes and obesity. And they can be problematic for these people. So basically, get off all the bad stuff now. It's not calorie counting. You can eat as much as you want. We're not like crazy how much macronutrients and percent of this and percent of that. No, it's just pick the right foods and we focus on what to eat. You don't have to focus on how much to eat.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
So when you look at your plate, it basically looks like this. Three quarters of it should be non starchy veggies. And I usually often will put two or three veggies in my dinner. I'll make mushrooms, I'll have, have a, you know, broccoli. I'll make some, maybe a salad. So I'll have lots of veggies and, and I'll have a portion of protein that's essentially the size of my palm 4 to 6 ounces, usually 30 to 40 grams of protein. That's a good amount of protein, but you don't need that much. If you're having animal protein. It should be very generally raised, should be pasture raised, chicken, wild caught fish, should be low mercury, obviously, all that. And we'll put all that show notes. Lots of good fats with dinner, like avocados, nuts and seeds, olive oil in your veggies. You can even use, for example, ghee, which is a kind of a butter, but it actually has the inflammatory proteins remove casein and whey. It basically has just the fat. It's called clarified butter. Very common. You can get my book Tend to detox diet. You can get the 10 day detox diet cookbook, whatever you want, put all the show notes and links together. It I do call it the 10 day detox diet, but sometimes you need to do it longer, like two weeks.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Three weeks, 10 months, maybe even 10.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Years, depending on the situation. But we're going to talk about the 10 days and how powerful that can be to transform your health. Now, I find that most people have never connected the dots between how they feel and what they eat. They walk around with what I call FLD syndrome. That's when you feel like crap. That and that is a big problem for people. What do I mean by that? Well, you might be tired, sluggish, you might have brain fog. Maybe I have digestive issues, reflock, heartburn, irritable bowel. Maybe you have nasal congestion, sinus issues, muscle aches, joint pains, headaches, insomnia. Should I go on? Rashes, acne, I mean it goes on.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
And on and on.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
And many of these things are caused by food. And the only way to know is to do a total body reset. It's like hitting the reset button on your commuter. When all the systems are jammed, it's a complete reboot. So how do you do a reboot? It's very powerful and most people have never experienced this. And this is why I love to do with people. And I actually run programs all around the world where people can come and actually experience this. We do programs where we have people do this just in five days, not.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
Even 10 days, people have a 70%.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Reduction in all symptoms from all diseases.
Dr. Mark Hyman
Now I'm going to put in the.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Show notes the medical symptom questionnaire that I use in my practice, which essentially gives you a score based on the degree and frequency and severity of symptoms. So if you have a headache, is it zero, meaning never, or before I.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Get it all the time and really.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
That or some version in between. And then you get a score at.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
The end and, you know, people have.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
A score of 60, 70, 100. It should be less than 10, maybe even zero. Ideally, I should have symptoms. It's not normal for human beings to suffer this much. And that's really why I created this, this book and the program, the 10 Day Detox Diet, because I was doing this with my patients and seeing such incredible results. So I do this personally regularly. I do it at least two or three times a year, four times a year, to really reset my system, to kind of get my body back on track, to get rid of all the bad stuff, put in all the good stuff. I want to walk you through how to do this. I'm going to teach you how to hit the reset button, reboot your system and to optimize your biology to help your gut, help your detox system, to help your immune system, help reset your nervous system. And it's powerful. So if you want to really see how your body can feel and get rid of what we call FLC syndrome, I would do this. Most people are like the frog that's in cold water where you turn the heat up, up slowly and it starts to boil to death. We just kind of get used to it and think it's normal. These symptoms are not normal. I remember I want to do this with a junior high school once. And the teachers are like, well, we might have to get permission from the parents to see if it's safe. You know, maybe they don't want their children doing this.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm like, what is it safe to eat?
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and protein and cut out sugar and starch and processed food.
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, they should get a no.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
That it's permission to eat the junk.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Food that they have in school. The opposite anyway. Yes, it's very safe.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Anybody can do this.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
And some people, by the way, you know, need more of certain things or other things. But basically this is a very universal approach to resetting your system. The second pillar, aside from what you eat, the food is really important. And by the need to approach in the morning, you need to make sure you get rid of sugar and starch in the morning. Super important. People start their diet their day with carbs, which is the worst thing you can do. Sugar, sweetened coffees, teas, cereals, muffins, bagels, breads. Done. Second pillar are your daily habit essentially involves a pattern of eating and living that puts your body back in rhythm. It helps you reset your nervous system.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
And there's two really important habits as.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Part of the tendency to. One is when you eat and also when you sleep. Let's talk about when you eat. Now, when you eat might be as important as what you eat. So many of us don't eat in the right pattern. We tend to, you know, eat all.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Day long, we tend to snack, we.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Tend to eat before bed, we snack late at night. It's kind of bad. So basically when you eat is very important. Research shows that doing that can really be bad for your health if you eat at night. So the first is make sure you give yourself at least 12 to 14 hours between dinner and breakfast. So dinner at 6, breakfast at 8, that's a 14 hour fat. Okay. If you eat at 6 and then you keep snacking all night, that doesn't count, right? And it's the most simple form of what we call time restricted eating. And it's basically giving our body a rest and getting the body to reset. And I wrote a lot about this in my book the Young Forever. But basically there's a whole process at night that happens called autophagy and cleanup and repair. You want to give your body the ability to do that. The next is food. Now you can do a breakfast if you're eating, you know, for example, dinner at 6 and breakfast at 8 or so. That's a 14 hour fast. Really important to have protein in the morning, not carbs and sugar. Also not eating three hours before bed is really important. So most people eat and snack after dinner. Don't do that. Have at least three hours time. You eat and you go to sleep. That way you will lose weight, your body can repair and heal instead of trying to digest and store the food, food. What about sleep? Sleep is one of the most underrated pillars of health. It's probably even before exercise, meditation, maybe even before nutrition. Because when you don't sleep well, you're going to eat tons of sugar and carbs. You're going to crave more. So you want to focus on sleep and restorative rest. We know that getting in a routine of waking and sleeping can help us have deeper, more restful sleep. So try to take the same bedtime every night. Try to get off your screens for an hour or two before bed. Keep your room or use blue blocker glasses. Keep your room dark and cold. Probably 65 to 68. Really important because your body does much better with sleep at night. Try to relax at night with meditation. Do a guided imagery, do breath work, stretching, journaling, gratitude, practice whatever you like. But do something very important. So your evening routine should be like set a bedtime and stick to over the 10 days, turn your phone off and get it out of your bedroom. Turn the TV off for at least an hour or two before you go to bed and then use the time at night to read, to journal, to meditate, to connect with people you love and just kind of wind down. The third pillar is extra support we need on the journey. Right now we all need nutrients. They're called vitamins because they were vital amines, vital to life, right? And so we've seen a dramatic reduction in the nutrient density of our food. Our organic matter's gone out of our soil. Nutrients can't be extracted. Foods travel long distances. We have commodity crops which are bred to actually breed out the nutrients and in the starch and, and, and, and you know, yield and so foods aren't as nutritious as they once were. And probably 90% of Americans according to the government own surveys our decision in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency. So how much vitamin D or you need to not get rickets? Not very much, like 30 units. How much you need for optimal health? Probably three to 5,000. So we need to really probably focus on nutrients. And even with a perfect diet, you know, because none of us are hunter gatherers anymore, we eat all kinds of food that we never ate. And I'm a nutrient depleted, we need, we need the basic supplements. So we need a basic set of supplements. A multivitamin, mineral, foundational, magnesium. A lot of us are deficient, probably 45% or lower. Deficient magnesium involving over 300 different enzymatic reactions, super important, helps relax your nervous system at night, help you calm down. Also people get constipated sometimes when they change their diet. So taking magnesium citrate can help. And lastly vitamin D. Now you can also take fish oil, but vitamin D is really important. Vitamin D, over 80% is lower deficient in vitamin D. It's, it's involved in so many different things in the body. So really important and helps your mood, helps your muscle function, helps your brain, help your energy, helps inflammation, autoimmunity. It's just super important and most of us are low. Fish oil is also important and I, I often recommend fish oil to people or omega 3 fats. So what are the program steps in the 1080 talk? What should be the test? And then we're going to go through this. The first step is to eat from the 10 day detox approved list for 10 days. So eat what I'm telling you to eat right, Whole foods. You can do a whole food based shake in the morning. You could add, you know, protein powder, grass fed protein if you want. I have a grass fed protein called super simple protein. But you really need to make sure you have good breakfast. Second is commit to daily habits, right? Pick your designated eating window, right? You want a 12 to 14 hour night fast, which means eating within a 10 or 12 hour window. Don't snack before bed. Try to have the same bedtime. Get off your technology an hour or two before. Practice some active relaxation. Huge impact on your health. Step three is adding the supplements. Now you don't have to do this, but I really encourage people to have a multivitamin, magnesium, vitamin D and potentially fish oil. And we're gonna list which products you should take in the show notes so you have it all listed there. Also what you should eat and what you should avoid during your 1080 talk. Let's go through that. So, so here's a full food list. You can, you know we're going to have it in the show notes. You can take it with you to the store. It's in the book the 1080 Talks, it's in the 1080 Docs Cookbook. But essentially, here's what you should eat and what you should actually get rid of. What you should eat is protein. You need the right protein, right? So grass fed originally raised meats is great. You can have past raised lamb, beef, bison, venison, elk, grass fed beef, pasture is chicken, turkey, duck, all that's fine. What you should avoid is conventionally raised chicken and poultry and eggs and so forth. And by the way, you can also have eggs if they're pastries, eggs, meat, get rid of all processed meats, deli meats, all conventionally raised feedlot meats. Get rid of all that stuff. What about fish and seafood? Lots of small fish are good, big fish are bad, right? Big fish like swordfish, tuna filling, a sea bass, halibut, most farm raised fish are pretty bad for you. What you should be consuming are things like the. I call this mashed fish, a small wild salmon, sardines, anchovies, herring, a mackerel. You can have black cod, shrimp, scallops, trout, all those are fine. Eggs, as I said, pasture eggs are fine. Non organic, regular eggs are not fine. What about nuts and seeds? Very important. Almonds, Brazil nuts, cashew nuts, hazelnuts, macadamia, pecans, pine nuts, pistachios, walnuts, all that's great eating cacao nibs, chocolate, not actually chocolate but where chocolate comes from, seeds are great. Chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, all great. Nut butters also great. So unsweetened nut butter, so almond, cashew, pecan, macadamia, I love macadamia, walnut nut all that's great. You can also eat beans if they're. If you're a vegan and you want to do this, you can use GMO free or non GMO tofu or tempeh as your protein. What you should avoid are nuts there with sugar that are cooked in oils that are with basically candied stuff. A lot of nut butters have sugar, hydrogenated fats, peanut butter, peanuts, this can be okay. But I would say mostly avoid peanuts because they have aflatoxin in them, they often are rancid and so you wanna be careful with that. What about oils and fats? Well, the ones you wanna use are organic avocado oil. You can use organic coconut oil for cooking grass fed ghee. If you wanna use tallow, lard, duck fat, chicken fat, that's okay as long as they're they're path grace or regenerate raised for salads. And you can use different kinds of oils like almond oil, flax oil, hemp oil, macadamia oil and convert to olive oil. And you can cook with olive oil but only like tomato sauces and things like that. Things that are not high heat, sesame oil tahini is great as well. Great fat, sesame seed kind of paste, walnut oil. Those are flavorful oils, they're not main oils. But you want to avoid the traditional oils. All the seed oils like canola oil, partially hydrogenated oils, margarine, peanut oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, trans fats, vegetable oil, vegetable shortening, all that stuff.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Bad.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
What about veggies, what should you eat? Well, you want to stick with lots of non starchy veggies or arch Oaks organic if you can. I use the Dirty Dozen guide from the Environmental Working Group EWG.org tell you.
Dr. Mark (Functional Medicine/Integrative Medicine Expert)
Which are the clean 15, meaning you.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Can eat them non organic or the Dirty Dozen which you should definitely not eat if they're not organic. But I love asparagus, artichokes, avocado, bean sprouts, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, cucumber, eggplant, garlic, ginger, hearts of palm, kohlrabi, leafy greens, mushrooms of all kinds, onions, peppers, radicchio, radish, rutabagas, all that kind of stuff. Seaweed is Great. Lots of minerals, shallots, summer squash, tomatoes, turnips, zucchini.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
List goes on.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
We have all in there. You can have some things like sweet potatoes. I like the Japanese purple sweet potatoes, winter squash, carrots, pumpkin and all. That's fine. I mean carrots are fine because unless you're doing carrot juice or that, that's a problem. But basically try to limit it to like one serving, which is like half a cup a day. What you should be avoiding is corn and white potatoes mostly. A little, you know, some of the little fingerling potatoes or the Peruvian potatoes, primal potatoes. Those are, can be fine. What about dairy? You can eat pasture raised butter or ghee, but I encourage you to get up all dairy, including sheep and goat, which are mostly fine for people, but I encourage people to get all other dairy. And if you're having ian encourage you to have, make sure it's grass, grass fed or originally raised. What about beans? Well, you can have green beans, you can have green peas, you can have non GMO or organic soy such as tofu or tempeh, you can have snap beans, you can have snow peas, but otherwise definitely no, no, no beans. What about grains? No grains at all. So even healthy grains, quinoa, buckwheat, things like that, I incredibly get off, off all of that. Why? Because it just shuts down. The insulin response, helps people lose weight, reduce inflammation. Not that these are necessarily all bad, but eventually you can add them back. But basically get rid of all, all the other, all grains, wheat, barley, rye, rice, amaranth, milletep, oats, everything. Get rid of it. Fruit, Fruit can be okay, but small amounts of non high glycemic organic fruits, so organic blackberries, blueberries, cranberries, kiwi, lemons, limes, raspberries, all that's fine, not too much, right? You know what I mean? Like you know, two pounds of blueberries, but you can have a cup, half a cup a day. You want to get rid of all the other fruit, all the high glycemic fruit like bananas, pineapple, melons, cherries. Grapes is the worst. Even foods that fruits that you think you know may be good for you are actually good for you, right? Whether it's, you know, peaches, pears, nectarines, cherries, for example, but you don't want to eat them while you're on the 10 day detox. You just want to really shut down the blood sugar and some response. What about sugar sweeteners? Sorry.
Dr. Mark Hyman
You can sometimes have a little monk.
Dr. Sid Baker (Functional Medicine Expert)
Fruit or stevia you have in the shake. We have but generally tend to avoid all that stuff. Also, just get rid of all the other artificial sweeteners, all the sugar, all that stuff. If you have to ask, answers no. Basically, then what should you be drinking? Well, lots of water, herbal tea, green tea, this little caffeine, that's okay, a little green tea is fine. You know, if you get off coffee, sparkling water, mineral water, all this, what you should avoid alcohol, coffee, bottled water, toxic soda, obviously sugary beverages. Basically, that's the programs.
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this when it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body. The kind with the highest quality, cleanest and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store where I've hand selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients, and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, Dr. Hyman.com has the world's best selection of top quality premium supplements, all backed by science. Science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out Dr. Hyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's Dr. Hyman.coM-R-H y m a n.com podcast.
Podcast Host/Producer
Please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I am Chief Medical Officer.
Dr. Mark Hyman
This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions.
Podcast Host/Producer
Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding of that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient.
Dr. Cindy (Functional Medicine Practitioner)
It's important to have someone in your.
Podcast Host/Producer
Corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Episode: Inflammation: The Hidden Fire Behind Pain, Aging, and Disease
Host: Dr. Mark Hyman
Date: October 20, 2025
This episode peels back the curtain on the silent epidemic of chronic inflammation, often dubbed the "hidden fire" fueling pain, aging, and a host of modern diseases—from osteoarthritis to heart disease, diabetes, and even mental health disorders. Dr. Hyman and an expert panel discuss why inflammation lies at the root of so many chronic ailments, why conventional treatments often fall short, and how lifestyle, diet, targeted therapies, and functional medicine approaches can help you reverse—rather than merely manage—these conditions.
Functional medicine seeks root causes, focusing on diet, gut health, exercise, stress reduction, and toxin exposure.
Illustrative case: Overweight, highly inflamed patient scheduled for knee replacement reversed their pain and avoided surgery with changes in diet, weight loss, reduced alcohol, increased physical therapy, and anti-inflammatory supplements.
[06:43] Dr. George: "He lost 45 pounds... canceled the knee replacement and came in with his tickets to Miami."
Anti-inflammatory diets—gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar/starch-free, focused on whole, plant-rich foods, healthy fats—are key.
Supplements like high-dose omega-3s, curcumin, vitamin D, and specialized pro-resolving mediators (SPMs) help resolve inflammation.
[08:23] Dr. Cindy: “Like not everybody needs to be gluten, dairy free, but if you were inflamed, you gotta be. If you have a chronic problem, it's number one, two and three on the list.”
Ozone therapy: Medical-grade oxygen processed to add a third oxygen atom (O3), creating a highly reactive, therapeutic molecule.
Injected into joints, ozone stimulates an anti-inflammatory response, improves circulation, enhances oxygen delivery, promotes tissue repair, and may even regenerate cartilage.
Prolozone: a combination of ozone and nutrients (B12, magnesium, procaine) for synergistic healing effects.
Anecdotes and case studies highlighted rapid and dramatic improvements in stubborn joint pain, even when replacement was previously recommended.
[19:01] Dr. Cindy: “It was so painful... [after ozone injection] literally within five minutes, I was like doing this. I was completely mobile."
[21:34] Dr. George: “After her second injection, she went on her first hike in two years. She hiked six miles...with no swelling.”
Widely used and cost-effective in many countries; safer and more restorative compared to steroid injections, which can degrade cartilage over time.
Prolozone appears to stimulate chondroblasts (cartilage-building cells) and can potentially regenerate cartilage.
[24:04] Dr. George: “It stimulates chondroblasts. Chondroblasts are the cells that rebuild cartilage. It can rebuild the cartilage...prolosome fits the bill.”
Chief drivers: Diet (especially sugar, starches, processed foods), refined oils, physical inactivity, stress, toxins, and gut/microbiome imbalances. [25:04] Dr. Mark Hyman: “Number one, two and three is diet. And guess what the number one, two and three in diet thing is... Sugar. Or the equivalent of sugar. Starch.”
The modern American diet: excessive refined carbs, sugar (average consumption: 152 lbs/year!), processed foods.
Exercise is a powerful anti-inflammatory; chronic stress and toxin exposures also major contributors.
Microbiome imbalances—“metabolic endotoxemia”—lead to absorption of gut-derived toxins driving systemic inflammation.
“Inflamm-aging”: Chronic, smoldering inflammation is a hallmark of aging and its related diseases.
[30:29] Dr. Mark Hyman: “The kind that we're talking about is the kind that's bad. And that leads to almost every known disease of aging, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's...Autoimmune disease...All these problems are caused by inflammation.”
On chronic inflammation's danger:
[32:22] Dr. Mark Hyman: “The real concern isn't our response to an injury or an acute infection... but this chronic, smoldering inflammation that slowly destroys our organs and our ability to function and leads to rapid aging.”
Regarding diet as the linchpin:
[58:15] Dr. Sid Baker: “Eat real food, real whole food. Understand that food is medicine. It's not just energy or calories. It's truly medicine. It's information.”
On the loop of over-focusing on symptoms in medicine:
[57:58] Dr. Mark (Integrative Expert): “No, that's just the name of what it looks like. It's not the cause of the problem. Right? And so that's what's so beautiful about functional medicine…”
Functional medicine’s root cause philosophy:
[31:13] Dr. Mark Hyman: “In functional medicine, there's a simple rule...If you're standing on a tack, it takes a lot of aspirin to make it feel better. Take out the tack.”
The promise of real reversal (OA story):
[06:43] Dr. George: “He lost 45 pounds...canceled the knee replacement and came in with his tickets to Miami.”
On the scope of inflammation and aging:
[30:29] Dr. Mark Hyman: “It’s not just a bone on bone mechanical issue. It's an inflammatory issue.”
Ozone’s dramatic effect (personal testimony):
[19:01] Dr. Cindy: “Literally within five minutes, I was completely mobile.”
This episode reframes inflammation as the silent but solvable root behind many of our greatest health challenges—and repositions us, through food, lifestyle, and functionally-targeted therapy, as powerful agents of our own well-being.