In this talk with Judy Cho, Board Certified Holistic Nutritionist and Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, we talk about how to get to the root cause of illness, omega-6’s, histamine, Lyme disease, and much more.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.
As the Omicron COVID-19 variant sweeps through many countries, there’s been a renewed call to wear masks, preferably of the N95 variety. For more details regarding the different types of masks that are available, visit here.
However, many of my patients have significant mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) and often have severe reactions to environmental chemicals and toxins. Many of you also have serious reactions to foods and excipients in medications and supplements. You can read my article about excipients here. Some of you have recently reported experiencing various symptoms while using masks. It’s now apparent that many of you may also be reacting to some of the chemicals found in the facemasks that are mandatory in public places. Please be aware of these reactions if you’re one of these patients. There are no easy solutions to this problem, as masking is mandatory in so many situations these days.
A colleague of mine in the MCAS world, Dr. Tania Dempsey, based in New York, recently alerted us all to a patient of hers with significant MCAS. The patient’s condition was well controlled, and she’d been vaccinated three times without any mast cell symptoms arising. The patient was using a N95 mask every day while working as a schoolteacher and began to have significant symptoms from Monday to Friday, which lessened over the weekend. Symptoms such as a scratchy throat, nasal pressure, acne, headaches, sleep disruption, and feelings such as ‘crawling skin’ were reported.
The patient eventually determined that these symptoms could very well be associated with facemasks. She started conducting research on the topic, on websites such as the following:
It was discovered that the types of masks she was using are contaminated with harmful chemicals, including formaldehyde, fluorocarbon, and polypropylene fiber, some of which could be causing the patient’s MCAS flare.
As millions of people are using these masks worldwide, it’s worthwhile asking our patients, if they’re experiencing a flare, what kind of mask they’re wearing on a regular basis and if they notice anything unusual after wearing it. Some symptoms are obvious, such as acne flares, also referred to as ‘maskne’, but some others could be caused by an enormous array of possible triggers. As Dr. Dempsey commented, it’s ironic that these masks are designed to block chemicals, including formaldehyde, yet this information about N95s has been known for years, going back to at least 2008. She further commented that, “since only a small percentage of people in certain industries were wearing them, it wasn’t public knowledge but now that we have potentially hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people wearing them, we need to be more aware (and we need better quality masks). One more point, KN95s could also be problematic, depending on the manufacturer.”
If you have MCAS and are having unusual flares of your symptoms, I suggest you do some research on the type of mask that you’re wearing. Keep asking questions. If you find information out there about a mask that’s less reactive, please share your data with our readers.
Furthermore, it’s important to note that many healthcare workers, who have to wear masks at every shift, report multiple symptoms and they don’t have MCAS. Their symptoms are strictly due to mechanical issues, in addition to environmental chemical toxicity. N95 masks are also quite uncomfortable to use, with many people reporting headaches, TMJ issues, and facial pressure problems. There are a few studies showing the worsening of headaches and TMJ symptoms in people, regardless of their mast cell status. Kellie Barnes, a very experienced physiotherapist who treats hypermobility issues, commented that masks can produce reduced cranial drainage if the masks are tight around the occipitomastoid suture region and the sigmoid sinus. This can lead to a pressurized head, headaches, and changes in a person’s voice. In addition, C1 cranial vertebra issues can arise when people place straps over C1, particularly if it exerts a posterior/anterior force on C1, which is a common occurrence.
It’s frequently been observed by myself and my colleagues, who routinely treat environmentally ill patients, that they’re often primarily associated with three types of buildings. These are hospitals, schools, and government-owned buildings, where exposure to environmental toxins, such as mold, EMFs, asbestos, ventilation and duct contamination, is quite routine.
With regards to using the N95 masks, it’s also apparent that there are many counterfeited N95 and KN95 masks on the market. Up to 60 percent of KN95 masks are said to be counterfeit, with most of those counterfeit masks coming from outside the US, where there’s often much less regulation about the kinds of chemicals that are used in production. It’s therefore very important to make sure that people are wearing legitimate N95 and KN95 masks, ideally manufactured in the US, as this might help those individuals that are struggling with mask chemical sensitivity.
Another of my colleagues, Dr Donna Kirchoff, posted a number of articles about this topic.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.
This transcript was automatically generated, please excuse any errors.
Yoshino:
Hey everyone, welcome back to Artist Decoded. This is your host, Yoshino. And, this is yet another Mind/Wave episode. These episodes have been transforming over the course of time, but mainly my intention for these episodes is that I want to explore various modes of thinking. And, I want to hopefully give people an access point to create positive mental health routines. I’m a firm believer in conscious decision-making and in creating a solid foundation for self-reflection, self-care, and self-growth. Creating good habits in all aspects of life is extremely important, which takes a conscious effort to do so. I personally work out about 12 times per week, so that’s twice a day with one day off. I lift weights in the morning and do calisthenics in the morning, and do my cardiovascular activities such as walking, running, and cycling before sunset. I also know from personal experience that good habits, both physically and mentally, have to be developed slowly and over time.
This can be holistically compared to creating a solid foundation for a career in the arts, or just simply having an artistic practice because not everyone necessarily needs to have a career in the arts. But either way, this takes a conscious, consistent, and concerted effort to continue your craft. Which can be likened to anything in life, including developing positive mental health practices, which leads me to my guest for today, Dr. Bruce Hoffman, who is the founder of the Hoffman Centre for Integrative and Functional Medicine.
So let me tell you a bit about Dr. Hoffman. Dr. Bruce Hoffman did not choose the medical arts as a vocation. Originally, he wanted to be a writer and poet. His interest in health and healing developed later in life after a long and winding road of self-discovery, life experience and learning. He only applied to medical school so he could complete a residency in psychiatry and subsequently study Jungian analysis to understand the human condition and behavior. As life would have it, his destiny took him on a different journey. He never did formally pursue a psychiatry residency or Jungian analytic training, but his love for art, poetry, and psychology remains.
Dr. Hoffman was born and educated in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. After two years of compulsory military training, his distaste for the local regime convinced him to immigrate to Canada in 1986, where he pursued family medical practice in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. Once ensconced in the practice of family medicine, he quickly realized that his interests in medicine were broader than just drugs and surgery. The allopathic medical practice was limited to treating symptoms and illnesses, but failed short in restoring the patient’s health entirely. Bruce embarked on a journey to understand what constitutes the human experience. What are the triggers and mediators that perpetuate human suffering? He wanted to assist his patients not only to be free of disease, but to realize their maximum potential.
Well, I hope you all enjoy this podcast episode. There’s a lot of rich information here, so stay tuned for that. But before we begin, please go to our iTunes page, leave us a review. It helps reviewers just like yourself to hear about the podcast. We’re also now on YouTube. There are a lot of new videos and content from past episodes up there. So, check us out over there and be sure to tune into our no wave cinema conversations on Clubhouse. The next conversation will be with me and Justin Dasher Hopkins. We’ll be talking about the classic 1964 Hiroshi Tasha Guevara film, Woman and the Dunes. We will be having this conversation on Wednesday, April 7th at 6:00 PM Pacific Standard Time. So definitely go check it out and listen to us over there. Maybe even contribute to the conversation as well. So anyways, without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Bruce Hoffman. Hope you enjoy it.
Dr. Hoffman, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. And the main reason why I want to bring you on is to talk about good mental health practices and as Maslow would put it to hopefully reach self-actualization. And I think it’s really important for people in general, to be honest with themselves about every single aspect in their life, to live a holistic practice. And I was wondering if you can speak about your early pursuits for wanting to become a writer and poet and how that eventually led you down a path of studying traditional medicine.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Sure. I was brought up in apartheid, South Africa. And initially in quite a conservative traditional home. But at a young age, when my parents got divorced at around age 10, my mother drifted off into more creative endeavors and found herself hanging out with Keith Anderson, who was a head of a circus, also an artist, a set designer with the opera company and the director of the opera company. And so, I found myself hanging out with Keith and his group of merry pranksters, if you will, because they were circus people, artists, creatives, and opera participants. And I found myself as a trapeze artist in a circus that traveled around South Africa, hanging out with these rather unique individuals, clowns, dwarfs, transvestites, just a crazy band of merry pranksters, which at a young age in conservative South Africa was completely unheard of.
So, I was exposed to alternative lifestyles from a young age. But then when my father got wind of this, he sent me off to an all-male boarding school, a thousand miles from home. And when I got to this all-male boarding school, they took one look at me and said; Hoffman, we’re going to knock you back into shape. So, then I was forced into this narrow, masculine boarding school mentality, and I was horrified it was like the worst thing that ever happened. But the school was an outward-bound school based on the boarding school that Prince Charles went to Gordonstoun and Prince Phillip went to. Just based on those same principles, go out into the mountains and find yourself. But after a couple of years of being at a boarding school, I had a school teacher by the name of Roger Loveday. And Roger was a devotee of a guru called Ramana Maharshi. He exposed me to the teachings from India and particularly the subset of Hinduism called Advaita or non-dual Vedanta. And also at the same time, I got exposed to the writings of Jung; Memories, Dreams, and Reflections- his autobiography had a huge impact on me. And what ended up happening was I had a satori experience.
One day, Roger was speaking to me outside the school, outside the classroom, after he’d given a big dissertation on the bible and Christianity. After I was very cynically inclined at that time. I said to him; Roger, you don’t believe in all of those myths, do you? And he said to me, “of course I do”. And in that moment when he said, of course I do, I had a sudden awakening. I went into the state called non-dual state or satori. And, that’s where all space-time sort of, linear time disappears and you see behind the curtain, so to speak. You see the appearance of reality through the quantum lens, which is, there’s no time, there’s no future, there’s no danger, there’s no fear of death. Everything just dissolves into this oneness and where everything’s light. Which is well-documented in all the literature, many people have had these experiences. But that then set the stage for further exploration of these principles and these studies. I just continued to be inspired by the fact that there was a reality behind the reality that the rest of the world was operating on.
And then my mother applied for me to go to medical school, unbeknownst to me. Why, because she had a friend who had a friend who could get a scholarship for medical school, for somebody from the particular part of the country that I came from. So, she applied and I was actually up in Johannesburg building sets, scenery for a play with Keith Anderson and his group. I got a phone call and my mother said; Oh, by the way, you got into medical school. And I said, what? What’s medicine, I’m go to do what? She said, no, you got to go study medicine. I said, are you out of your mind? I want to go and study literature. Anyway, I ended up going to med school and not knowing what I was doing there. It is quite a peculiar experience. But while I was in medical school, I happened to go and stay on a remote farm up on the mountain. And there were a group of people around that area who were very influenced by the beat poets, Kerouac, Ginsberg, et cetera. And I started to read them with great sort of joy. And, and then I ended up in my second year of med school, going to San Francisco and started to hang out with Gregory Corso and a lot of the other beat poets. And that was another inspiration for me.
I just got involved in creative endeavors, integrating Jung and Eastern thoughts and philosophies, and then finished my medical training, ended up in rural Saskatchewan as a family practitioner and really loved being a doctor, when I actually discovered what being a doctor was, because I had no clue. But then after a period of a year or two, I realize that this whole N2D2, name of disease, name of drug method of practicing was ridiculous. Even though it serves a function. And then I came across the writings and the videotapes of a medical writer and thinker called Larry Dossey. Larry Dossey had explored the interface between Eastern philosophies and Western medicine. I’ve written quite extensively about it. And, I watched his video and I was like completely moved. I realized that; Hey, I can bring back everything I learned in my youth that I thought I had to leave behind forever into the integration of this kind of medical practice. I flew down, met Larry Dossey, at a conference, had dinner with him. Very inspired, and then started off with that. To eat, discover, and study anything I could across the whole spectrum of medicine. Healing and the healing arts, including anything that could help an individual live at their maximum potential.
People enter into the medical office. I’m sitting in my medical office. I’ve just seen patients this morning and they come in with symptoms of depression, mold illness, Lyme disease, mast cell activation syndrome, a whole host of chronic fatigue or whatever. Then you start to work with a bigger lens are really entry points into a much greater dialogue and a much greater roadmap that you need to bring to the table in order to assist the person through this transformation of illness to wellness. People think they have a disease in which they label, and they think that’s where it begins and ends. But in the system I use and the method I’ve employed, and I’m proud to say that some of the success I have is that I employ a much larger roadmap. It was a much larger set of tools and hence have written about this new curriculum that’s necessary in order to interface with complex patients who can’t just be mechanistically reduced to a diagnosis. It’s actually absurd when you start to think of it. We’re just not trained to think with a different paradigm. We’re very mechanistic in our thought process, but there’s a lot more mystery that goes on into diagnostics and treatment.
What happened after that was that I started to study Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, homeopathy and German biological medicine, and the the sub-disciplines. And, happened to spend number of years with Deepak Chopra and David Simon. And when I discovered Ayurvedic medicine, they had an explanation of the different layers and levels of what they consider to be human reality, which is stepped down from soul to spirit, to mind, to emotion, to energy, to physicality, to outer world, out there, the expanded universe.
And I started to use that diagnostic model to think of human behavior and illness. And now I’ve incorporated that and expanded that and happened to also, at the time, meet up with a German doctor who’s still alive and still very active, Dietrich Klinghardt. He had also thought of these things and integrated some of these systems into his roadmap. And then I just expanded the roadmap. And now I use the Seven Levels of Diagnosis and Treatment TM across all layers and levels. And when a person enters my room, I use western diagnosis and their symptomatology as an entry point into a much wider dialogue and a much wider diagnostic and therapeutic potential roadmap. So that’s how I work nowadays.
Yoshino:
In terms of just like a, I want to say like a global scale, but I guess, you know, some of the pitfalls for allopathic medicine and the way that it’s practiced in a Western context, like what are some of the things that you’ve observed that needs to change within that context? And how do you think that you implement it in your particular practice?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, being a trained western MD, I have the fortunate privilege of being able to look at disease through that lens. And the pitfalls are that the Western diagnosis implies that an organ system gets diseased, then you must find a pharmacology or a therapy or a surgical treatment for that. That is often the case, as we know. Sometimes when you got pneumonia, you want to get intravenous antibiotics, nothing wrong with that. But now we have a whole new paradigm upon us of complex multi-system multi-symptom disease presentations. And that model, that DSM- 10 classification of organ systems and pharmacological interventions is hopelessly inadequate to address those complexities. And it’s quite uncanny really when you start to work with complex patients as to how often western medicine gets it entirely wrong. And it’s only because their tool bag is so limited, it’s this perception that human beings are these mechanistic beings that, a little biochemical particles, that disease just falls out of the sky. And then you got to find a drug to kind of turn down the symptom.
Yoshino:
Do you think that that’s more of a systemic issue or what do you think the actual issue there is?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, we think of human beings as being physical bodies, mechanistic bodies. So, it’s the paradigm, it’s the lens through which human beings are observed. That becomes a limiting factor. And we think diseases just fall out of the sky. There’s no antecedents, mediators, and triggers over the inflammatory disease process that is constellated. And we now know generationally, people exhibit, as you spoken with Mark Wolynn, people can come and present with disease processes that the initial triggers have been three generations before they were even born. And that epigenetic transfer of data is real. It’s studied at all the major universities. So that isn’t taken into account in the mechanistic model and the drug-based model. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, what diagnosis, what symptom cluster, what drug, boom. And in America is even worse because your insurance companies control what goes through the gates. And it’s ridiculous. I mean, it’s silly. It’s not how it works.
Yoshino:
Yeah. I think in America, it’s more capitalized, but that’s just part of the whole system. So pharmacologically, it could be traced from that. And also like the way that the educational system is structured as well.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. It’s a disease-based model, it’s a mechanistic model. And the only therapeutic input that’s of any use is pharmacologically based, and the gateway to that is controlled by the drug industry and the drug lobbyists. It’s very bizarre how it’s all got set up. It’s very peculiar really. Because it’s not real. The human body is the final resting place of every incoming influence. And every top-down influence. The hidden and the obvious. And the body is the final kind of resting place of an individual for all of those influences. And if you don’t start looking at the toxicological logical input of a very diseased planet, the genetics of the individual, which can either detoxify or not that process. And then the influences of the energy body, because we basically, our DNA emits light, which then stands as a standing wave around us, either coherent or incoherently and is highly affected by electromagnetic fields. If you don’t take those things into account, and then the emotional influences we bring up from early childhood, we know from all the literature that children that have been either suffered from abuse trauma, or neglect trauma. Neglect trauma being often more damaging than abuse trauma. They have an infinite amount of increased disease processes later on in life. So, the environmental body, the physical body, the structural body, dentistry, chiropractic, if you don’t take all of those moving parts into play.
Like today, this morning, I saw a woman with a headache, but she had a bite misalignment. She had an overbite, with TMJ issues, had root canals, implants, and had a swollen back of the throat, which we call a Mallampati grade four with sleep apnea. I’m not trained about dentistry as a medical practitioner. I wouldn’t even look in the mouth as a doctor, but its obvious that her dentistry was playing a huge role in her headache presentation. I would just find a drug to treat the headache if I’m using my western practice.
So, the structural piece, then the energetic piece, and then the emotional piece, and then the ego development of the individual. The first half of life, ego structure, which takes us out into the world to become something that drives the first half of life. If we don’t know the internal dialogue of that person, the defenses they develop in order to stay safe, the thoughts that they have, the beliefs that they carry, the value systems, the hierarchy of values that they have. If you sitting in front of a patient and you don’t know their hierarchy of values, you can’t treat them because if their health is a fourth on their value system and running their businesses is the first on their value system, guess what? You have chaos in your low value systems, and you have order, you run your business well, but you’re going to delegate your health to your wife. And you’re not going to show up for all that’s required for you to transform your life. So, if you don’t know the hierarchy of values of people, you can’t really effectively relate to them where they are. Because they will come in and say, they want to feel better. But when you examine their hierarchy of values, it’s fourth on their value list. And unless they raise it, they’re not going to achieve any ends.
Yoshino:
Yeah. I think that’s really important to bring up because, even in that ICI presentation that you were giving, you were talking about how traditional allopathic approaches not taking into account different states of consciousness. And, you know, you could speak obviously more about this than I can, but I’m curious, how would you diagnose someone that doesn’t really take their health into consideration, but is more focused on maybe their business and work and value that as like something that is more important?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Oh, I take a history and I have a questionnaire. One of my set of questions, in my 70-page questionnaire, is determining your hierarchy of values. And I ask the question; how do you spend your time, your money, your attention, what you talk about, what you’re surrounded by? And if somebody says, well, I get up at six in the morning, I go to work. I talk business all day. I come home along the cell phone, I’m doing business deals and I’m surrounded by financial books and I watch business TV. It’s pretty obvious where their hierarchy of values is. Well, you got to “rob Peter to pay Paul”. If you want to get your hypertension under control, and your diabetes under control, how much time are you going to devote to exercise, diet, meditation, sleep, et cetera? And they go, I’ll do my best. I’ll do my best, usually means not much.
Unless you’re inspired to have health as a high value, you have to be motivated from the outside, not inspired from the inside. Motivation lasts six weeks and then you give up, you can’t sustain somebody else’s value system to motivate you if it’s not inside of you.
Yoshino:
Yeah. It’s kind of like that traditional saying, you can lead the horse to water, but ask to take a sip. Maybe sometimes a much bigger sip. So going back to non-duality and speaking of…
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Hey, can I just say something? Sorry Yoshino, can I just say something quick just before we leave that subject. Mahatma Gandhi said that the problem with Western medicine is it works. You know, he said that. If you’ve got heartburn, you take a PPI, you take Pepcid, it goes away, nothing to do with what you ate before, how much you drank, blah, blah, blah. So people just take a whole bunch of suppressing drugs and they get on with their life, which is fine. But if you want, if you value health and wellbeing, you want to do a lot to get where you want to be. There’s this whole new group of younger people who are called bio-hackers, who make it their life’s work to study all that it takes to sustain a healthy cell membrane and a healthy internal milieu of the mitochondria. And a brain functioning and sexuality and libido, and they just devote the whole life to enhancing that. And that’s a full-time job. So, there’s is a gradation of what you can expect from a patient from just take a few supplements, to really devote your life, to turning your life around from a health perspective.
Yoshino:
But going back to the non-duality approach, how do you at the Hoffman Centre integrate that into the practice of educating people that are your patients, and then also integrating those more nuanced approaches with allopathic approaches and Western medicine?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, the non-duality concept can’t be taught as you know, it’s either happens or it doesn’t happen. You either wake up to non-duality or you don’t. And it’s one of those strange events that other people experience or don’t experience. That’s when you start to see reality from behind, you see it with what they call One Mind. There’s no dual mind, there’s no you and me. We are just part of the same consciousness. Everything is consciousness, and that can’t be taught. Many gurus have set for decades on their stools, talking about the fact that the very thing you seek is preventing you from finding it. So, the very seeking prevents it, it just happens. But that’s a non-dual, that’s Level Seven in my model. But then there’s the other levels which I integrate in my model of assisting people achieve maximum potential within the realms of the dual life. The non-dual part is it can’t be imparted. It happens or not.
Yoshino:
Can you break down your seven-step method, essentially? I’m curious what exactly is in each part of the system.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So, the Ayurvedic or Vedantic breakdown of human reality is we arise from Brahman. The one mind, the unified field, which we call spirit. You won’t be able to see this and I’m not going to attempt, but I sort of broken it down like this. Spirit, soul, intellect, emotion, electromagnetic, physical, extended (bodies). And on each of those stages, each of those layers of an individual’s reality, there’s definitely experiences, anatomical, designations, sciences related, diagnostics and therapeutics. So that’s the system I use. If you look at my website, I believe there’s a chart there, or that ISEAI lecture. That’s a system I practically use in order to assist people and get better. But they all enter through the physical, they come with a diagnosis and their symptomatology. And then I look at all the environmental influences, the biochemical imbalances, the genetics, the structure, the brain, I do, I have a brain treatment center. So, we’re always looking at brain function. And the electromagnetic, heart rate variability, et cetera. And I take a history of early developmental trauma. And then I look at ego structures and defenses and if need be, I send them for psychometric assessments. And then for the soul piece, for the family soul, I use a genogram and do Mark Wolynn’ s work or Bert Hellinger’s work, family constellation work. And for the individual soul, do dreamwork and Jungian type approaches.
So at each layer, there’s different ways of perceiving and experiencing human reality. And so, in a two-hour consult, you’re doing your best to sort of take as much in as you can to get to know that person and where the major blocks are. So even if they come in with Lyme disease, sometimes it’s a question of inherited family trauma, that’s really running the show. Or sometimes it’s due to a traumatic brain injury and they need brainwork. Sometimes it’s all layers, all levels. So having done this for a long time I sort of getting get better and better making the diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations.
Yoshino:
Can you talk a bit about your success stories with this process? I like to understand that a bit.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Well, all cases in the end sort of blur into one. But you know, there’s endless amount of patients that present with, say a diagnosis of Lyme disease or mast cell activation syndrome, who believe that that’s the only reason why they are sick. But when they start to explore all the other potential diagnostic possibilities, they all of a sudden realize that that was truly a teleological entry point into a much larger dialogue with themselves. And then they start to explore the whole of their lives and they start to make the necessary adjustments. I’ve got case histories in my upcoming book. I can’t pull one right now because this sort of endless variety of different presentations that I see on a daily basis. I mean, it’s just one little thing today. I saw somebody just very recently who was in her thirties, failed marriage, young child, no direction in life, presents with depression.
Her diagnosis is depression, on antidepressants. And could I help her with her depression and poor self-esteem. Upon further inquiry I found out that she’s moving back home with her parents at the age of 38. And she was very ashamed by all of that. At 38, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m going back home. What a tragedy. And the man she just divorced, was castigating her for being hopeless, no good, et cetera, et cetera. But when you take a deep inquiry, you see that this soul has had interrupted bonds with her mother at a young age. Mother was separated from her for six weeks. She had a very poor diet. When she went to her mother in teens with developing puberty, her mother was offline, and didn’t see her. She never felt seen. And then she had the series of events, sexual abuse, medication and drug abuse, and then never really found her calling.
So, subsequently turns out that going home to mother and father at age 38 was an opportunity to actually reconnect and heal the interrupted bonds that she’d never been seen in heard for in the first half of her life. So instead of being castigated and feeling so ashamed, she now sees this as an opportunity to reconnect with her mother and father in a truly humble way where the parents, carry the greater weight, and she’s the child. And she can go back and start to integrate her life with her mother’s life and her grandmother’s life, both of whom were artists. She was a makeup artist, but always thought that her makeup career had nothing to do with art. But when it was reframed that she was disconnected from the feminine lineage and her makeup artistry was a continuation of that lineage, she all of a sudden blossomed into the realization that she was part of that maternal lineage and she need not be ashamed of it.
And even though she’d put the makeup artistry aside because of her child and she has to take care of the child because the hours were wrong, she realized she could always pick it up again, and she could step into that female lineage. And she did have a calling. She thought she didn’t, all of a sudden, she knew her whole calling was still on that feminine lineage. Her mother had had a transformation and had said to her; “darling, I realize I didn’t see you when you were younger. I apologize for that”. And all of a sudden, she had this entry into this greater feminine lineage that she could not use so she can pass on to her daughter. So, the daughter doesn’t feel as strained and shameful, et cetera, et cetera. So, yes, she’s depressed. She’s depressed because he’s in an existential crisis of not knowing. She was floundering in life, but she had all this opportunity that’s presenting itself. If she just turned the switches and started to see how it was all part of a grand design that was going to help her realign with her life calling. So, it just gets reframed in a new context and all of a sudden, the life force opens back up.
Yoshino:
Yeah. So, can you speak about the neurological significance of reframing, perceived negative events in one’s life and then transforming them into something positive in one’s mind?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, the way I was introduced to, it’s a combination of neuro-linguistic programming and Jungian psychotherapy done cognitively, strangely enough, was through the work of a person by the name of John Demartini. And being exposed to his work, I was able to see how the perceptions that we take into life are often not real. And he uses this teaching tool. He says, look, basically in the quantum world it’s all light. Light gets broken down or dumbed down into matter. Matter is both equal positron and electrons, it’s got both sides. Our lower mind, which always seeks pleasure. One side is always excluding the other side. We always looking for dopamine and trying to avoid pain. And he says, the lower mind can see both sides simultaneously, but you can train your mind to see the integration of both sides to any event, if you just train it. It’s a cognitive restructuring of your mental processes. So, I learned how to do that. I learnt his methodology of how to re-perceive reality through non-dual, if you will, both sides, eyes. So, any event in the future, which looks disastrous, you start asking yourself, where is the upside to this so-called disastrous event? Anything you judge very negatively, like if you judge somebody with very negative trait, you’ll find out where you have the trait, how that trait serves, how that person’s negative trait is benefiting you. It’s not just something that should be a thorn in your side. And how, when you being challenged by a so-called person, who’s is sort of challenging you, where are you being supported? The universe is constantly in this flux of support and challenge, positrons and electrons, which is the basic nature of the quantum reality.
If you can train your higher mind to collapse the world into its opposites, as quickly as possible, you can stay poised in what John calls love. And love to him is just a synthesis of all opposites, where you see both sides simultaneously. And there’s no judgment or no lowering yourself into black and white unipolar perception. So, I try and assist patients like “you going home to mom, this is the most terrible thing at 38, but what is the soul wanting of you? “What is being asked of you? And once I took a history after, she came in saying that this is a horrible thing. She felt so ashamed. She left, she couldn’t wait to go home to see her mother to reconnect because it was reframed. She just saw how it had served her soul’s experience. It was necessary to go home, to receive the love of the mother in a new light, because she had had interrupted bonds all her life with mother. Her mother was ready. She had to be ready. She had to shift the perception from negative, to not positive, but just as opposite. As soon as reframed, boom, I’m going home. Thank God.
Yoshino:
No. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s a beautiful story, but I think, especially in the metaphorical sense, you know, when you think of a situation such as a purgatory situation, you can even think about it in certain ways, in a biblical context or in many different stories of purgatory. But we sometimes put ourselves in that purgatory by not seeing the positive association that could be taken out of that negative or what we perceive, quote, unquote, “as that negative lesson of the past”. And if there was something negative that happened the past, if I could say, Oh, that actually helped build my character for who I am today. And then constantly frame it in that context, you can find those lessons. But all those lessons are always there screaming at you to essentially, show themselves in a way that can benefit you. This is at least from my observations.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. I have the firm belief that every experience that you have, whether it’s positive or negative is serving the projection, the evolution of your life experience. You sort of born over here; you die over there. The acorn does become the oak tree. The acorn needs the wind, the sun, the stresses and support of the environment to become who it’s meant to be. And, I’ve no doubt in my existence, your voids, the things you find most missing, the things you judge the most negatively actually become your highest values. In the end, you look back and I have the unfortunate and fortunate privilege of being in my second half of life. So, when you’re more soul based than ego-based not that you, without ego, not saying that, but you’re more trying to integrate the parts of you that you left behind in your pursuit and the drives of the first half of life when you’re driven. Adler drives, Freud’s drives, that you’re driven to become something in the first half of life.
And then in the second half of life, you try and pick up the pieces of the parts you left behind. And you try and reintegrate your authentic, innate self. And, in that process, you realize everything that ever happened to you was in service of your soul. There was never a mistake. You never were out of purpose for your soul’s trajectory. Nothing ever occurred to you that wasn’t in service of yourself. You have no regrets. And there’s nothing to forgive because everything was in service. Forgiveness is a ridiculous concept because it’s implying that, that one was given to you was wrong. And now you must forgive them. No, everything’s in service. Thank you for giving me that experience. Forgiveness implies I’m bigger than you. What you did to me, you were wrong, I’m right. And now I’m going to forgive you. How dare you, you know. Say, yes, thank you for giving me that experience. It’s always in service of our soul.
Yoshino:
So, speaking specifically about that forgiveness and you speak so passionately about it, but you know, if someone is suffering from some sort of shame or guilt, what sort of questions would you prompt to them to be able to have them question that shame and guilt and where that comes from. I’m curious about that.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So, guilt is the perception, that in the past you’ve done something that’s caused others more pain than pleasure. So, the only question you need to ask is where do you think that experience that you gave that individual, where did it serve them? How did they perhaps benefit from that experience? Could you please look in the seven areas of their life? We have spiritual, which is our calling. We have relationships, social friends, we have health and beauty. We have careers, we have making money. And we have intellectual, mental development. If you feel guilty by some act you’ve done, it’s incumbent upon you to ask; where do you think that person benefited in those areas of their life that served their evolution? Keeping in mind that everything serves, everything is in evolution of the soul’s progression. So where might it have served them? Not where did it damage them? We know that there’s both sides. Yes, it was maybe painful to them, but how did it serve their evolution in the end? And if you ask those questions, which of the seven areas did they benefit, you could find? Some people because of pain, you’ve caused them, branch out and start to develop. They read, they go to courses, they connect with their family because they sort of destitute and in pain that they have to reach out to whoever they can. So, they start forming relationships back with strange family members. They form new friendships. They go online, they go to self-help, they go to retreats. They build careers around the adversity that you caused them. So, at the end of the day, you’ve got to ask the right questions of individuals.
Nobody suffers without gaining. If it doesn’t exist, the universe is not one sided. It doesn’t work that way. Which brings into question the whole victim mentality of “I’m a victim”. No, I’m not, this can provoke a whole outlandish backlash that victims will be up in arms but if you look through the lens of moral and ethics, yes, there’s victims and perpetrators. I’m not questioning that. But if you look through the eyes of the soul, there’s a balance there that’s evolutionary. And, if you look through the right lens, you can see an evolutionary projection. It’s just how I tend to see the world.
Yoshino:
No, that’s great. And I think that it’s interesting because of your background in more traditional western forms of medicine. And also, how you combined the western perspectives and also these eastern perspectives. Or what would be deemed as western and eastern. And, you’re able to eloquently, within practice, like what you do at the Hoffman Centre within practice, to be able to mold these things. And even on your bio, you said writing and poetry, which led you to the medical arts. I think that’s very important because that is what you do. Cause you’re essentially utilizing all of your experiences, your own personal pursuits, such as your pursuit of literature and poetry. And letting that inform you in a way to ask the right questions of your patients. But at the same time to ask the right questions of yourself.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It’s so important Yoshino that you know to stay in an inquiring mode, a student mode. And once you have the privilege of having lived longer is you start to see patterns and trends. You’ll see an individual present with anxiety and OCD and anorexia and so forth and so on, and like a young woman in her thirties. And then you’ll see this archetypal trend that exists that she’s addicted to perfection. And she’s following the value system of a patriarchy, which is inculcated. And she’s introjected somebody else’s value system, like an overbearing father and wants it to achieve. And you see these archetypal trends emerging in your practice. And that’s based on reading, is based on literature, is based on knowing. In the ancient Greek temples, once you’ve gone through, this is in my lecture, the outer healing and the inner healing, you are then sent out into the theater where you watch Greek tragedies, which were archetypal or depictions of life. And you see these trends occurring. You see these people in certain stages. If you don’t know the stage of life the person’s in. Your first half of life patients, very different from second half of life patients. They’re not the same. They’re different flavor, different. You approach them differently. You got to be sensitive to the stage of life. And if I wouldn’t have known that. If I hadn’t been exposed to all these different paradigms of insights.
Yoshino:
Uh, I’m curious. You were speaking of liking essentially, or interested in Jungian philosophy, but also have you read a lot of Joseph Campbell? I’m sure you have.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Well, when I first got interested in Jungian work, Joseph Campbell was very popular. He had that PBS series, I think, in the 90’s…
Yoshino:
Power of Myth. Is that right?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
I don’t know how old you are, Yoshino. Hahaha
Speaker 5:
No, I’m 34.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You probably were. But, Joseph Campbell did the Power of Myth. It was everywhere on PBS. And we watched that series. I’ve got all the videos. We have all the VHS videos of that. I still have that.
Yoshino:
I know I’ve seen them.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
I still got them in my library right there. And I read his books and yes, very moved, very beautiful. He was a big influence.
Yoshino:
No, I was just curious, because you were talking about seeing certain patterns and archetypes.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You do see them; you see them over and over again. It’s quite uncanny when you tune to those archetypes. And, you can see when a person is presenting with symptomatology, when it’s got nothing to do with the western diagnosis. When it’s actually a calling from the soul to wake up to a deeper transformation, that’s being asked of them. And you just get used to knowing how to have that dialogue with people and when to watch out for signs and symptoms. And know that, oh, the Lyme disease is not Lyme disease. It’s the fact that they are misaligned with, they haven’t integrated an aspect of themselves, which is calling to be integrated. They’re still living out the first half of life, dictates, which need to be given up at some stage. You can’t, a 70 year old man in a Ferrari, that’s diagnostic. It’s just is.
Yoshino:
Yeah. I mean, I’m sure you can see many examples of that from either people that are also in your working profession or there’s so many examples of that. And, just someone having a Ferrari at any point of life, you just have to ask, like, what is the reason for that? You know, and also you can only drive one car at a time. They can’t drive two at a time, at least not from what I understand.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah, there’s all those clues, the history taking is filled with clues. And you just got to be sensitive to them and hopefully tuned in as much as you’re able to. And so that requires a whole new curriculum for the healers of the future. It has to be rewritten. The curriculum must be rewritten. Not to say that MDs must become healers. I disagree. Doctors should stay doctors. Stay with all that. Stay with a mechanized symptom-organ system- method medicine. Be very good at it, be the best at it. And leave them alone. Don’t ask them to become healers. Let’s have a new curriculum for healers. People are called into a different way of interrelating with their patients. And let’s have that curriculum outlined. And let’s co-exist with each other in equal exchange, which doesn’t happen. Doctors have this peculiar arrogance that what they’re not up on, they down on. And so, anything that doesn’t fit into that model, they tend to dismiss, which is unfortunate.
Yoshino:
Makes sense. I mean, it’s essentially breaking up the paradigm that if you believed in this certain way of life being educated by the system. And it creates a certain type of way that you think about the world and your perception of your space in it, essentially.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Absolutely.
Yoshino:
I have one more question for you because I don’t want to take too much of your time and I appreciate you for taking the time to be on the podcast, but what sort of advice do you have for artists and creatives?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Wow. I spoke to you before we got on, that my great love is art. Now in the last 10 years, I rediscovered this huge passion, interests, and I was deeply moved by art and still to this day. Before I answer the question, I was estranged, I was South African living in Canada, and I felt deeply homesick. But as soon as I started to buy South African art with its imagery and symbology, I could bring it over and have it in Canada, I settled down, I had living symbols of my African heritage with me, and there was no such need to go back home. So, I mean, artists generally are tuned in, at a deeper dimension and they bring forth symbolic messages and are able to translate archetypal stories, like poets. When they tuned in and the higher their skill, both intuitive and skill, the deeper the symbolism, the deeper the impact on that, because we all resonate at some level with archetypal symbolism. It hits us like a break when it’s true. And it speaks to us.
So advice, I’m in awe of artists. I mean, those surrealists’ artists like Leonora Carrington. Oh, my goodness. I mean, what were they bringing forth? And what’s really going on. I’m fascinated. I believe some of their outer lives are maybe quite chaotic, but they sort of balanced it with this inner rock of their own unconscious that just pours through them. So, I think it’s an equal balance between outer neuroses, if you will. Then in a solidity and what a beautiful exchange, what a beautiful gift to humanity.
Yoshino:
Well, I mean that’s a sound observation. It sounds like you have a very deep love for and appreciation for the arts and what the arts can provide for humanity.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Yeah. Poetry. I mean, Mary Oliver, The Wild Geese. Oh man. When it speaks, it speaks and you just fall over into ecstasy. It’s so archetypally resonant. It’s just makes life meaningful. Provides meaning. It’s a beauty. Beauty and meaning.
Yoshino:
I agree. I agree.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Have you ever seen that movie? The Great Beauty?
Yoshino:
I haven’t, no. When did that come out?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Oh, it’s by that French (incorrect- Italian) director, Paolo Sorrentino. It’s about a man who gets to be in the 60s and nothing inspires him anymore. And so this whole movie is about him visiting sights and sounds. And is in Rome, all this opulence and decadence and nothing excites him. And he’s just like desperate. Until he realizes that at some stage he was moved by a great beauty. It happened to be in the form of a woman he loved. But all of a sudden, he just wakes up to some things that he’s left far behind. And he wakes up into another phase of his life, realizing how many years he’d lived in this outer world without connecting to his true inspiration. It’s a beautiful movie. Wow.
Yoshino:
You know, what that reminds me of, have you seen Citizen Kane recently?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You know, I saw it once and I read it. I’d read how perfect a movie it was. And when I watched it, I thought, what are they talking about? But after 10 minutes, I watched each frame and I immediately got the majesty and the marvelous sort of symmetry and exactness of the whole development of that movie. And I’ve got why it’s one of the greatest movies of all time. I just could see it just so obvious actually, you know, Jungian.
Yoshino:
Definitely. Well, I just bring that movie up because what you’re talking about specifically at the end of the film. I don’t think I need to say like spoiler alert because this film came out in, I think 1945 or 43, but at the end of the film he just keeps on saying rosebud. And then you find out what that symbolized to him. And so, I think, he does all these things throughout his life to attain power, to attain wealth, but then this was it, I believe it’s a sled when he was a child carried so much meaning and symbolism to him. And it’s just interesting how there’s that consciousness shift. So it just kind of sounded similar to the film that you were telling me about.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Well, now I’m going to watch both movies back-to-back and then keep that in mind to see the connections. Well, we live our lives through symbols and meaning in the end, the outer world is just a playground for meaning and symbol.
Yoshino:
It’s interesting. Just to leave you with this, but yeah. I’ve been meaning to crack open Jung the Book of Symbols. Is that what it’s called? I have it downstairs and I need to spend some time, cracking that open. But anyways, thanks so much for doing this and taking the time. I appreciate you for doing this.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman
Yeah, absolutely lovely. I’m going to look at your podcast and see what else you’ve done. That it is inspired me through your connection to the artists and artistry.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. You might like some of the artists, you know? All right, Bruce. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Thanks for the talk. I appreciate the talk. Thank you.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.
I’m the last speaker of the conference, and I’m going to try and tie up some of the concepts we’ve learned into a comprehensive diagnostic and treatment protocol specific to the theme of the conference One People, One Planet, One Health. I want to provide some idea of how I approach patients with complex issues and attempt to make sense, if you will, of some of the complexities and some of the multiple incoming bits of data and information that we often are asked to sort through.
So, this is a very common scenario. The patient presents at your office having seen many people, having tried many things, having researched, having been on the internet, and is up-to-date with all the latest treatments and then asks a few things that you may or may not be familiar with. You are left wanting to know or thinking, how do I approach this patient, and what systems of inquiry do I use, what diagnostic protocols can I think of? How do you proceed to make sense of this? It’s very challenging.
Where do we begin? The amount of misinformation out there is huge, patient advocacy is welcomed, but often misdirected. There’s often lots of single point causation. People think it’s Lyme or mold or mast cell activation syndrome. It’s often all those things and much more. It’s very difficult to penetrate and get into a patient’s system of inquiry without sometimes ruffling feathers or offending people’s points of view. It is sometimes a minefield, not always but sometimes. Sometimes it’s very pleasurable and it fills you with hope and it sort of makes you realign with why you started to do this work in the first place. Other times, it’s very challenging. The question that arises often is – is the functional medicine integrated model adequate, does it leave things out? What else can be considered? What other considerations can we bring into account when we’re dealing with complex patients? And I hope to go over some of those today by presenting this data.
By way of background, I was talking to Werner Vosloo, a member of the ISEAI board one day about complex patients and had approached him and he said, well didn’t you just present it and show us what you do. So that is the basis of this presentation. Just a little bit by way of background because it would make sense at the end, why I chose to introduce some biographical information about how I arrived at this system.
I had a rather complex childhood, but I was fortunate when as a teenager. I was sent to boarding school and had this high school teacher by the name of Roger. He introduced me to many things, including the philosophical system of Vedanta and a particular subset of Vedanta called Advaita. The relevance of this will be made clear a bit later. He also introduced me to the writings and work of Carl Jung, whose book, Memory, Dreams, and Reflections was a seminal piece of work in my early exposure to philosophical systems.
Carl Jung was the first person to draw out the cartography of the psyche as told through his autobiographical narrative, which is a very fascinating read. He was also the first person to really say that the psyche, the inner world of people, has an objective reality. Although it’s subtle and unseen, there are aspects to it that can be used and taken to be somewhat fixed and relied upon as a roadmap when you’re working with people’s unconscious material. He also said, along with many others, that the desire to be whole, or what he called” individuated”, or to be integrated, to be healed if you will, to know yourself. In the East, they call it enlightened, Maslow called it self-actualized. He said that this was an evolutionary urge. Everybody desires to be the best they can be in the most integrated way.
This is evolutionary. So patients, although they may present with sickness and disease, there may be another directive that they are asking. The question is, as medical practitioners, is this our responsibility? Where do we enter into these complex systems and what are our responsibilities? I’ll address these a bit later. So, he (Jung) said that the urge to be whole, to be healed is evolutionary. Advaita, within this Hindu system or the Vedantic system, is often translated as non-duality. A more apt translation is non-secondness, meaning that there is no other reality other than what they call Brahman in Hindu terms. That the reality as we see it through the five senses is not ultimately, at its deepest core, constituted by bits and pieces, by parts. That is, everything that’s always changing in the universe, all these changing things have no existence of their own, but they are all appearances of what they call The One, Brahman, the Unmanifest Field. This is not that different from what the great quantum theorists of the last 150 years have said. They’ve all said that behind this vast appearance of matter, is this unified field of information and intelligence, which they call a quantum field or light if you will, which is infinite, eternal, and never changes. It’s not subject to space-time and present moment awareness.
Advaita says that there is nothing to be made whole, as Jung said, because you already are whole, you just don’t know it. You don’t just wake up to that reality. It’s a philosophical concept which we’ll address and come back to. Now, ironically, the title of this conference is One People, One Planet, One Health, the very essence of Advaita. One mind, one manifestation, everything is connected with everything else.
Another bit of biographical data, which I introduce in order to elaborate on why I use the system. When I was younger, I had two major experiences of what they call satori in Zen Buddhism or Christ consciousness in Christianity, Fana in Sufism, Samadhi in yoga whereby you directly experience this reality. When you directly experience this oneness, it’s a very peculiar experience. It’s not psychotic. You are very much in your body, but you really do see this unified field that underlies all matter. You really do see that past, present, and future are continuous. You really have no fear because you understand yourself to not be your ego squeezed into the confines of a body through space-time. You just experience this expanded state of awareness. Literally, everything does appear to glow with a certain light. Quantum theorists will tell us that matter is nothing other than light squeezed down into matter. That’s the basis of quantum theory.
So when you have these awakenings and these experiences, which many people have had through near-death experiences and precognitive dreams and synchronicities etc., you definitely do experience that oneness that underlies all appearances of matter. It really is a different state of consciousness, but it actually, you resonate with it and believe it and know it to be true.
After high school, I found myself in medical school and became a family physician in Saskatchewan,Canada and then started to be curious as to what other methods of healing and methods of inquiry could help patients when they presented to the office with symptoms.
I was then exposed to a video by Larry Dossey, who you all may know, and he incorporated aspects of Eastern and Western medicine into his approach. This approach evoked in me a memory of my childhood exposures to Eastern thought, and then launched a massive search for whatever it was that could assist patients to live at their maximum potential, not just treat symptoms, but to live more fully. So, using my allopathic training as a basis, I then, like many of you, became curious and started to study beyond that allopathic model. I studied TCM and acupuncture. I spent years with Deepak Chopra and David Simon studying Ayurvedic medicine. Went to India and did an Ayurvedic internship in Poona. Did IFM training and A4M training, spent years with and still do, listen and study with some of the great leaders in biological medicine, Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, many others in the field. I’ve studied with Lawrence Afrin and Shoemaker like many of you, Dr Horowitz in the Lyme world, William Walsh in the mental health field.
But I was ultimately provoked into thinking about integral theories by the works of Ken Wilber and his so-called integral theory of everything. He combines all these areas of thought, and philosophical systems into one unified system. It’s theoretical, but not practical. So, what I did was make practical these theoretical systems. This is the seven-level model that I’m proposing today.
The title of the conference is One Health. One Health is a big movement of trying to integrate different aspects of our reality, including animal health, human health, and environmental health. Even though Advaita and the One Health concept have different epistemological origins, one is more of a different state of consciousness whereas the other is more linear in space/time. They both embrace an attempt to unify different aspects of separateness.
This unification of systems is not new. We know from antiquity that many of the old traditional systems of medicine, which were not alternative, they were the traditional systems, were very integrative. They weren’t like traditional medicine as we know it now. Allopathic medicine is the new kid on the block. More integrative systems have always been there. We know from the ancient temples of Asclepius, which were scattered around Greece and Turkey, that people would travel very long distances to go to these temples. They would spend time in the outer sanctums getting all the purification rituals. These are the outer therapies. They also had to travel long distances. It has been shown that if people go through some sort of hardship to get to a healing center, there’s a much greater prognosis. This has been replicated with studies with cancer patients showing the further they travel, the better the outcomes.
So, people had to give up something to get something. They had to have intent. They have to mobilize themselves. This is something we know. When we’ve tried treating patients, if there’s no true intent, if they don’t mobilize the inner resources to get what they need and want, if they stay passive, it’s very difficult to treat people. We call that “projection of will” or “high resistance”, if you will, in psychological terms, but when patients present in that mode and you start working harder than the patient, you all know this, it becomes very difficult to help them. And so, the practitioners at ancient temples knew this, that people would travel long distances to come to these temples. They would go to the outer sanctums where they are getting the outer treatments, much like today, where you get your pills and potions. They go through purification, rites, and rituals, which is similar to the nutrition and detoxification protocols of more integrative practices today.
Then they would be shifted or moved into the inner sanctum where the abaton was, where the dream sanctuary was, where they were required to have some inner experience, some inner signal from the unconscious that they were on a healing sort of path. After that was over, they would go outside the inner sanctum and move into the theaters or amphitheatres where great Greek tragedies and plays were enacted. These were to show people that these dramas of health, healing, and transformation were archetypal. Players would re-enact the great human dramas of evolution in life and show people the archetypal description of how life unfolds. So, these traditional integral systems have always been around.
Larry Dossey, through his book Reinventing Medicine showed that modern medicine has started to embrace more integral concepts, as we all know.
He called Era One medicine, physical medicine – existing from 1850 to the present day. Actually, through Paracelsus, we know that the application of outer remedies has been around somewhat for 500 years or so. But our true allopathic paradigm exists from about 1850 to now. Then Era 2 medicine, when mind/body medicine systems were integrated. Then Era 3, what he calls “non-local” medicine where spiritual practices and spiritual insights were added to the paradigm and somewhat integrated into therapies that exist to this day.
At a recent Lyme conference, an ILADS conference, there was a presenter who showed that there are many research systems now trying to integrate a lot of these different, disparate aspects of reality into a sort of a research mode or research vehicle so they can try and look at different systems as to how they interrelate and what the additive effect of different systems are. So, there’s lots of research going on in integration.
But, all of you know, when we approach patients with our old allopathic mindset or what we call Era 1 Medicine, well, the reason you are at the ISEAI conference is that we know that the system has its limits, but it also has its great virtues. These are just some of the reasons why we’ve moved beyond that model alone. We know about all the research articles that have shed some doubt on some of the previous findings and how editors of journals are highly compromised and how research often hides the negative data and promotes the positive data. We also know that you can’t really treat patients just through physical interventions. We can’t treat people as machines. We do. Sometimes very effectively. But when you’re treating complex patients, you can’t separate consciousness, environment, culture, emotions, and the sort of inner core workings of the patient as they relate to their society and their culture and the world at large. You just can’t isolate it.
Then the allopathic model, as we all know, limits treatment to drugs and surgery. We’ve got to expand our model. Majid Ali coined the phrase N squared, D squared medicine. Meaning name of disease, name of drug. This is what we spend a lot of time doing in allopathic medicine. The other aspect that is interesting is that when you name a disease it often limits the involvement of the patient. It often tends to shut down further inquiry and that in itself can be problematic. When a patient has lupus, for instance, it just brings together a whole mental minefield. “Oh, I have lupus, what now?” It shuts down further inquiry into the antecedents, mediators, and triggers in the functional medicine world. It also isolates the inner reality of the patient from the outer disease. The inner healer, the inner intent sometimes just goes down, goes quiet. They simply focus on the diagnosis. I have lupus now let’s deal with lupus.” I think this is a great tragedy, which I will explain a bit later.
Why? It separates cause and effect. Patients present with say Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and yes, they identify some triggers and they go on all the mast cell blockers, but it doesn’t really take into account building biology and EMFs and other things that may be playing a role.
Then one of the great tragedies and often experienced with that is when the disease or symptom cluster can’t be named, it is dismissed as all in your head. This is a great tragedy. More and more practitioners are being made aware of this great tragedy. When allopathy runs out of diagnostic options, very often these simplistic interpretations get placed on the patient. Instead of the provider saying I don’t know, what other methods of inquiry should we open up? Who should we refer to in order to get more insight into this case? As we all know, allopathy has a tendency to be quite arrogant in terms of its understanding of mechanistic disease. If it can’t be explained through Newtonian mechanisms, it often is said to not exist, and we all know this not to always be true.
I was listening to a talk by Dr. Klinghardt and he brought forward this insight, which I thought was fabulous. He said when he was exposed to his early medical training, he was primarily exposed to the regulatory forces in health and healing. His teachers told him that there were three classes of medicine: regulation, substitution, or suppressive. Suppressive, or what we know as antibiotics, et cetera. Substitution is when something is deficient, you give something to replace it. Regulation is the idea that the body is a self-regulating system. You just have to find ways to assist the patient in self-regulation or to optimize function. We know that the mind, through intent, has a tremendous capacity to self-regulate as well. So, I thought this was worthwhile introducing.
The other thing about our model is that it ignores different stages and states of consciousness. It just treats mechanistic, Newtonian models of space and time. The body as a machine that’s broken down and needs fixing. This doesn’t really take into account the different stages of people’s lives and different states and stages of consciousness, and what can be called diseases of the soul.
That’s a broad concept, but sometimes the patient needs another input other than what we have in our arsenal. Like Prozac or Abilify or something like that, then they have a true crisis of the soul, a spiritual crisis if you will. An integral physician, a person who practices a more complete model, becomes aware of these dimensions of being in consciousness. They will be able to determine through their own internal sort of system of knowing, which one it is and whether to prescribe Prozac or meditation or send them to a spiritual crisis therapist, et cetera.
Another aspect that I find quite challenging is this patient/doctor relationship. You know, we all go to med school, naturopathic school, a chiropractic college, and we accumulate this huge body of knowledge. In the first half of life, when we are accumulating all this knowledge, there is this tendency to occupy what can be called the hero archetype.
It is this all-knowing archetype that we assume that we know more than what the patient knows. The patient is seen as an object, a closed materialistic system, unknowing and sick. It ignores very often when the doctor is in the hero archetype, the part of the patient that is not sick, the healthy aspects of the patient, their value systems, their choices, their intent, and the fact that they have the capacity to demand quite a significant healing response within themselves. When the doctor is the hero archetype, the patient assumes the “sick” role and becomes passive. Often, they sort of learn this passive role in order to survive this one-sided relationship. How often have you heard our patients say, “I tried to tell him, I wanted to ask him questions and I was just shut down and I had five minutes and they walked out the room.”
This is very common. We’ve all experienced it and it’s ubiquitous in our field. But the thing that’s really interesting is that the doctor in the hero archetype remains blind to their own vulnerability and their own cycle of woundedness if you will. So being a doctor as a hero is one archetype.
The doctor as a healer is a very different archetype. The wounded healer, if you will. I don’t really like that word, but it’s just the doctor being vulnerable. They see both sides, the sick and the healthy parts, and they stay related to both within themselves and the patient. They don’t just see organs, hormones, neurotransmitters, and psychopathology. Not just a body of overactive muscles and neurotransmitters. Not a soulless body, but the whole being of the patient. Now the healer archetype is embodied more by who the doctor is than what they know.
And we have to stay humble to that and stay related to those two archetypes. Who are we? What do we know and how do we stay related to the patient? So, there’s just a diagram explaining the difference.
This brings me to the point that the inner world of the physician becomes paramount. How much inner work has the physician done on himself to know what he knows or doesn’t know. How much does the physician actually embody that outer symbol? The caduceus, if you look at the symbol of the caduceus, the caduceus is actually the staff of Hermes, the Greek version of the Egyptian God. He is the God with a man’s body and the head of a bird.
He was worshiped as the creator of the arts and sciences and music and medicine. Greek legend has it that one day Hermes was walking along and saw two snakes that were fighting and he took his staff and he struck it down between the two snakes. They curled themselves around this staff, forever in contention, but held in mutuality of power by the staff. This was written by Robertson Davies. Now the symbol of modern medicine is the staff of Hermes separating these two opposing forces, not letting one outshine the other or align to win the battle and the struggle for supremacy. These two opposing forces are wisdom and knowledge. The caduceus is a reminder that medical practitioners must maintain a balance between the two. Knowledge is what we learn in our toolkit, all that we learned from the outside. We bring many years of training to bear on the diagnosis.
Wisdom is what comes from within. Where the doctor looks not at the disease, but at the bearer of the disease, the person who’s sitting in front of you. That is what creates a link, or unites the healer and the patient. This exercise makes him the true physician, a true healer, or what Robertson Davies called a true child of Hermes. The book is called The Merry Heart – How a doctor can also be a humanist. It’s the wisdom that tells a physician how to relate to the patient and to make them a partner in their own evolution and cure. Both of these sources of wisdom must be accessed, not only by healthcare providers but also by the patient. The patient themselves must apply as much external knowledge as they possibly can if they’re not too ill.
It’s from as many different sources as they can. While also being cognizant of the fact that not all healing is about applying an external remedy, an inner journey is required.
Then another issue about the loss of competence in our model is that it emphasizes this disease-based model. We are asked to treat one small link in a sometimes thoroughly diseased chain of events. We patch people up and send them back into the same environment. The model has very few directives for wellness, let alone directives for living at one’s maximum potential across all spectrums of the body, mind, spirit axis.
This has been known for a long time, 2012, New England Journal of Medicine quote “We must teach aspiring physicians about system science. We should emphasize homeostasis and health, rather than only disease and diagnosis.” We’ve paid lip service to this, but it’s really not organized into any roadmap or system of approach. IFM and functional medicine do a very good job, but is there more?
Then we come to the question, how do we even define health? We understand that human beings are these assemblages of molecules. But we know as humanists that they contain much more and we’ve kind of just reduced them to materialistic bodies. So, what does health mean in a multidimensional being? Interesting question. Can I be healthy if I’m spiritually malnourished?
If a white supremacist’s blood work comes back normal, is he healthy? How many levels should a physician actually treat? Is this even our task? As a physician, we can compartmentalize and treat one area, but as a human being, we face a painful dilemma. We just can’t do that. We know the patient comes in with complexity. The more I become a doctor treating one little piece, the less I become a humanist, aware of all the interconnections. Traditional medicine, as we know, treats the illness. Integrative medicine has more of a patient systems approach but a more complete model includes the physician’s own role in terms of wisdom and knowledge, both internal and external ways of knowing as they relate to this complex human being. The Hippocratic Oath is “First, do no harm”, but remember there are two ways to harm. Errors of commission, but also errors of omission. By what we know, but also by what we don’t know.
So, what do we do practically in the office when we know everything is connected to everything else? What do we do when we know all illness is embedded in larger network systems and chains of pathology? How can we approach people from this perspective?
The first possibility is viewing suffering, physical or emotional, as unwanted. We suppress it and we treat it and we say illnesses have no causation, they just fall out of the sky and we get a diagnostic code and we go and find a remedy. We subscribe to the consensual reality of our culture that just perpetuates this cycle. This is symptom treatment and has nothing to do with healing. You’ve all heard that the original definition of a quack is someone who treats symptoms. This is true. This is from antiquity. So that’s one possibility.
The second possibility is working with patients who began to look at physical symptoms as a larger inquiry. Symptoms, as teleological, more as entry points into something that they need to transform. I have observed this over years of working with patients. Yes, you may present with a diagnosis, but are these symptoms pointing to something deeper in the patient’s complexity that’s asking to be made conscious, is it giving voice to silence in a system? I can quite categorically state in many cases, yes, a cold is sometimes just a cold, nothing further is required. Or pneumonia is pneumonia, but very often symptoms are teleological. They point towards something that needs to be made conscious and worked with.
I remember a patient recently just last week presented with multiple sclerosis (MS). She had a very difficult relationship with her father, her whole life. She was never seen by her father. Her father was a very famous coach in the national sport in Canada. He spent all his time working with his team and was never at home. This patient was extremely, extremely bitter, and angry about this relationship. She felt she was never seen and never fully taken into the father’s confidentialities and mentored and parented by the father as she should have been. This was part of her whole life. This is where it becomes interesting. She presented with MS. So, we asked a little bit more as to when the MS appeared? And she gave me the exact date. Then I asked her, and where was your father at the time? She suddenly just broke down in tears. She said you know what? I developed MS the day after my father was fired from the team.
It was immediately apparent to her that she’d been ignored and neglected her whole life by her father. The day after her father no longer had the obligation to leave home and be out of the home most of the time. He was fired, he was now at home. She showed the symptomatology of MS the day after he was fired. She connected the two. She said, finally, he saw me and started to take care of me. One day, 24 hours. That is a symptom that I think is teleological. I don’t know what else to call it.
Patients who fall under the second possibility often start to ask much deeper questions and use symptoms as allies. They ask themselves questions. We all have these patients, and they are a delight to work with if their reasoning is rational. Sometimes we get people who, as we know, don’t have the capacity to integrate knowledge in a way that is coherently helpful to them. That becomes problematic. But many people are excellent self-advocates and have deep intuitions as to meaning and purposes as to the possible teleology of symptoms. They use a much more conscious approach and they recognize patterns and they approach their healing, not just with physical interventions, but with a much wider array.
Then you get the third possibility, that others seek a state of health motivated by aspiration or something more than just an absence of symptoms, but a positive state of wellbeing. As much as they’ve learned about illness, they now look at what it is to be healthy and well. This includes a sense of inner self-regulation. Competence, self-competence, not hubris or arrogance, but they just know themselves. They have a core self that is self-regulated. They really are called from above. They are inspired. They have a sense of meaning and purpose. They know why they get up every day and they know they have a destiny to fulfill. They are inspired from within. They are also aware of parts of themselves, this part of themselves they don’t want to own, shadow, and how they project that shadow onto others. They also know that the ultimate desire is to know themselves as much as they are capable of.
They stay in their core, without too many emotional fluctuations. They see crises as blessings. They are inspired by a mission and vision bigger than themselves to which they stay aligned. These patients are delightful to work with, as we all can attest.
Alastair Cunningham, in his book, Bringing Spirituality into Your Healing Journey said the qualities of cancer survivors that best predict spontaneous remissions are those who are open to change. Those who have a commitment to daily practices, have a deep sense of themselves, and have achieved a level of autonomy integration and inner authority, as opposed to those who have what has been turned into type C patients. Type C patients, as we know, are less able to summon the strength within themselves. They suppress emotions and tend to have “projection of will,”where their desire to be healed is all placed in your hands. They tend to defer their own needs to the needs of others. They don’t tend to practice a healthy balance of narcissism and altruism. Everything is about the other.
Then is the fourth possibility. Those who seek a level of health that is fundamentally and radically different. These are the people who have what we call an expanded level of consciousness. Self-transformation rather than self-regulation. This viewpoint embraces all the previous perspectives and approaches to health while simultaneously transcending them in the creation of a fundamentally new vision. Here people start to identify themselves with an aspect of themselves that is not only their bodies, their emotions, and their mind. If you think about it for a moment, our bodies change, our emotions come and go, our mental field changes, but to whom are those changes taking place? The answer is you, the deepest sense of who you are.
That is a sort of subjective experience which you can align with. They define themselves by attention to an inner, more spiritual process, rather than something outside of itself. They become attuned and surrendered to something, to an intelligence that’s greater than their own ego. They know that their ego is not the center of the universe. The evidence for ourselves not being at the center of the universe against the backdrop of infinity is rather overwhelming. People who surrender to that awareness know that they are just one small cog in a very large wheel and against the backdrop of infinity. They don’t take themselves too seriously, but they stay aligned to what they are called to do in this incarnation. But they surrender to something bigger than themselves. That’s why the ancient Greek temples often had open roofs. Peoplewere open to something, some intelligence that is more than just themselves. This is very similar to what happens when I had that satori experience, you stay open to something bigger than yourself. What happens is when that comes through, fear completely disappears. It really does. You just have no fear of death, because you really know that we are not our bodies, emotions, or thoughts. You just know that to be true. This is the deepest possibility of a transformed individual, from illness to illumination. Hence the nature of my talk. Very often, when we have these awakenings and satori, they are fleeting. My first one lasted a few hours and the second one lasted a few days. So, you have this awareness and then you come back into your body and space-time, and the duality of being in the emotional body, but you still carry that awareness in you, that there is this possibility beyond your ego-based experience.
All the great wisdom traditions teach that is the true state of who you are. That’s the essence of Advaita. That’s the essence of many of these inner esoteric traditions of spiritual practice.
This can be felt and experienced and be part of your healing journey. So, we move then from the relative purpose of medicine to the ultimate purpose and possibility of healing when we start to incorporate this deeper aspect, this sort of shifting consciousness if you will.
So, a more complete roadmap doesn’t look at treatments but looks at how all these approaches can be applied. The doctor, the patient, the individual, the collective unconscious, the unconscious states, and stages of consciousness, sickness, and wellness. The healer and the patient have that roadmap. They are aware there’ll be multiple risk factors at all layers and all levels. There will be many different diagnostic and therapeutic options at all layers and all levels.
As I mentioned, I use Ken Wilber’s integral medicine model, but it’s not practical. It’s theoretical. Ken Wilber incorporated many paradigms into his system of human inquiry. All the ancient sciences, physics, chemistry systems, theories. It is a system of individual outer and inner reality and collective outer and inner realities. He calls it the Integral Theory of Everything.
One of his statements in the forward to the book, Consciousness and Healing, which I recommend everybody read, says “In the black bag will not be just 20 pills, two scalpels, and an orthopedic hammer, but all layers, all quadrants, all states and all stages of consciousness. The crucial ingredient isn’t all the ingredients, but the holder of the bag. The integrally informed practitioner opened to their entire spectrum of consciousness who can acknowledge what is occurring in all levels internally, as well as externally. Who have an expanded map – from dust to deity, from dirt to divinity, and from agony to ecstasy. Only then the treatment.” I think it’s a wonderful insight into what’s possible. How to practically apply that in insurance-based medicine, in a short appointment, well that is another thing. That’s the logistics of how to practice in this model.
So, is there some way to practice medicine that surrenders not one ounce of the rigorously scientific, empirical, and clinical dimensions that are the cornerstone of any modern scientific system of healthcare, but also make room for other dimensions of being in the world that if ignored, subtract from one’s humanity and effectiveness as a physician? This was the great question that arose in my evolution as a doctor/physician. I was likely to be exposed to many great thinkers and read many books and visit many clinics and ashrams and so forth.
The origination of the model, I’m now going to teach you and show you just briefly. It was based on original Vedantic awareness. When you look at the literature, they talk about these layers and levels of the human experience, and they step them down. They call them Koshas. It’s an Ayurvedic or Vedantic map of the human experience. At the time I was studying Ayurveda, I happened to meet Dr. Klinghardt, who has his Five Levels of Healing. I looked at his five levels and I looked at the Koshas, the bodies that I was learning and studying with Ayurveda, and I created a few more divisions. With Dr. Klinghardt’s permission, I created subdivisions of the five and made them seven. He allowed me to use his map, but I took the level one and made it it’s own. Stage One, or the environment. Then in Stage Four, I separated the mind, the intellect, and created another subsection called emotion. You’ll see why in a moment. I separated them out into seven instead of five.
This model, if you look at it. Stage One. When you are sitting in front of a patient and you’re trying to look at them through a certain lens of how you’re going to appreciate what they’re presenting with, this is the lens I use. I can’t think any other way now. I think of what stage is being asked to be interpreted and covered. Stage One is all about the external body, the environment. Stage Two is all about physical, biochemical, and structural. Stage Three is all about energy, the autonomic nervous system. Stage Four is about emotion. Stage Five is about intellect, ego, and defenses. Stage Six is about the unknown aspects, the hidden aspects of our reality, which is called, for want of a better word, soul. I like the word authentic self as opposed to the persona, and then the family systems that we inherit, and then there’s a sort of archetypal, mythical dimension underneath that too.
Then Stage Seven is this expanded state of consciousness, the so-called unified field, or the Grand Organized Design, (G.O.D.)which is this nature of reality behind our space, time, physical existence. Now Ayurveda recognizes that health is more than just the absence of diseases. They call it a vibrant state in which your mind, your body, and environment are intimately connected and functioning in a healthy, nurturing, and supportive way. It’s a harmonious relationship between all these levels, the mind, the body, and the environment at the highest level of joy. The mind is clear and creative, the body’s healthy, vibrant, and strong, the air is clean and fresh, the food is nourishing and clean and relationships are loving, communicative, and nourishing. Well, this is an idealism. We know that. But it’s an idealism that can be entertained when you’re working through space-time reality.
This is the model we all bring to our rooms when we see patients. At the highest level of healing, none of that matters because at our deepest sense of who we are, we are beyond all of that. That is what you do invoke when you have this awakening into another level, at Stage Seven, if you will. So, at the deepest level of Stage Seven, none of that will matter because that’s not who you are. So that’s the roadmap.
On the screen, I know this is going to make you annoyed because I put everything into this map, but you can’t read it because it is too small. There is no way to make this map readable on a computer screen, but I’m going to break it down. So here are the Seven Stages to Health and Transformation. At the bottom, I’ve acknowledged the contribution of Dr. Klinghardt who has five levels and I’ve incorporated some of his concepts as well. But as I said, I’ve expanded them and added many, many other dimensions. So, I’m going to break them down and you’ll be able to read the breakdowns for each level.
So, here’s a patient in his fifties presenting with marital conflict, alcohol abuse, and depression. You’ve got to think of this patient through the seven-level model.
Stage One – environment. He’s got mercury toxicity, organophosphate exposures, biotoxins, root canal issues, tick bite history, et cetera, et cetera, everything to do with the environment.
Stage Two – looking through the functional medicine lens, everything we know, the genetics, the food sensitivities, the permeability, the Mast Cell, it’s all there and we do our appropriate workup. We find out that he’s in the cell danger response, his mitochondria were low, et cetera, et cetera.
Stage Three – we look at his electromagnetic body if you will. We see that he is exposed to computers all day, he has had head injuries, his NeuroQuant MRI shows certain things like asymmetry from a head injury, he’s got high thalamus and amygdala in his NeuroQuant at 99% percentile. Knowing that this person probably has mast cell activation and the limbic looping through either PTSD or early childhood trauma.
Stage Four – here we have it. Sexually abused as a child, beaten by dad as a child, dad was an alcoholic, brother died when he was 12. His own son died when he was 17. This is a highly traumatized individual. This is a very difficult case to work with because of the complexity and the defenses this person is going to bring to the interaction, especially in terms of trust.
Stage Fivev–one could say he has a narcissistic personality disorder, major depression. He has a personality disorder and a mood disorder.
Stage Six – from the family. There were all sorts of inherited trauma that was brought through.
Stage Seven – he had no connection to anything other than his own suffering.
This patient is complex and difficult to treat. But if we have a roadmap, we can sort of orientate ourselves to each layer and each level and then work accordingly. Give ourselves a year to sort through a lot, if the patient has the ego strength to survive that level of complexity. We have to often modulate our own knowledge of this individual where their weaknesses and strengths lie and then adjust ourselves accordingly.
So, when patients like this walk in, we take the history, we look for the antecedents, mediators, and triggers. We create timelines, we posit a working hypothesis. We do all the tests and we jump into treatment. I’m just going to suggest before we take this approach, before you rush into treat these specific symptoms, clusters, or diagnoses across all layers and levels, step back and ask a couple of questions of ourselves. When we go to look through this much larger lens there are certain things that I think we should bring to the dynamic in the room with the patient.
So here are the things that I sort of need to remind myself of many times a day, and sometimes forget when I’m in the doctor as hero archetype, which is not difficult to do. You get humbled. You’ll often get patients who humble you. You get challenged, and then you drop back into the awareness that yes, we can occupy doctor as hero but we also need to be doctor as patient. We have to be aware of our own hubris and our humility when you are dealing with complex patients. You will be pulled back and forth by so many dynamics that are being thrown at you.
Here are some of the things I think are important. Are you present, related, listening, resonant, embodied, and attuned? This is Porges social engagement theory. Does your face reflect that you are listening to that patient? Is there trust established? Are these patients being seen by you? Were they ever seen by anybody? The patient I mentioned before, was never seen by his father, his brother died, he got lost. His mother was so traumatized. Then his own son died. Can you imagine the level of trust he has in outer parental or in external authority figures? Not much. You’ve got to be aware of the projection of these unresolved early developmental issues of patients.
The patient, as I mentioned, had so many unresolved complexes that he projected onto the exchange it was very difficult to negotiate in some of these complexities. How many layers and how many levels are needing your attention? Are symptoms Teleological? Do they point to something in the system as I mentioned before?
Then what stage of life are they in? The first half or second half? This is a very important question that comes up a lot. If you look at the trajectory of life, the first half of life is very different from the second half of life. In the first half of life, you’ve got this developmental brain, you’ve got the so-called triune brain, the reptilian brain which is fight/flight, you’ve got the limbic brain which is emotional and then you’ve got the mammalian brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is the inhibitory brain.
If you look at the trajectory of patients, attachments, and needs in the first 10 years the child needs to be seen by the mother in particular, not so much the father although the father does play a role. The child attunes to the gaze of the mother. The mother’s right prefrontal cortex tunes and attunes with the child’s right prefrontal cortex, and a sense of attachment and safety is created. Sebern Fisher showed in her fabulous book about neurofeedback development that if the mother and the child attune in the first 10 years of life, and there are no breaks in the bond, that creates, in the child, right prefrontal cortex maturity, and they develop a sense of self. Now, if the mother’s present and it tunes with the child, because the child looks to the mother, attunes with the mother, feels safe, looks away, self soothes, self regulates then looks back to the mother. This goes on for years. In a daughter, up to 30 years. In a son, later, up to 35 years. That child is always trying to attune to the parental expectation. Now, if the mother is present and the mother is attuned, the child feels safe. So, the first 10 years of life is all about fight/ flight and safety. If the child is safe in themselves, they then start to develop core strength and a stable sense of self, which they then take into the next 10 years, which is developing an identity and a sense of self with peer groups. Now, the father’s often responsible for tuning the child into the second half, the second decade of life when the limbic brain becomes attuned. If that child then gets exposed to bullying and ridicule, that limbic brain is highly traumatized and that’s when you get all these anxiety states and OCD states because there’s no self-regulation at that level of development.
Then in the third decade of life, you achieve a certain sense of autonomy. You’re starting to lay down your prefrontal cortex, your inhibitory brain, where you inhibit the fight/flight of the first 10 years. You inhibit the fears of the second decade, and you start to develop a sense of autonomy and independence, where you’re no longer looking for parental guidance. The parent is the external prefrontal cortex for 30 years. The child’s always looking for (external) self-regulation. But then as the child develops and leaves the father’s or mother’s house, they have their own prefrontal cortex to inhibit their fears and their emotional fluctuations, and their fight/flight responses. That’s a healthy developing ego. Patients in the first half of life are often taken up by these biological imperatives. They are very different. It’s the ego development of the child to develop a coherent sense of self. It’s very different from the second half of life, which we call more of a soul part of a person’s life. Whatever develops in the first half of life, particularly if there was high drama and trauma, the child will often develop what’s called a provisional sense of self, where they leave their authentic self behind. They make themselves adjust to cope and survive. That is what we call the provisional self, and that becomes the ego, the operational sense of self that takes them through life, which can be very highly developed. But the core instinctual self often gets left behind. It’s been my experience that in the second half of life symptoms will often bring a patient back to re-examine that part of themselves that they left behind in order to develop a provisional operational sense of self.
This happens all the time when I take histories and look at the teleological impact of symptoms. I think we need to, as practitioners, be aware that treating a patient in the first half of life, I’m talking about patients with complex mind-body type illnesses, not just bronchitis, but I’m talking about complex patients. Patients in the first half of life are called, driven by biological imperatives. You know, Freud talked about libidinous drives, Dr. Adler talked about power drives. Jung was the only one to talk about the drives of the soul. Jung would not see a patient psychologically until the second half of life, because he said there was nobody home. He said that in the first half of life, you’re just driven to become something. So, you’ve got hormones at your disposal and there is no true consciousness to work with.
I’m not saying that younger people aren’t conscious, of course they are. But you are being driven to become something and succeed in life, it’s only in the second half of life when we are naturally drawn to become more aware of your true, authentic self, that we can really start to do more of the inner work because we’re not being driven to succeed in the outer world. This changed my practice when I started to look through that lens. I think it’s an important lens. We can’t ignore it.
So, this series of questions. What is the strength of that person? What ego strength? Are they fragile? Do they project their will? Are they highly resistant? These patients are different. You’ve got to be aware of them. How defended are they?
What unconscious dynamics are they wanting to be made conscious of? Are they ego defended or soul defended? There’s a difference, which I don’t have time to go into. The soul defended people are far more traumatized. Are they able to self-regulate or are they in their core or do they fragment into different ego states? Do they freeze or disassociate? Are there personality disorders? Then asking other questions. What is the actual content of the internal dialogue? How polarized are they into black and white thinking? Is there a need for a new narrative, a new story that needs to be told? I often see complex patients and they often don’t heal unless they have a new image, a new story, a new internal dialogue, even sometimes an awakening that is physiologically experienced. Not cognitive, but a true awakening to a new reality. That’s not a fragmented ego state or dissociative ego state. It’s truly a transcendent experience.
What is their capacity for self-advocacy? How well-informed is it? Is it rational? Is it magical? Wishful thinking? Are you, as a medical provider able to create salience and relevance? Do you educate your patients as to the complexity of their presentation? Or you just tell them what to do? There is a difference. We all know that education goes a long way in creating so-called compliance because there is salience, there is relevance. What are they asking of you? To treat disease, to make symptoms go away? Or are they asking to be assisted in their quest for full human flourishing? It’s important to know. What archetype do you occupy? Are you in your doctor as hero or doctor as healer mode? Do you stay in your core? Are you able to take no credit, take no blame, stay true to your own chief aim, vision, destiny? Are you able to keep loving what you do and not get too elated when people praise you or depressed when people damn you?
Doctors are subject to lots of projection, lots. A patient comes in the door and praises you. I know to keep yourself in your core because the next one’s going to come and damn you. So, you just don’t oscillate between seeking praise and getting too upset when people go at you. Which they do. On social media. On rate MD. You know, people can project all of the unresolved parental conflicts onto authority figures. Don’t forget we as MDs or naturopaths or chiropractors, carry a big potential for large parental projections onto us. These are unconscious projections by patients, that which they haven’t resolved with their parents. One of the great questions I always ask a patient is how are you related to your mother and father? If there is a complexity there or they’ve never seen their mother, never seen their father, that’s a different patient than one who’s been seen, loved, and nourished by patients. We know that through attachment theory and early trauma.
The last question is where do we enter into this complex system when patients present with this kind of complexity, where do we enter? What level? Do we enter at the level of toxicology? Do we enter at the level of the soul? Do we enter at the level of ego development? This is what we need to ask ourselves. Often when you sit enough in the field of a patient it becomes clear. It sort of unravels itself. It’s only through a phenomenological inquiry that the answers will emerge. You kind of walk in with a plan. You’ve got to stay related. You’ve got to look the patient in the eyes and you’ve got to listen and then see what emerges phenomenologically in the field as to where this system is asking to be unraveled or order created out of some chaos.
Here’s what we do. The first level is the Extended Body. You know, the river is my blood, the rainforest produces oxygen- is my lungs, the earth is my body. Every time we breathe in and out, we exchange tons of information with the environment. Just look at COVID. See how much gets exchanged through droplets, etcetera. Someone calculated with every breath we exchange 10 billion trillion atoms. That’s remarkable. Where were those atoms before I breathed them out? They were in my liver, my kidney, my spleen, my bones, my brain. Deepak used to talk about the fact we are always in an involuntary organ transplantation program. COVID has brought us this awareness. It’s too close to home. It has been calculated, do the math, that by the time you leave a room, we walk out with at least a million atoms that came into the room with somebody else. We’re constantly exchanging our bodies with each other and with the environment at large. Everybody here has atoms that were once in the body of Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi or Saddam Hussein or the lion in the Kalahari Desert or Donald Trump for that matter or the notorious RBG if you will. So, when you say “this is my body”, it’s somewhat of a delusion. It’s a limited perspective of who we are. So, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink is densely packed with a multitude of potentially carcinogenic and immune system depleting toxins. We know that. I mean, fabulous lectures this weekend on that from some of the world’s authorities.
The great teachings of Ayurveda say “I’m not in this world, the world is in me”. It’s not metaphysics, it’s science. We are continuously in exchange. We have a responsibility as well, to know that there is no “out there”. Us and “out there” are one and the same. It is incumbent upon us in this field to be environmental activists. In the highest sense, we have a responsibility because we know this to be true. Every time we drive our car when we could be walking. Every time we throw away a bottle and we could be recycling. We should be and must be at the forefront of the environmental movement. I do believe ISEAI is really carrying that mantle, of course. Mark Hyman’s new bookFood Fix was fabulous when he outlined how our food supply is in the hands of our 12 CEOs of big companies. Very sobering. We have a need for this regenerative farming, et cetera. So that’s the Extended Body, the world outside of ourselves. I just put together this quick slide. These are some of the toxicology environmental labs that I use. Some of the treatments I’ve found helpful. We are all familiar with these, you know these, I just wrote this down for quick reference. I originally had much more time to speak and I was going to go into more detail, but unfortunately, that can’t happen today.
The second level is the level of the Physical Body. We know that our body is nothing other than DNA wrapped in food with some structure. We know that macro and micronutrients influence this dramatically. When we look at the physical body as such, there are certain things that really have emerged in my practices. At the core of this awareness, because this is where most people will enter. They enter into at Stage Two, the physical symptomatology and biochemistry. We do our allopathic history and functional medicine history. We do a complete functional medicine workup with all the tests we can. That stupid saying that we all are aware of, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”, it’s so true. Some practitioners are excellent at what’s called ART, autonomic response testing, and don’t test as much. I personally am more familiar and more skilled at test interpretation. I try and get as many tests as I possibly can so as to explore the cartography of what’s being presented. People often, and budgets are limited, of course, so you have to adjust accordingly, but if you can test it really helps you pull in all these disparate parts and create a more cohesive roadmap for helping patients. So the complete functional medicine workup, we’re all familiar with it. I do feel that the different diets, you need to know all of them. You need to know about fasting, mimicking, intermittent fasting. I personally find the paleo autoimmune low histamine diet to be the bedrock of trying to get people to downregulate the inflammatory issues they usually come up with. You have to be familiar with the histamine diet, the oxalate diet, the SCD, the Ayurvedic diet. A Vata person’s diet in Ayurveda is very different from a Pita person’s diet. You’ve got to know the different tastes and flavors that these different Ayurvedic doshas if you will, do better with. I do think it’s important.
Mitochondrial medicine, the cell danger response, membrane medicine, Robert Naviaux’ s theory is unbelievable. It changed the way our practice works. We are now able to do the labs that look at some of these markers. I do them on every patient, almost. Working with Dr. Afrin and Mast Cell patients, we now start talking about Pentad and recently Septads. Pentad patients are patients with Ehlers-Danlos, POTS and dysautonomia and auto-immunity with chronic infections and cranial, cervical instabilities. This is important. Many POTS patients go undiagnosed. You’ve got to take the blood pressures, lying and standing. You’ve got to ask about Ehlers-Danlos and do Beighton scores. These are very important, little bits and pieces I’ve picked up over time that I’ve put into my toolbox. Sleep and exercise medicine, we all know that. Peptides, exosomes, stem cells are new kids on the block, and there’s even more now. We’ve got psychedelics in there too. There’s so much going on, unbelievable. Ketamine, et cetera. Dentistry, you’ve got to know dentistry. You got to start learning about dentistry and how to read a two-dimensional panorex and maybe 3D cone-beam CT scan, but best to work with a biological dentist, you’ve got to know a lot. Lots about Nucca chiropractic, craniosacral vision therapy, and know your immune system basics. It is very important to know how to down or up-regulate accordingly.
Then Stage Three is the Electromagnetic Body. We all have this layer of Prana according to Ayurveda, this level of energy and vitality. There’s a difference between a corpse and a human being. With a human being, there is some intelligence flowing through which needs to be nourished and interacted with in every way. Just as we are metabolizing food, we metabolize with sight and touch and smell, et cetera.
We have to know some of these theories and some of these insights. These energy fields that come from the body that works in concert, and it’s been shown that they actually govern biological processes. We know from the work of Dr. Albert Popp that there’s a biofield around in the body. It’s coming from what they believe to be DNA. This whole concept of the aura is actually real. Local fields, meridians, regulate the flow of energy within the body. These fields operate as a spectrum. They can include electrical, electric, magnetic, and subtle energies. These do correspond with a wide range of scientific data and field reports. I learned from Dr. Klinghardt from his work with Dr. Popp and others that our matter, our actual biochemical reactions are controlled by this energy component, which shapes matter. Apparently, there’s an electromagnetic sort of field that stands as a standing wave outside of your body. Where they intersect it actually is where the control of biochemical reactions occur. We know from Harold Burr in the nineties, he measured these electrical fields around an unfertilized, salamander egg, and found it was shaped like a mature salamander. He showed that often these electromagnetic patterns often undergo destruction before the physical body, before physical illness follows. When we look at this electromagnetic field, we have to know about the brain. We have to know about the autonomic nervous system. We’ve got to know about NeuroQuant MRIs, heart rate variability. The QEG work that we do here at the clinic is extremely important. I love to correlate NeuroQuant MRIs with QEEGs. You can often tell the biography of a patient just by looking at what’s showing up in the NeuroQuant MRI and what’s showing up in the QEEG. We also have to know about interference fields, scars, tonsillectomies, tissues that have damage to them, which can actually interfere with some of these fields. We have to know about man-made electromagnetic fields. This becomes part of our workup. Getting a building biologist to go into a home and measure electrical fields, magnetic fields, EMF’S, and dirty electricity.
We also have to know about the mind because the mind through the stress response or through intention can sort of change the electrical field.
Upregulation of the HPA access, for instance, can cause cortisol to cause a leaky gut, leaky brain, leaky mitochondria. So we have to know about stress responses, mental fields, and the downstream effects on the electromagnetic body. This is the so-called regulatory medicine that Dr. Klinghardt mentioned where we use interventions, homeopathy, acupuncture, all forms of regulatory medicine of which we learned, not through allopathic medicine, but through other studies. Sometimes with brain injury, we do need to do neurocognitive testing. I do quite a bit of this, particularly with traumatic brain injuries.
Now we switch from the outer world to the inner world. We start looking at the emotional fields of the body. And Candace Pert was the first to show that thoughts create our physiology through first electrical and then chemical signals on neural peptides.
Every time we think a thought it’s turned into a chemical. The Ayurvedic saying is if you wanted to look at what your experiences were like in the past, look at your body now. There is a blueprint. If you want to know what your body’s going to look like in the future, look at your experiences now. Traditional Chinese medicine teaches us that emotions are linked to specific organs. You know that a patient who’s been sexually abused, particularly females, often have a lot of pelvic symptomatology. Anger and the liver are very much linked. You’ll see this a lot. Also, grief. I had a woman who gave up a baby for adoption and she presented with asthma. She dealt with the adoption guilt and her asthma cleared. Nothing else. It’s just linking emotion to organs. This is a real thing. It’s not just speculative on the part of traditional Chinese medicine. Many studies have been done showing how emotions are linked to biochemistry. Anger has specific upregulation of inflammatory cytokines, laughter downregulation, et cetera, et cetera.
We know from this world of the emotional body we’ve got to start looking at early developmental traumas, the adverse childhood effects of trauma, and what effect they have on the body. We know that there’s an increased incidence of all sorts of diseases with adverse childhood experiences and early trauma. We’ve had to learn about trauma-based therapies, integrated body psychotherapy, somatic experiencing, family constellation work, early developmental trauma work. We use a wide array of therapeutics in this domain. We can’t ignore the level of complexity that dysregulated emotions bring into the interview.
Level Five is everything to do with the Intellectual Body or the so-called individual mind and ego development, the operational sense of the self. We have this individual ”I”, which is interrelated to bio-social networks. This is a very important part of how we interrelate. Is the person’s ego-sense of self strongly developed? Is it fragile? Because it depends on how you interrelate with a person as to whether this is true.
Everybody has a value system. You need to know your patients’ value systems. Every person has different personality types. Every person has different constitutional types. I find it quite important to know about Ayurvedic types. The Vata patient is very different from the Kapha patient who is very different from the Pitta patient as to how you interrelate with them. With Myers Briggs typology, a person who’s an introvert is very different from an extrovert. A person who is judging is very different from somebody who’s perceiving and so forth and so on. A feeling type is very different from a thinking type. It’s important when you start to work with patients to know some of these typologies in order to work with them accordingly.
So, the individual mind, which is located to the body, takes in information through the five senses, transforms that through the filters of values and core beliefs, morals, ethics, and culture, and then in the step-down transformer, the brain, transforms that into reality. Also, the individual mind or ego takes in information, if you will, from above, from internal images that it has created and stories, we’ve told ourselves about early developmental experiences. Then we filter that through our personalities, our constitutional types, and provisional selves. Our ego states are usually provisional selves. Then we translate that into reality and thus physiology. Our conscious core beliefs about our ego selves mobilize biochemistry, causing neurons to fire together. We often have unconscious core beliefs, unconscious complexes that come up from below, and then these then create our outer reality.
We have to know how to work with this intellectual body through different interventions. ISTDP is a form of psychotherapy that I respect and refer out to other people to use. ISTDP looks at the defenses of a patient. Patients are often presented with a cluster of symptomatologies, which are masking the inability to feel deeper emotion. For instance, anxiety. Anxiety is not an emotion. It’s a defense against feeling deeper emotions like shame, guilt, anger, rage. So, an ISTDP practitioner will ask patients certain questions and work with them in the transference and countertransference of the relationship to try and see how symptoms may be presenting based on defenses that are being crystallized, preventing them from uncovering what they really are trying to feel. I find ISTDP a fascinating and very deep form of therapy, but difficult to do. I use other methods, the Demartini method, and others.
So, individuals who have truly miraculous responses to healing in their physiology are the ones who have a shift in perception, in consciousness. They extract a new set of information from their perceptions. They change their beliefs about their perceptions and hence radically reorganize their downstream physiology as a consequence.
At the level of the soul, we have to know about the cartography of the soul. The objective reality of the soul that Jung talked about. We have the outer ego that orientates itself to space-time, and we have the deeper unconscious aspects of the shadow in the self. It’s only in midlife that often the soul body or the authentic self wants to emerge. Very often in a therapeutic encounter, you’ve got to know the difference. Symptoms will often present themselves at this midlife stage, as I mentioned, in order for a person to transition from the first half to the second half. If they hold on too tight to the first half of life ego-based demands, they will often attract challenges in their physiology in order to draw attention to the fact that transition is needed. You know, in Greek mythology, the seat of the soul is on your knees. You will often see this. People who attract tragedies, will attract physical ill health, they’ll attract divorces, they’ll attract bankruptcies. They’ll be challenged, forced to change the trajectory of their life from the first half to the second half, because if they continue on the first half of life endeavors, as the hormones retreat, they will fail to recognize the calling of the soul to become more whole and more developed. We naturally evolve as we mature to integrate parts of ourselves that we left behind. Our provisional selves get made conscious and we start to integrate parts of ourselves that we previously were not aware of. We become more authentically ourselves. We start to deal with something called shadow projections, parts of ourselves that we don’t necessarily like. Those parts of ourselves that we don’t necessarily like, we often attract on the outside. We have to deal with them until we learn to integrate them. We have 4,500 traits. Every trait serves a purpose. Until we can learn to integrate all traits, we’re not really able to be authentically ourselves. That’s a methodology and that’s something we have to learn.
The other thing at the level of the soul is the family soul. We often inherit this. We have to take a multi-generational history to determine neuro-psychiatric conditions. The experience of a parent before conceiving markedly influences both the structure and function and nervous system of subsequent generations. So, at level six, this is one of the most profound insights I’ve ever sort of experienced, what the ancestors bring to the table will often be expressed in the individual, but it has nothing to do with them. It is in their system. They inherit epigenetically trauma in the system.
Sometimes when you start to see the dynamics and the entanglements of the family system, and the patient is made conscious through family constellation therapy, of these entanglements, and they get an entirely new insight into what preceded them, it entirely rewrites their story and their personal dialogue and their beliefs about themselves. They’re able to really let go of the narrative that they brought into the treatment room. This has been very profound. I used to do a workshop every year with Mark Wolynn who is one of the masters at this work. Whereby we would look at illness and inherited family trauma. Very often we could see how illnesses have their origin in inherited entanglements and family systems. I encourage all of you if you’re fascinated by this to not ignore inherited epigenetic family trauma.
Bert Hellinger was of course the great pioneer of this work. His work is immensely helpful and worth reading.
When a patient shifts their judgment, criticism, and projections, to understanding and see their parents, for instance, in a greater light, something profound happens. They may have hated their mother, but when they start to see how their mother got very little from her mother, something opens in them and they stop telling the same story. They see their mother with more compassion. So, when a parent or individual is placed in a much larger family system, a new image is created, and it absolutely changes downstream metabolites, it really does work that way. These trickle-down effects do go down into physicality and to biochemistry and a whole new healing potential is set in motion.
This summary slide sort of summarizes what I’ve said. When we work at all layers or levels from our family system, from our ancestors, we may inherit events. As well, when we are born, we inherit early childhood bonding experiences either positive and negative, which then influence our beliefs, our values, our internal dialogue. We have 60,000 thoughts a day. Most of them are the same as the day before. When those change, it creates a different downstream metabolism. Then our defenses, that then influences the content of our thoughts, which creates a specific image and a narrative, a so-called internal dialogue, which then alters the autonomic nervous system, peripheral and central nervous system, and the HPA axis immune system. In the brain that then transforms first into electrical signals, then chemical messages in the form of neuropeptides, neurohormones, that then interface with protein receptors in the nucleus of the cell mitochondria. That is then encoded in specific genes to translate proteins that transform into enzymes, neuropeptides, immunoglobulins, hormones, connective tissue. That then becomes you, that beat your heart, breathe your lungs, procreate your off-spring and heal.
Or, if you further increase your allostatic load, triggers from the environment, et cetera, creating further cell danger response or hyper-freeze in Porges dorsal vagal theory, that then creates more symptoms of diseases. So, in the middle of this, we’ve got to enter into the system and start to unpack and uncover what’s going on at all layers and all levels that could create either health, healing and a sense of living at one’s maximum potential. Or, further increase and down-regulate the cell danger response and the hyper freeze response and make things sicker and worse. We have to enter into this system and try to unravel what’s going on and what to do. This is the skill of a fully informed practitioner who has a bigger roadmap than just the functional medicine roadmap.
This is a patient who presented, for instance, just looking at the family systems issues. She presented with all the symptoms that we know many people present with. She was Vata imbalanced. She had POTS, she had chronic pain. She had worked with everybody and still remained very symptomatic. She had an MSQ of 102. The family story was that her dad was a drug addict. He used drugs, the parents weren’t happy, dad left when she was two and then died from drugs when she was 10. The story in the system was that dad was useless. Was a drug addict. Killed himself, she seldom thought of him when she did it was very negative. She had a break in attachment with her mom because her mom was always busy with her father and took her eyes off the patient.
She was merged and identified with the deceased father. She could not love him overtly because he was terrible, that was the family myth. He was a no-good drug addict. So, she loved him covertly, but by becoming sick like him. Children have a massive unconscious loyalty to their parents. No matter what the parents do. She would say to herself unconsciously, (this was not conscious), dad you didn’t live a full life, I won’t either. I’ll suffer like you, so you won’t have to do it alone. This is the unconscious loyalty of the child to a parent. So, when this was uncovered in a history taking, she tuned in to the sensations of her body, she felt more cohesive. She was able to feel more integration. She felt the vibration, and this became her sense of self. This became a daily practice and she started to then visualize attachment to the mother appropriately and started to bring her father back into her life.
She placed a photo of her dad on her desk as an altar to him, inviting him in. She went to his grave. She visited his family. Now remember she’s half her father. So, this half of herself which she’d cut off and ignored now, all of a sudden, came up alive and introduced energetically into her system, the part of herself that she had ignored and rejected and was in pain. She then did, level three or stage three work. She did emWave to develop coherence, saw a somatic experiencing practitioner. She developed a stable sense of self and developed the so-called “window of tolerance”. She said, you know, these insights have changed my life. I’m asking dad to guide me. She just started to develop a core self, an increased window of tolerance. Her symptoms calmed down; her POTS was under control. Of course, we did all the biological functional medicine, you know, salt and stockings and Florinef and everything we do at level two. But it was this insight that really had a trickle-down effect. After a certain period of time, her MSQ had come down to 30.
Level Seven – Spiritual Body. About a hundred years ago, there was, as I said, this infusion of ancient souls. They said things were not really physical. Behind this mask of molecules behind this facade of materialism, there’s this vast domain of energy and information. We can relate to it. It beats your heart, it breathes your lungs, it moves birds’ wings, it creates black holes and supernovas. This intelligence underlies all matter. It has no limits. Larry Dossey’s, his new book is called One Mind. It says that everything behind the appearances of separateness is this One Mind. It is connected in infinity in all directions.
And you can experience it directly through these Satori’s or awakenings or precognition as mentioned. It’s not located within my mind or my body. It is not limited to my brain or my body. It’s the umbrella to all individual minds. This is a level of transcendence that can be experienced. Once it is experienced, it’s the ultimate healing because there’s no fear of anything because you realize that is all there is. We manifest from that. Our separateness is somewhat an illusion of the five senses. This can’t be cognitively felt, it has to be transcendentally experienced.
In summary, in the Seven Stages to Health and Transformation, Stages 1-5: Conscious / Space-Time / Ego. Stages 6-7: Unconscious / Systemic / Soul. Each level has its own order and its own laws, which need to be understood. The lower five levels belong to the personal realm, the conscious ego-self. The sixth and seventh to the systemic and transpersonal realms, unconscious. The higher levels have an organizing influence on the lower level. It is very important to realize that the lower level supplies the energy to the higher levels and creates boundaries for the individual to exist in. Resolution of issues at the higher levels, trickle down to the lower levels. This is so true. You can’t treat POTS and hope for family system trauma to be healed. But if you heal family system trauma, POTS may resolve.
This is very much a rule that I was taught by Dr. Klinghardt and which exists to this day. So, the Seven Stages to Health andTtransformation. The purpose of an inclusive model is not to create a larger tool bag of treatment strategies, whether they’re allopathic or integrated. The purpose is not to add 10 minutes of prayer to radiation treatment, and believe we are filling a more holistic imperative. We don’t necessarily need more tools and hammers in our toolkit. The purpose is to create as large as possible a diagnostic and therapeutic roadmap that relates directly to the patient’s experience and request and ask, what is it about all the approaches that can be applied to healing? Where both the doctor and the patient, the individual, and the collective, both sickness and wellness are considered and included.
The crucial ingredient isn’t all the ingredients, but the holder of the bag. A transformation in the practitioner. The integrally informed practitioner who is open to the entire spectrum of consciousness. They can acknowledge what is occurring at all levels and all layers, internally as well as externally, as much as is possible. With both confidence and humility, be aware within themselves, of the doctor as hero, as well as the wounded healer, and be aware of projection of this and the patient’s complexes. And attempt to lower as much as possible errors of commission, as well as errors of omission.
“In the black bag there will not be one mechanic to one machine, one plumber to one broken faucet, but one human being to another. Not just 20 pills, two scalpels, and an orthopedic hammer, but all layers, all quadrants, all states, and all stages of consciousness. They will have an expanded map from dust to deity, from dirt to divinity and from agony to ecstasy – only then the treatment”. That’s Ken Wilber.
What is most obvious is that this does not happen without a profound inner shift in consciousness and a radical shift in the beliefs of the patient about what is humanly possible.
These beliefs are contained in the internal dialogue at Stage Five. This is accompanied by an entirely new narrative and image, replacing the one from the past and what is possible for the future. Rewiring through new neurocircuitry a different set of downstream metabolic modulators.
I remember Debra, a dear patient who died from stage four breast cancer after seven years of treatment. She had achieved a profound sense of health and healing in all areas of her life at the moment of her death. She had experienced this shift in consciousness: One mind, and I believe she died fully healed.
This is completely possible. So, we moved from the relative purpose of medicine to relieve symptoms and to cure disease, to fix people, to eradicate tumors, to normalize blood tests, alleviate pain, create clear CT scans and prolong life. These are the culturally sanctioned notions of what physicians are supposed to do. We all asked to do this with the least amount of effort, expense, and sense of personal responsibility. This is compounded by the consensual reality that all illnesses are negative and should be eradicated. Illness is not being used as information for self-transformation.
We then move from the relative to the absolute purpose, to assist in healing the physical body so that people can live out their lives in a state of maximum potential, in the fulfillment of love and purpose, and feel the love, joy, wisdom, and compassion in their lives more fully. We achieve this, not by medicating a symptom away, but by using it as a feedback mechanism. To let us know where we need to become more conscious, we lean into the sharp points of our lives, and we assist in creating a culture in which spirit and energy have equal priority over matter and the body. We assist in cleaning our connection to this infinite field. One Mind – to which we are all connected. If we fail and people die from physical diseases, there is no tragedy because we can die fully healed with an open heart and a state of present moment awareness with the realization that our true self, our One Mind is connected to something greater than our individual self. It’s non-local, it’s outside of space/time. It’s immortal, and eternal and therefore incapable of death.
I apologize for going overtime. Thank you for your attention.
If you’re interested in learning more, then please don’t hesitate to read the other posts on the Hoffman Centre blog or contact my office to set up an appointment.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.
In recent weeks there’s been a huge amount of attention being given to the drugs hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. A study published last week, April 9th 2020, on 1,061 patients that were treated early on in the course of their illness with these two drugs, led to some profound conclusions. The study was conducted by French researcher Dr. Didier Raoult, a well respected but controversial French M.D. The study followed on from a smaller study with a cohort of twenty patients that yielded similar results, which are referred to in the graph below.
The data released showed that:
92% had excellent outcomes.
Ten patients out of the 1,061 patients had to go to ICU.
4% of the patients treated had persistent virus beyond the ten day treatment window determined as the cut-off by the researchers regarding whether to attribute success or not.
4% had a poor outcome defined as extending their hospital stay beyond the ten days.
Five patients died.
Results concluded by the researchers established that:
The treatment was considered safe with no side effects. This is relevant as I’ve used both these drugs for many years in the treatment of chronic Lyme disease and have never seen any side effects for either of them besides nausea from azithromycin, especially if not taken with a full meal. Hydroxychloroquine use requires a six-month ophthalmology checkup to look for retinal changes, which is far beyond the timeline required for the treatment of Covid-19. I should point out that I have never seen these retinal changes in patients on long-term hydroxychloroquine use. The potential retinal damage is related to length of use and dosage. In addition, cardiomyopathy (an enlarged heart) has been detected in a few patients treated with hydroxychloroquine.i ii
The amount of hydroxychloroquine in a patient’s blood correlated with the success of their outcome. Different absorption rates for different patients was a consideration.
Some blood pressure medication was associated with much poorer outcomes. ACE inhibitors (angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors) iii were considered to lead to poorer outcomes while ARB (angiotensin II receptor blockers) ivusers had a better outcome. I’ll be discussing these two drugs in a later post.
These results were seen to be promising and have resulted in the NIH preparing to begin a 500-person trial
Dr. Raoult did emphasize the importance of excluding cardiac issues before commencing the studies. Dr. Raoult has spoken out strongly about the “dictatorship of the methodologists” that insist on first-class or gold standard research trials, which are randomized and with control groups, before applying the science. He believes it’s inhumane to subject patients to control arms when there’s clear evidence that the treatment would benefit the patients. v
The details of the study
Patients with COVID-19 infection were treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.
Plaquenil 200mg was given three times per day for ten days and azithromycin 250mg was given for five days, twice the first day then once for the next four days.
In order to avoid cardiac problems, an ECG was performed before starting treatment.
A low-dose CT scan was also performed to assess any potential lung damage.
The evaluation of the virologic effect was done with PCR blood test before inclusion.
The quantification of the viral load was conducted on a nasopharyngeal sample.
A PCR blood test was repeated on day five to verify that the virus was undetectable or at levels too low to present a contagious risk. This test can detect pieces of viral DNA of the actual virus, although one can’t say if the viral tissue is alive or dead, only that a piece of the virus is in your body.
Please Note
These drugs are presently unavailable to most pharmacies and are only available to chronic autoimmune patients, who are on them for long-term use. Directives from health authorities in Canada have discouraged prescribing any of the recent popular drugs put forward as potential treatment for Covid-19 with the warning that there are no treatments currently available to treat Covid-19 and that we, as M.Ds, must be cognizant of evidence-based prescribing for recognized conditions. Included in the list of drugs that shouldn’t be currently subscribed were hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine, remdesivir, lopinavir/ritonavir, colchicine, and azithromycin)
An earlier paper involving only twenty patients published in March 2020 in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents featured the following graph: #
Disclaimer:Do not take these medications without the guidance of a doctor.
References
ihttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25672591 iihttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/236601571_Chloroquine_cardiomyopathy-a_review_of_the_literature iii Examples of ACE inhibitors include: Accupril (quinapril), Aceon (perindopril, Altace (ramipril), Capoten (captopril), Lotensin (benazepril), Mavik (trandolapril), Monopril (fosinopril), Prinivil, Zestril (lisinopril) iv The ARBs that are currently available are: azilsartan (Edarbi), candesartan (Atacand), eprosartan (Teveten), irbesartan (Avapro), telmisartan (Micardis), valsartan (Diovan, Prexxartan), losartan (Cozaar), olmesartan (Benicar) v Is France’s president fueling the hype over an (Science Mag) unproven coronavirus treatment viwww.doctoroz.com The Dr. Oz Show Medical Unit
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.
In the current Covid-19 Pandemic we get asked a lot of questions about the best ways on how to protect and assess yourself. We've gathered some great recommendations that we've found to be very useful and came up with a few of our own suggestions.
Most of the following recommendations come from from a video conference given by Dr. Dave Price, an ER physician. Watch this video by Dr. Dave Price, Protecting Your Family ER doctor at Cornell University.
Covid-19 A Brief Summary
What is COVID-19?
A virus from the common cold family, the coronavirus has never been seen by the human body before, hence the virulence. The virus appears to have come from an animal.
Symptoms
The most common symptoms are a fever, cough, and sore throat. The virus then travels throughout the body and goes mostly to the lungs although there can also be cardiac involvement. Patients commonly present with a cough or are just not feeling good, with a cough and mild headache. Most people just don’t feel good when they suffer from the virus. The infection can last anywhere from five to fourteen days. Those with a mild case of the disease usually feel better around the fifth day. In more severe cases, those that are more affected will become short of breath between the third and the fifth day then feel better around the seventh day.
How do we get the disease?
Coronavirus is contracted almost exclusively from moving your hands to your face. You have to have long and sustained contact with someone who has the disease. The vast majority will have a fever and aches or will be someone that is going to get the disease in the next one or two days. This virus is almost entirely transferred from your hands to your face, into the eyes, nose, or mouth. Keep your hands away from your face and you're mostly good. Super clean hands, never touching the face. Boom.
There is some suggestion you can get the virus from aerosolization, in other words because it’s airborne. However, for this to occur you need long sustained and unprotected contact for at least fifteen to thirty minutes, in a closed room with no mask. Most people get it from touching someone with the disease or someone who is about the get the disease. Covid-19 is in your community right now. I’m not attempting to scare you, but simply empower you to take the necessary steps to protect your hand to face spread.
Follow 4 Rules to Protect Yourself
1. Become a 'hand washing fanatic'
Know where your hands are and keep them cleaned and sanitised at all times. Walk around with Purell or hand wipes. Leave your door, Purell. Open the door and then Purell. If you keep your hands clean, you dramatically reduce the risk of infection and if you combine washing your hands with not touching your face, you will NOT get this. Covid-19 is mostly contracted from sustained contact with someone who has it. However, because of the risk of slight exposure on objects, make sure that you always keep your hands clean.
2. Psychologically work at the connection between your hands and face
We touch our face thousands of times a day without thinking, whether we’re scratching, picking, rubbing, or pondering. Start to monitor yourself doing this, gamify not touching your face or wear a mask indoors to train yourself in this new behaviour.
3. You don't need a N95 medical mask
When you leave the house, wear a mask or something wrapped around your mouth and nose, to stop you touching your face. Any covering of your face is good. The mask doesn't prevent the disease but simply trains you not to touch your face. So, when you leave your house, add a mask. This will prevent transmission 99% of the time. Clean hands and not touching your face is the key. The general community has zero need for a N95 mask. If you’re in a room with a Covid-19 patient who has a risk of aerosolization, you need a N95 mask. If you’re going to the grocery store and touch the cart, just make sure that you clean the handle.
4. Distance yourself from others
Keep around three to six feet away from other people. Shrink your social circle for now. Find your small group and don't break from it. Do all other socialising digitally. We’ll need to physically distance for the next three to six months, maybe longer if we see another little spike. Become used to keeping this distance and don’t allow yourself to slip with this. You don’t need to be afraid of your neighbour. The better you are at doing this, the less likely you'll catch or transmit the infection.
And that’s it. Just four very simple rules.
The only way you will get this disease is if your hands are contaminated, you touch your face, and you stand too close to a contaminated person. You don’t need to be afraid if you go out to the grocery store. The person three to six feet away from you is not your enemy.
What Should You Do If You Have a Cold?
Behave as if you have coronavirus for two days and see what direction this takes. If in a couple of days it feels like a regular cold like all your others you’ve ever had, go back to normal life. You can have Covid-19 and stay in your house, protected and perfectly safe. If someone is immune compromised in the house, such as a very elderly individual, isolate them completely from the person that’s sick or that person needs to leave the house. The same applies if someone is known to be immune compromised after undergoing chemotherapy, for example. Touching a person or touching a contaminated surface then touching your face is what will transmit the disease.
What Should You Do If You Get the Disease?
This disease is primarily spread through home and family transmission, such as from mother to daughter, from brother to sister. If you develop a fever or other symptom, isolate yourself in the house in a separate room, with a separate bathroom if at all possible.
If the person has to come out of the room, have that sick person wear a mask and wash their hands with sanitizer before leaving the room and entering the rest of the house. The sick person should touch as little as possible, clean after themselves, and then head back to their self-isolation. Don’t have sustained contact with this person and don’t do things like repeatedly taking their temperature. However, don’t be afraid to stay at home.
The healthy person in the house should not be touching the sick person or be around the sick person whenever they can avoid it. The sick person should get through the illness within seven days but remain vigilant as their recovery relates to washing hands, wearing masks and so on for seven to ten days. Once the sick person is feeling well, they can have more contact with others. However, continue cleaning your hands and put on a mask.
If You’re Sick, When Do You Need to Go to the Hospital?
You only really need to go to the hospital if you’re short of breath. That’s the clearest indication and a steadfast rule. Don’t go to the hospital if you have a fever, body aches, a cough, or you simply think you might have Covid-19. A lot of people presenting to hospitals are being sent home to wait out the four to five days of the disease. Of all the people who get Covid-19, only 10% become short of breath and need to go to hospital. Of those, only about 10% of people turning up at the hospital that have symptoms will actually be admitted to be monitored. About 1% of those will be put on a ventilator. The overwhelming majority of people come off the ventilator seven to ten days later. Going to the hospital is not a death sentence.
Telemedicine is the best way to avoid overloading the medical services. Call in with your symptoms and heed the advice given by your health authorities. In Canada, call 811 and follow their directions. However, if you’re short of breath, head to the hospital.
Do I Need to Get Tested?
No. Let people who really need it, get tested. As testing ramps up more people will have access. If you have symptoms like the flu with the features mentioned, you probably have Covid-19. If your community is having an outbreak of the disease then you may need to be tested.
Are Kids Getting Infected with Covid-19?
There have been almost no cases of Covid-19 disease in kids between zero and fourteen years old. A few newborns are getting it, which is thought to be due to contact. Kids are not getting critically ill or dying. We’re still waiting to understand whether kids are vectors and assume for now that they are. At the moment, kids aren’t dying and kids aren’t getting sick.
Transmission
The absolute vast majority of transmissions are from droplets. When a droplet leaves an infected person, it lands and is quickly picked up by an unsuspecting person, transferring it from hands to face. Very, very little transmission occurs through the air. You would have to be very close to a person spitting or coughing and have a droplet transferred to your face. This occurs in a hospital when the patient is suctioned or a similar aerosolized procedure is done. This is where a N95 mask is needed. Most nurses use an ordinary surgery mask when in hospitals attending to Covid-19 patients.
It takes approximately two days to be symptomatic. You are infective in those two days, keep a list if you can of all the people you interact with so that you’re able to inform people if you’re in contact with someone in the two days prior to you becoming symptomatic.
Health care providers that are on the front line taking care of infected patients in a closed room and doing nasal swabs without protection are getting very sick. With the proper protection nobody is getting sick, even in working in a Covid-19 hospital ward.
Is it really safe to go on a run or a walk if you adhere to the spacing directions?
Yes, it is. Take sterilising liquid with you and wipe down anything you touch. Keep your distances. Just don't get sloppy and don't assume that other people have your diligence. Wear a mask so that you continue to train yourself not to touch your face and to communicate to other people that you're taking it seriously. Wipe everything down before you touch it and don’t touch your face. A bandana is okay if you don’t have a mask. It’s not preventing you from getting the disease, but just to prevent you from touching your face.
What if you don't have a sterilising liquid?
Coronavirus is not robust. It dies immediately upon disinfection. Use your elbows or other body parts to open and close things, then wash with soap as soon as you can.
Do I need to wipe down groceries when bringing them into the house?
It’s a reasonable idea to have the delivery person leave the goods outside your door, pick it up with gloves then wipe it down. That’s certainly reasonable but the most important part is, as stated, to wash your hands, don't touch your face. Don’t pick up the package with your bare hands. Clean your hands immediately. If picking up coffee from a Starbucks drive-through, Purell your hands or disinfect your hands after taking the cup.
It is fallacy that this only affects older people?
Yes, this is affecting everyone above approximately fourteen years old. Everybody is getting this disease even without preconditions. Older people often do worse, while men are more often infected than females. The younger you are, the less likely it will happen. The older you are, the more likely you are to get the disease.
Is it true that Ibuprofen should be avoided when feeling sick?
In practice, 90% of people will get a fever and a cough. Those who become sicker get short of breath. Those who can’t walk to the bathroom need a ventilator. They usually settle out after a day and after seven days they get off the ventilators. There’s good enough data coming out of Germany now that ibuprofen should not be used since it causes more inflammation. If you have a fever use an alternative like Tylenol. Take glutathione if you use Tylenol.
Immunity
The people who get the disease are shedding the virus one or two days before they get the disease. The stories of people getting sick again are about people that haven't fully recovered. If you've had it, and are through it, you're immune. This virus is now in circulation and as it mutates over the next few years, it will become milder and milder. Five years from now it will be just a cold.
Finally, a study in China has determined that microbiome health is a more significant factor than age when it comes to coronavirus deaths.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.
The vast majority of the world’s population that has access to any source of media outlets is currently under the collective fear-driven news cycles of an upcoming apocalypse due to the emergence and spread of the coronavirus, COVID-19. As I write this, a CCN alert flashed across my screen stating that there were 3,000 cases of coronavirus in the United States with 62 deaths. This number was updated six hours later to 3,155 cases. No doubt by this evening, this number will be adjusted upwards, a trend that will probably increase for the foreseeable future, the exact end-point being entirely unknown.
While all due caution is absolutely imperative and all medical guidance should be strictly followed, as I stated in my other pieces regarding coronavirus, parts one and two, I couldn’t help but reflect on what appears to be an innate tendency of all living systems to trigger homeostatic mechanisms that force self-correction whenever one side of its expression become too polarized to either extreme. It appears that evolution itself has to adjust course in light of new information by self-correcting evolutionary realignments.
We know from history that disasters are often followed by tremendous gains and achievements. The extreme horrors of World War II were followed by an extraordinary period of increased economic, social, and political global growth and relatedness, rather than nationalism, which was unprecedented in history. It was the same with 9/11. Immediately following those events, murder rates plummeted, and kindness and appreciation were unleashed upon civil servants, hospitals, demolition crews, and emergency medical services. Out of control real estate, airline, and hotel prices were corrected, and there was increased dedication to global causes. The list is much more extensive but undoubtedly real, when previous issues and statistics were assessed through this lens.
One of the greatest and most well remembered political speeches of all time was delivered at the first inauguration by Franklin D. Roosevelt as the 32nd President of the United States. At that time, the nation was at the peak of the Great Depression and the speech was heard by tens of millions of American citizens.
“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves, which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.”
He went on to say, “There is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.”
So, while we’re currently in the grip of the downward, fear-driven spiral that’s mostly emphasizing the potential catastrophic consequences that may or may not result from CoVID-19, how can we best compensate for those fears and reflect on the potential upside of this situation? And most importantly, what can we do to mitigate this fear-driven spiral into ennui, inaction and a potential sense of hopelessness?
What follows are some compensatory ideas that are in no way meant to downplay or minimize the suffering that many people have gone through or are about to go through. However, if we’re to embrace the homeostatic principles that there are no crises without blessings and we don’t live in a one-sided world where there are only losses without gains. So, let’s examine a few potential consequences that might arise from this present situation.
Global warming. The global warming crisis seemed to be almost impossible to reign in, despite the most well-meaning attempts by a subset of global political and environmental leaders. With all kinds of global travel grinding to a halt, it’s inevitable that at least a pause to the upward tend of global warming, primarily due to the carbon footprint induced by travel, will be inevitable. When climate change experts examine this effect in months or years to come, maybe their statistics can be used to convince others of the need for a more sustained and ambitious action regarding this omnipresent threat.
Exotic animal trade. China stopped the trade in wild animals for the purpose of consumption such as dogs, rodents, yaks, snakes, porcupines, and bats when the link between animals and the coronaviruses was discussed. Officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said they isolated the virus taken from a seafood and wildlife market in Wuhan believed to be the source of the outbreak. The coronavirus that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak was traced to the civet cat, a wild animal considered a delicacy in parts of South China. The civet is used in the popular dragon tiger phoenix soup, which is believed by locals to help with arthritis, stimulate poor blood flow, and revive decreased libido.The movement of humans toward recognizing animals as sentient beings may be assisted, a movement initiated and kept alive by the PETA president and founder Ingrid Newkirk and written about in her best selling book, Animalkind.
Consumerism. Our western culture is an extroverted and consumer driven one. Perhaps by sitting at home for extended periods, with the stores, at least at present, bare of many types of consumer goods, we can reflect on our impulse to seek emotional consolation outside of ourselves by buying new items that we may not need. I do realize that the beast of online shopping may be unleashed but here’s hoping that the online stores may not be able transport unnecessary consumer goods due to the transport channels being slowed down.
Possibility of increased relatedness. A series of recent posts by Rebecca Arendell Franks, who along with her husband and child has now been on forced quarantine in China for over 50 days, is quite illuminating. She said that, “Our family life has never been better. Usually, one weekend is long enough before I’m ready to send each of us back to school or work. But for SEVEN weeks, we’ve been home together with very little outside influences or distraction, forced to reconnect with one another, learn how to communicate better, give each other space, slow down our pace, and be a stronger family than ever before.” I encourage you to read the link regarding this at the end of this article.
Nature emerging from the technological and human encroachment upon its domain. It’s been observed in Wuhan that the sound of birds singing has been heard for the first time in a long time since the crisis began. In Wuhan, Rebecca Arendell Franks commented, “Right now, I hear birds outside my window (on the 25th floor). I used to think there weren’t really birds in Wuhan, because you rarely saw them and never heard them. I now know they were just muted and crowded out by the traffic and people. All day long now I hear birds singing. It stops me in my tracks to hear the sound of their wings.”
Learning new technologies for virtual relatedness. How does ZOOM actually work and can I teach my grandfather to hook up?
Learning to cook. Maybe we can now, instead of ordering food in or going out to a restaurant, learn to cook for ourselves and make that tasty, healthy recipe that we’ve always been meaning to get around to.
Examination of our national leader’s skill set in crisis management.
Exercise. Finally, the Peloton bike or treadmill can be put to good use!
Non-drug based medicine. Examination and renewed interest, along with a certain amount of respect given, of alternative methods for treating symptoms of coronavirus, and indeed other viral related illnesses such as the three studies currently underway in China on the use of IV vitamin C for the treatment of corona related pneumonia. See blog posts part one and two for further details.
Lifestyle factors. An awareness of how lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, sleep, and stress play an extraordinary role in immune efficiency.
Business awareness. Small business will become aware of cash flow issues, staffing needs, and unemployment issues.
US Federal Reserve slashing interest rates. Maybe now is the time where one can afford the mortgage on a new home that seemed out of reach a few years before. Or maybe people with fixed student loan payments can borrow money at a lower rate to pay those off.
Learning to connect with others non-locally. There’s a common misconception that in order to benefit from the full experience of another human being we have to be in their physical presence. Yet if we truly love someone and see both sides, the dark and the light, of their being, we can sit quietly, hold them in our hearts, and send deep love and appreciation to them for being in our lives. It helps if we have an understanding of the Einstein-Podolsky- Rosenberg paradox (EPR paradox) in quantum physics that showed that if one particle had ever been in contact with another particle, if they were separated across the full expanse of the universe in space and time, they’d be eternally intertwined or entangled. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”
(Please note this is a very simplistic explanation for quite a complex issue.)
A few more quick positive outlook possibilities:
Increased revenues for the medical device industry.
Increased revenues for the supplement industry.
Increased connection to neighbours to assist with grocery runs.
Appreciation for the media and their updates.
Appreciation for our doctors, nurses, and miscellaneous healthcare workers and politicians for rising to the occasion and setting minute by minute guidelines
Appreciation for mobile device apps, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for keeping us informed.
Appreciation and understanding of our own vulnerability.
Resetting of values and personal reflection on what is truly meaningful, including a reorganization of values and priorities.
So, as we step back, reassessing our priorities both personally and collectively, these are a few thoughts I’ve had in these troubling and somewhat frightening times. If Nobel Prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine is to be believed, even insentient material systems have an inherent drive to self-organization. When physical systems get pushed too “far from equilibrium” they escape this chaos by leaping into higher level states of organized order, referred to as “order out of chaos”. My challenge to all of you is, what inherent dynamic force may be at play in your life, driving you toward greater and greater wholeness, complexity, and consciousness in the midst of these very challenging times? What thoughts of this nature have come to your mind in these times?
While you contemplate having a positive outlook and these deeper thoughts, stay safe, follow your governmental and health directive guidelines, and do what you need to do to get through these times. We must attempt to move beyond the greatest fear, which is that of fear itself.
See part one and two for specific coronavirus updates and treatment suggestions.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.
It’s only common sense to keep our bodies as healthy as we can to help us to fight off all kinds of illnesses. Obviously, we’re always going to encounter germs in our daily lives but keeping our immune systems in good condition is an excellent defense strategy.
Follow these steps:
Get enough sleep, ideally seven or eight hours each night.
Try to reduce stress where you can in your life.
Make sure you’re on a diet that contains plenty of plant-based antioxidants, minerals and vitamins and eat healthy food to keep your body and immune system in good shape.
Make sure that you always get enough exercise whenever you can to keep everything in working order.
Stop consuming all sugar
Stop smoking or vaping immediately.
Get some N95 facemasks before supplies are gone.
An N95 respirator is a respiratory protective device designed to achieve a very close facial fit and very efficient filtration of airborne particles.
The ‘N95’ designation means that when subjected to careful testing, the respirator blocks at least 95% of very small (0.3 micron) test particles. If properly fitted, the filtration capabilities of N95 respirators exceed those of facemasks. However, even a properly fitted N95 respirator doesn’t completely eliminate the risk of illness or death.
N95 respirators aren’t designed for children or people with facial hair. Because a proper fit cannot be achieved on children and people with facial hair, the N95 respirator may not provide full protection.
A full list of FDA approved respirators is provided below. These might already be out of stock everywhere but put orders in regardless of the backorder.
3M™ Particulate Respirator 8612F
Pasture Tm F550G Respirator
Pasture Tm A520G Respirator
Transmission through the eye is a common vector for the aerosolized virus. One of the common transmissions is touching public items then touching your face and transmitting it through the eye. Frequent hand washing and excellent hygiene are paramount.
Drug treatments
It’s important to be aware that there are at present no antiviral treatments that are effective for the treatment of Covid-19. There are currently no vaccines available for SARS-CoV-2. The present treatment approach is for supportive care and symptom management only. If people become severely ill, vital organ function support is necessary, usually in a hospital or ICU setting.
Here’s a link to the number of drugs that as of February 2020 were being studied for the treatment of Covid 19. .
The CDC also has a site discussing antiviral medications for the flu here.
A Chinese multicenter collaboration group suggested this malaria drug might be useful for the treatment of Covid-19 pneumonia. In another recently published paper, the use of hydroxychloroquine, 400 mg twice daily followed by a maintenance dose of 200mg twice daily for four days, was found to be more potent than chloroquine to inhibit SARS-CoV2. Hydroxychloroquine was also shown to have fewer side effects than chloroquine while still addressing the inflammatory cytokine storm induced by the virus.
The recommended dose of chloroquine phosphate was 500mg twice daily for ten days.
This drug is traditionally is used as an antiparasitic and has been studied for the treatment of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus. This drug has been shown, in test tube studies at least, to have activity against MERS-CoV and other coronaviruses. Further studies are being undertaken to determine its true efficacy. The recommended dose was 1000mg twice daily for 10 days.
A 62-year-old man who became Spain’s first coronavirus patient is believed to have made a full recovery after being treated with an HIV drug called Kaletra or lopinavir-ritonavir. Miguel Ángel Benítez was admitted to the Virgen del Rocio Hospital in Seville, where he received an antiretroviral drug, which has been used to treat HIV and AIDS for over ten years. The drug was combined with interferon beta, which is a protein that prevents cells from becoming infected and is administered to multiple sclerosis patients. Santiago Moreno, head of infectious diseases at the Ramón y Cajal hospital in Madrid, said that the “SARS-CoV-2 protease is very similar to that of HIV,” using a name that sometimes refers to the novel coronavirus.
In this February 2020 article it was discussed that “Coronavirus infection (regardless of the various types of corona virus) is primarily attacked by immune cells including mast cells (MCs), which are located in the submucosa of the respiratory tract and in the nasal cavity and represent a barrier of protection against microorganisms. Virus activate MCs which release early inflammatory chemical compounds including histamine and protease; while late activation provokes the generation of pro-inflammatory IL-1 family members including IL-1 and IL-33.” The article proposes for the first time that inflammation by coronavirus may be inhibited by anti-inflammatory cytokines belonging to the IL-1 family members.
It may be that individuals with MCAS are at higher risk for developing the serious consequences of this infection and thus may benefit from much stricter control of the mast cell activation syndrome if infected. Nebulized cromolyn and/or glutathione or n-acetyl cysteine (NAC) and/or IV Benadryl may be extremely helpful in these conditions.
In addition to the previous suggestions, there are a number of natural substances and supplements that can be of help in lowering your risk of becoming infected with the current coronavirus. Many of these approaches are not specific treatments for the coronavirus but have been studied and referenced in the literature as having antiviral effects.
It’s common knowledge that vitamin C is good for us but there have been clinical trials in China regarding the intravenous use of vitamin C to help treat patients suffering from Covid-19. A dose of between 100 and 200 mg/kg body weight (this is equal to quite a low dose of between 7.5 and 15 grams for a 180 lb person) was given to patients intravenously for three consecutive days and was very effective. There are currently three clinical trials sponsored by the Chinese government studying vitamin C. Dr. Tom Levy and Dr. Jeanne Drisko from the integrative U.S. medical community are involved in the Chinese studies. Dr. Richard Cheng MD PhD, who has been studying IV vitamin C, is suggesting the use of oral vitamin C. The one study can be found at the clinicaltrial.gov website. High dose vitamin C at 20 grams has been used in ICUs for some time in an attempt to reduce mortality from septic shock, in one study from 40% to 4%. However, most hospitals refuse to administer IV vitamin C for viral infections since it’s not considered standard of care. It’s quite likely that these Chinese studies will place high dose IV vitamin C therapy for viral infections a part of mainstream treatment in the future.
In the United States, doctors who have pioneered vitamin and mineral therapies have also been studying the effects of intravenous vitamin C, with a February 2020 paper being published. “Early Large Dose Intravenous Vitamin C is the Treatment of Choice for 2019-nCov Infected Pneumonia” recommends this for the treatment for pneumonia resulting from the virus.
A recommended minimum oral daily dose of vitamin C is 2,000mg. Twice daily dosing is recommended due to the water-soluble nature of vitamin C and the fact that it’s quickly metabolized. If one wants a liposomal formulation, certain brands do provide this option or you can make your own by adding https://klinghardtinstitute.com/one or two teaspoons of Body Bio PC (phosphatidyl choline) to 2 grams of powdered vitamin C and stirring it vigorously. Divide your dose and take twice daily. Watch for diarrhea if your dose is excessive.
This is also very important. It’s recommended that we have a minimum of 2,000 IU and a maximum of 10,000 IU per day. The usual daily dosage for vitamin D is 1000 IU per 25 pounds of body weight. It’s best to get vitamin D levels measured and to have serum levels in Canada between 150 and 200 nmol/l. People tend to have lower vitamin D levels in the fall and winter months due to fewer hours of sunlight. However, our bodies need vitamin D to support our immune system so we need to make sure that we’re getting enough of this vital ingredient. All the cells in our bodies have receptor sites but only two types are in every cell. These are thyroid hormone receptor sites, which are responsible for metabolism, and vitamin D receptor sides. This gives you some idea of the importance of vitamin D in maintaining our overall health and wellbeing. Research indicates that vitamin D may even be more effective than the flu vaccine when it comes to flu prevention. Consequently, it’s a good idea to include vitamin D in the fight against Covid-19.
It has been reported by many clinicians that high doses vitamin D of 50,000 IU over three days is highly effective in treating acute viral infections. This dosing is contraindicated in any person with lymphoid malignancies and in any patient with granulomatous diseases such as sarcoidosis, where high calcium levels are an issue. Also, a relative contraindication is pregnancy. This is by no means an approved treatment for Covid 19.
This has been shown to be effective in fighting infections and also supports the immune system. Zinc can help to prevent coronavirus and other viruses multiplying in the throat and nasopharynx, which is the space above the soft palate at the back of the nose connecting the nose to the mouth and allowing us to breathe through our nose. When you begin to exhibit symptoms of the illness zinc capsules can be taken several times a day. The recommended dose for zinc is between 40 and 50mg per day.
This has also has some antibacterial and anti-viral properties. If you use an official product such as Argentyn 23 you have a clear idea of how much silver you are putting into your body and don’t run the risk of taking too much. If you have viral symptoms, the recommended dosage is one teaspoon seven times per day. However, this is only a short-term solution as there are side effects such as skin discoloration if silver is used for too long.
This herb has been used in traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda for a long time. It’s been shown that the herb’s compounds have anti-inflammatory, antiviral, and antioxidant benefits. The herb boosts the immune system and is often employed to fight cold and flu symptoms. As a result it does have a role to play in treating the latest version of coronavirus, at least in the short term. One capsule twice a day is the recommended dose of the herbal supplement if you exhibit symptoms of the virus. There are a number of referenced articles that demonstrate its effectiveness against the influenza virus, particularly with regards to respiratory symptoms. Lyme patients with active disease may have a Herxheimer reaction as it increases lymphocyte proliferation and interleukin -2.
Another natural short-term solution if you have typical flu symptoms, such as a cough, sneezing, and a runny nose, is elderberry extract taken up to six times a day. Elderberries come from the European elder tree, which is not the same as the American Elder, Elderflower, or Dwarf Elder. People believe the extract helps with the common cold, influenza, boosts the immune system, and reduces inflammation.
Is also known as marigold and has been used as a medicinal herb for a very long time. The plant’s extracts have antiviral, antigenotoxic, and anti-inflammatory properties that can be used to treat some of the symptoms of Covid-19.
Also known as dandelion, this can also be used as an anti-inflammatory supplement. Dandelion also has antioxidant properties and some studies indicate that it has antiviral benefits and is good for our immune system.
This is known to be a potent antiviral, particularly in animal models infected with corona virus. Dr. Ramzi Asfour, an infectious disease physician, suggests Beekeeper’s Natural propolis spray. Propolis increases cellular immune responses and has antiviral properties. Propolis can also be dispensed in a vaporizer (available from Ki Science) and has been shown to neutralize circulating mycotoxins in the air.
Most commonly known as skullcap, this is another flowering plant with medicinal qualities. It has been used to treat conditions such as respiratory infections and inflammation and have antibacterial, antiviral, and antioxidant properties.
Also referred to as sweet wormwood this has been used in traditional medicine for some time and has been employed in medicines to treat malaria. There are some indications that the plant may also be used to treat some coronavirus symptoms, particularly the SARS related coronavirus.
Dr. Klinghardt, in his extremely informative PowerPoint presentation, has recommended placing calendula, licorice, scutalaria, andrographis, artemisia, and dandelion tinctures, calculated for their weekly dose, in a blender with 100mls of clean water and 14 grams of vitamin C powder. Add two tablespoons of liquid Body Bio PC phosphatidyl choline and blend for a few minutes. Put this mixture in a glass and keep in the fridge. Each day, drink one seventh of the dose.
This product contains 19 different herbs with antiviral and immune modulating effects, including licorice, skullcap, dandelion, and rosemary.
Some patients have access to peptides with immunomodulating effects. I recently returned from a peptide conference in Los Angeles and the following peptides were suggested for their antiviral and immune modulatory effects.
Thymosin alpha 1 – This is the most recommended peptide for immune stimulation. This should be used as a treatment adjuvant and a prophylactic and can help with many conditions beyond viral illness. The recommended daily dose in 450mcg.
Thymosin beta 4 – Natural killer cells are essential for defense against tumors and virus-infected cells. The cells are activated in by ONF-Gamma. This is activated by IL-18, which TB4 upregulates. Therefore, TB4 has ben studied for many Immune related diseases. Caution is warranted with cancer patients as it can increase the growth of cancers.
LL 37 (cathelicidin) – This peptide has broad spectrum antiviral/microbial, fungal effects. Peptides such as LL 37 are key components of innate defenses against infection, with both microbial and host defense modulatory functions. In addition to their well documented bactericidal potential, CHDP have more recently been shown to have antiviral properties. LL 37 has ben shown to be highly effective in preventing viral attachment to cells. It’s been used in several virus studies and has been anecdotally reported to work well with respiratory tract viruses.
Pentosan polysulfate – Polysulfates are highly potent and selective inhibitors of the in vitro replication of HIV and other enveloped viruses such as coronavirus. The anti-viral activity of polysulfates is a result of their shielding of the positively charged sites in the V3 loop of the viral envelope glycoprotein gpl120, which inhibits viral entry into cells and allows for immune clearance. The usual dose is 2mg/kg.
Selank – This is a variant of the immune molecule tufstin and has potent antiviral properties in addition to its neurological effects. The antiviral characteristics of Selank were evaluated both in vitro and in vivo against the influenza virus strain H3N2 and H5N1 and the type 1 and 2 Herpes virus. It was revealed that Selank might have a prophylactic effect during influenza infection and a therapeutic effect during a herpes virus infection. It could also be helpful with Covid-19.
The Hoffman Centre Programs for cold and flu treatment
We have developed a number of potential programs for acute cold and flu treatment. While the details aren’t specific to coronavirus many of the recommendations are applicable to dealing with virus that commonly infect us in the winter months. These recommendations are in no way a substitute for quick and rapid communication with your healthcare providers and the guidelines as issued via websites (like this one), previously mentioned at the beginning of this article.
Any treatment that you decide to undertake should start at the first onset of symptoms. The following instructions are to be followed for the duration of symptoms unless otherwise stated.
Immediately stop consuming any sugar, since this paralyzes your white blood cells, the body’s first defense against illness. Make sure you also get plenty of sleep, at least between 7.5 and 8.5 hours per night. Hot apple cider vinegar baths twice a day will help to speed up the progression of the cold and reduce your fever, potentially halving the amount of time you may have symptoms. Add two cups of apple cider vinegar to a full bath of hot water and soak for twenty minutes, remembering to fully submerge your body. If the illness has affected the chest, you can steam water over the stove, add eucalyptus drops, and breathe in the vapor for some relief from your symptoms.
Please note that this treatment program is not to be undertaken if you are pregnant or breastfeeding.
Adult Dosage (age 16 and up)
Oscillococcinum is the first supplement to take at the first sign of a cold or flu. This works better for flu like symptoms (not cold symptoms) and you simply need to follow the directions on the package.
Vitamin D – 50,000 IU for three days. Contraindication to use of high dose vitamin D is lymphoid malignancies, pregnancy, and granulomatous diseases such as sarcoidosis
Mycelized vitamin A – 100,000 IU for three days. Contraindicated in pregnancy.
Vitamin C – 1 to 2g two to three times daily (titrate dose upward to bowel tolerance)
Astragalus Tincture – 1 dropper three times daily
Echinamide Anti-Cold tincture – 2ml three times daily
Probiomax probiotic – 1 capsule two times daily
Saccharomyces Boulardii – 2 capsules twice daily
Garlic/allicin – 2 capsules three times daily after meals. Open the capsule in 6oz of water and let sit for two minutes before drinking.
Argentyn 23 colloidal silver – 1 teaspoon three times daily in water
Andrographis – 2 dropperfuls twice daily in water
Transfer Factor Multi Immune – 2 capsules twice daily
DHEA – 50mg per day for two to three days will boost the immune system and fight infection. Note that this is for adults only.
For muscle aches take arnica and/or magnesium malate – 2 caps three times daily
Add anti-viral supplements such as olive leaf extract – 2 capsules three times daily, oil of oregano (brand name ADP) 2 capsules three times per day and lysine 500mg 2 capsules three times daily
IV Treatment for 3 days
IV vitamin C – 15 to 35g once per day. Check for G6PG enzyme deficiency first
Alternatively – IV Hydrogen Peroxide, once per day
Child Dosage (2 years and older)
Mycelized vitamin A – 10,000 IU for three days
Vitamin D – 10,000 IU for three days
Vitamin C – Between 250 and 500mg three times daily (to bowel tolerance)
Echinamide Anti-Cold – Between an third and a half a dropper three times daily
Probiomax probiotic – Half a capsule twice daily
Saccharomyces Boulardii – Half to a full capsule twice daily
Garlic – Half to a full capsule twice daily after meals. Open capsule in 6oz of water and let sit for two minutes before drinking. Note that it is difficult to get a child to take this.
Argentyn 23 colloidal silver – Half a teaspoon three times daily in water
Transfer Factor Multi Immune – 2 capsules daily
Maintenance and Prevention
Remember to stop consuming any sugar immediately, since sugar paralyzes your white blood cells, which provide your body’s first defense against sickness. Make sure you get at least 7.5 to 8.5 hours of sleep each night as well. This treatment program is not for women that are pregnant or breastfeeding.
Throat Infection
Zinc – 30 to 50mg lozenges. The topical antimicrobial effect can be important in infections of the throat.
Biocidin throat spray – 2 sprays three to five times daily
Propolis throat spray – 5 sprays three times daily
Argentyn 23 throat spray- 3 sprays three times per day
See your doctor for a throat swab to exclude strep throat and/or mononucleosis
Nasal Irrigation
Use a Neti Pot, particular with upper respiratory infection, for three days.
Place one dropper full of Nasya wash into your Neti Pot with warm water and a heaping quarter teaspoon of pure non-ionized Neti Pot Salt.
Stir until salt is dissolved.
Add three drops of Echinacea Anti Cold and Core Phyto Lavage to the solution. Use this to perform the nasal wash as directed by the Neti Pot instructions on the bottle.
Air Spray
Add a quarter teaspoon of salt to the bottom of an empty spray bottle.
Add five drops of Thieves, an essential oil by Young Living, on top of the salt as this will help to dissipate it,
Fill bottle with warm water.
Now you now have an air spray that will assist in lowering counts of viruses, bacteria, and molds in the air.
Spray your home, office, and other areas a couple of times a day.
You can also put Thieves drops into your palms and cup your hands over your face then inhale five or six times.
This will prevent you from contracting a sinus or lung infection, especially during long distance flights.
Dr. Alex Vasquez Recommendations
Dr. Alex Vasquez is an internationally recognized author, presenter, and teacher, particularly with regards to immune related disorders. He earned three doctorate degrees from fully accredited universities in the United States and has worked in various clinical facilities ranging from private boutique clinics to inpatient hospital settings. Dr. Vasquez has published 120 books, articles, letters and editorials in various magazines and peer-reviewed medical journals, including British Medical Journal, Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature Reviews Rheumatology, and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
What follows are his recommendations for viral infections and are not meant to be specific treatments for any infections, particularly coronavirus. I’ve included these references for those curious patients who are always checking out protocols online.
Antiviral
Powdered Glycyrrhiza Glabra – 1.5g BID for a maximum of four weeks. Works as a tea. This is a great expectorant but avoid in heart failure patients, monitor BP and potassium
Zinc – Between 20 and 50mg a day
Selenium – 400 to 600 ug per day
Iodoral Iodine/Iodide – 12.5mg a day for two weeks
Melissa officialis – Dose variable depending on formulation
Carica papaya leaf extract
Grape seed extract (see Biotics Research Bio-Cyanidins below)
Viral Anti-replication
SAMe – 400mg TID plus Betaine TMG 3g BID for one week
Methyl-Folate – 1.6mg od for one to two weeks
Alpha Lipoic Acid – 300 to 400mg TID plus Thiamine 100mg (or B Complex High Potency)
NAC – 600mg BID to TID between meals
Immunonutrition
Paleo-Mediterranean Diet with no refined carbohydrates
Protectamin Whey Protein – 45g a day for immune dipeptides, if dairy tolerant
L-Glutamine powder – 9g TID between meals
Vitamin A – 100,000 IU load for three to five days, then 25,000 to 50,000 IU for two weeks (not during pregnancy)
Vitamin D3 – 100,000 to 300,000 IU load for one dose, then 10,000 IU for ten days to increase endogenous antimicrobial peptides
Nordic Naturals Arctic Cod Liver Oil without vitamin D – One teaspoon TID with meals
Selenium – 600-800mcg/d plus 800 IU vitamin E per day
Melatonin – 20mg qHS
Ubiquinol CoQ10 – 300mg od to protect the mitochondria
Biotics Research KappArest – Three capsules BID as NFKB hijacked by viruses for replication
Biotics Research Bio-Cyanidins – One tablet BID (contains marine pine bark and grape seed extract)
Biotics Research UltraVir-X – One capsule TID (Red-rooted sage, Boneset, Actratylodes, Sweet Violet, Wheat Grass, Bupleurum, Astralagus, Bee Propolis, Maitake, Black Walnut, Hesperidin, Rutin)
Biotics Research POA-Phytolens (Cats’ Claw, Lens esculenta extract) – One capsule TID
Consider broad spectrum multi such as Metagenics PhytoMulti at two tablets per day (adjust dosage of Zinc and Selenium above)
Treatment and Vaccines
There is no vaccine currently available to combat the current coronavirus outbreak.
The best advice is to protect yourself in some of the ways outlined above and avoid contact with infected individuals or locations where you might encounter potential carriers of the virus.
There’s no specific antiviral treatment that’s recommended for patients with the Covid-19 virus.
Those infected should receive the medical treatment required to deal with their symptoms, including care of vital organs in the most severe cases.
In Conclusion
While we still don’t know everything about the current Covid-19 virus, common sense and taking precautions and preventative measures will be a great help.
The feeling in the medical community is that the virus is likely to become less aggressive and less dangerous over time, as many viruses do, although this is far from certain.
Many viruses adapt, mutate, and continue to live with us everyday. Time will tell if the latest threat will follow the same pattern in the coming weeks and months.
As a final note, in the current circumstances, if you’re suffering from what you’d describe as symptom similar to flu such as a cough, fever, chills, or an aching feeling in the body, please don’t visit the office. If you have an appointment we can do a phone consultation instead or even connect via zoom online. Staying at home will allow you the opportunity to recover and also reduce the likelihood that you’ll pass on the virus to others.
Resources
Expert consensus on chloroquine phosphate for the treatment of novel coronavirus pneumonia. Zhonghua Jie He He Hu Xi Za ZHi 2020 Feb 20. 43:E019
Ferreira L, Effect of the ethanolic extract from green propolis on production of antibodies after immunization against canine parvovirus (CPV) and canine coronavirus (CCOV). Brazilian Journal of Veterinary Research and Animal Science 49.2 (2012):116-121. http://www.revistas.usp.br/bjvras/article/view/40267
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.
Every day brings a new update about the spread of coronavirus. There are more cases all around the world every day and naturally people are very concerned. There’s certainly not a shortage of stories in the media but is the virus as dangerous as it’s being portrayed? And is the hysteria that’s being generated potentially more damaging than the threat posed by the virus?
In Canada, you can get the very latest updates courtesy of the federal government, including the current situation in different parts of the country, the risk to Canadians, how the government is monitoring the virus, travel advice, and the symptoms, treatment, and risk factors here.
A similar range of information is available for Alberta residents here. For those of you in the U.S. you can access pertinent information here.
Mass panic is certainly not going to help the situation but neither will complacency. Despite the fear being whipped up on social media and in the traditional media reports, it’s perfectly natural to be anxious about this situation. This outbreak isn’t to be casually dismissed as it is very serious and everyone needs to accept that and not be in denial. We all need to work together to get through this. We may not know everything about the coronavirus yet and vaccines, treatment and indeed cures are still some way off, but we need to determine strategies that are going to work to protect ourselves and prevent the spread of the virus. So what exactly is coronavirus?
The Virus
Coronavirus is an illness that mostly affects our respiratory system. Doctors are still learning about the virus but it is thought to primarily be airborne, which means that it can be spread from one person to another. When a person coughs or sneezes they produce what are known as respiratory droplets. These can be breathed in by other people that are nearby or left on your hands if you touch your face after coughing or sneezing. In China, the fact that the illness seems to be mainly transmitted to family members, healthcare workers and others in close contact with an infected person strongly indicates the transfer of the virus is by respiratory droplets. The droplets can also remain on objects that have been touched, such as door handles, keyboard, elevator buttons, and many other everyday items. The virus can then spread if a person comes into contact with a surface that’s been contaminated.
It has been suggested by recent studies that asymptomatic patients are also able to transmit the infection. This means that isolation might not be as effective a weapon against the virus as was previously thought. Researchers followed viral expression through infection through throat and nasal throat swabs in a small select group of patients. The researchers discovered that there were increases in viral loads at the point when the patients became asymptomatic. Doctors in Wuhan, China, studied 425 patients that had the virus. Many of the earliest cases were linked to direct exposure to live animal and seafood markets. However, later cases were unconnected to the animal markets, reinforcing the theory that the virus is transmitted between humans.
There are believed to be many different types of coronavirus but only 7 of them can cause disease in humans. Some of the coronaviruses that usually affect animals are also able to infect people. The diseases Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) are also caused by coronaviruses that moved to people from animals. Like MERS and SARS, COVID-19 is believed to have originated in bats. Before the illness was brought under control in 2003, SARS infected more than 8,000 people and almost 800 died. 2,465 cases of MERS have been reported since 2012 and 850 people have died. The mortality rate for SARS was around 10%, whereas for MERS the mortality rate is around 34.5%.
The coronavirus that is currently in the news is called SARS-COV-2 (formerly called 2019-nCOV). The disease that it causes has been called Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). Once someone has the virus, the symptoms can be very mild but for some people they can be very serious and endanger life. Although we’re still learning about COVID-19 it does seem to be milder in its effects than SARS or MERS, with only a 2% mortality rate. Initially, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the worst severe cases in China were mostly in adults over 40 years old with significant comorbidities. This means that the patient has more than one chronic medical condition. The illness also seemed to affect more men than women, although this could change as the outbreak continues. As of March 12, 2020, COVID-19 had been confirmed in more than 128,343 people, mostly in China. To date 68,324 people have recovered from the infection. By this date, the virus had caused more than 4,720 deaths and has spread to more and more countries. These websites have information on the global situation that is updated regularly. Keep in mind that an estimated 291,000 to 646,000 people die worldwide from flu every year.
Symptoms of Coronavirus
A person that has Covid-19 might not show any symptoms at all for between 2 and 12.5 days, with the average time being 5.2 days. This one can easily pass it on to others without even knowing that they are infected in the early stages. The average time from infection to symptoms appears to be 12.5 days. The pandemic worldwide appears to be doubling every 7 days and every infected person appears to infect an average of 2.2 others.
Symptoms can include:
Fever
Cough
Breathing difficulties and shortness of breath.
While some of the symptoms are similar to colds and flu that people suffer from throughout the year, there are important differences. With the common cold we suffer from a runny nose and there is sputum or phlegm. This is the mixture of mucus and saliva that we cough up from our lungs when we get sick. With the coronavirus there’s a dry cough but no runny nose. This may occur in a small percentage of patients (4%) but it’s thought this is because they already have some form of flu or cold symptoms.
If nasal congestion does occur with this virus, it is usually very severe. If there is an associated sore throat, it can last for three or four days. The virus might then move to the trachea and lungs, resulting in pneumonia that can last for five or six days. Breathing difficulties and a high fever are also likely at this stage of the illness. People infected might have one or more other symptoms including headaches, muscle pain and stiffness, fatigue, loss of appetite, chills and sweats, a rash, dizziness, stomach upsets, or nausea. Numbers do vary but around 90-98% of people have a fever, 80% a dry cough, and 30% have trouble breathing and extreme fatigue. Acute respiratory distress syndrome developed in about 29 % of patients infected. Even though pneumonia is involved, 80% percent of these cases are mild and the person doesn’t need to go to a hospital. About 15 % had severe infection and 5 % were critical. The Chinese CDC analysis of 44,672 patients reported that the fatality rate on healthy people with no reported comorbid conditions was 0.9%.
In general, children, younger people, and young adults seem to get mild versions of the illness. Those at the highest risk are people aged 70 to 75 or older that have existing medical conditions such as cardiac problems or pulmonary issues such as emphysema. The virus is also more likely to affect people with weakened immune systems, kidney disease, diabetes, hepatitis B, and cancer.
Protecting Yourself
There are a number of ways that you can protect yourself from being infected by the Covid-19 virus. Many of these are things should be part of our daily routines to prevent the spread of germs and keep our bodies healthy.
Washing your hands regularly throughout the day with soap and warm water for at least 20 seconds each time will help to keep infection at bay.
All surfaces of the hands need to be cleaned, front and back, between the fingers and under the nails. You can use an alcohol-based non-toxic hand sanitizer (60% alcohol-based) if there’s no soap and water available. However, always use soap and water rather than hand sanitizer whenever possible.
Always wash your hands before eating and touching your face. This is something you may have heard quite often recently, but infection can be spread via the nose, mouth, or eyes if your hands aren’t clean. Admittedly, the virus can only survive on your hands for between and ten minutes but although that may not seem long you could touch another part of your body in that time and spread the virus.
Things that are frequently touched in the home, workplace or other locations must be regularly cleaned and disinfected with wipes or cleaning sprays. The virus can survive for up to twelve hours if it falls onto a metal surface. On fabric it lives for between six and twelve hours but regular laundry detergent will destroy the virus.
Gargling can work to protect your throat from the virus. You can use a standard solution from the drugstore but really one made from salt in warm water is all you really need.
It’s also a good idea to drink plenty of warm liquids such as tea rather than cold drinks, either with or without ice.
Some people have also found bee propolis mouth spray to work well. Propolis is a substance created by bees to protect their hives against bacteria. As a spray it helps to relieve a sore throat or other mouth issues and strengthens the immune systems. It also encourages antioxidants in our bodies. Antioxidants are molecules that neutralize free radicals, which are unstable molecules cause cell damage. CAUTION:Propolis is not to be taken if you have a Honey or Bee allergy.
If you’re showing no symptoms and remain healthy, avoid contact with others that are sick since the virus is considered to be airborne and spreads very quickly. It’s believed that the virus can travel between six and eight feet when it’s airborne.
If you are sick with the virus, avoid contact with other so that you don’t help the virus to spread. Stay away from work or school and isolate yourself at home until you can recover.
If you’re coughing and sneezing, try not to do this into your hands but into the crook of your arm or use a tissue to cover your nose and mouth and ensure that tissues are safely disposed of in the garbage.
If you’re sick and have no choice but to go outside your home, wear a mask that covers your nose and mouth. This will stop you from infecting others while you’re out. However, bear in mind that if you don’t already have the virus a mask this will not protect you from catching the virus from an infected person that isn’t wearing a mask.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman joins Pandora Peoples on WOMR and WFMR radio to discuss the origins of The Hoffman Centre and the benefits of the integrative approach to functional medicine. Dr. Bruce Hoffman utilizes the ayurvedic model through a program he developed called, The Seven Stages of Health & Transformation™ that brings to light the hidden causes of what may be making you sick, and what you can do to heal yourself.
You’re tuned in to 92.1 WOMAR, FM Provincetown and 91.3 WOMAR, FM Orleans, the voice and spirit of Cape Cod. I bid you welcome to another episode of Healing Wisdom. I’m your host Pandora people’s chartered herbalist and psychic medium healing wisdom explores Mind Body soul connections as we discussed the healing effects of the arts, metaphysical concepts, intuition and the spiritual aspects of everyday living. Healing wisdom begins in the heart. Our theme music is provided by mystic Pete
01:00
Hello, hello, hello, hello, Cape Cod and beyond. My guest today is functional medicine Dr. Bruce Hoffman, founder of the Hoffman Center for Integrative and Functional Medicine. His center encourages people to become involved with the process of health, restoration, self-master their health issues and make health a primary value. Dr. Hoffman has dedicated himself to research and education in cutting edge health care wellbeing and living a meaningful life. Welcome, Bruce, thank you so much for being with us.
01:28
Excellent. Thanks Pandora
01:29
So first off, what inspired you to go from an allopathic practice or a traditional practice to an integrative approach to functional medicine,
01:39
Curiosity more than anything and frustration at the drug-based model, you know, when you go to med school, you learn this is called n squared d squared, medicine = name of symptom name of drug. Although it’s interesting, it really limits your diagnostic and therapeutic options. So, when a patient presents say with complex illness, where there’s a mind -associated issue, and or environmental issue, nothing you can do with a drug based model, you know, you just diagnose a disease find a drug or refer to a specialist. And that’s it. It’s over. Whereas in an integrative model, you look far and wide for what they call in functional medicine, antecedents, mediators and triggers. So, you look upstream, you know, and in a functional model that I use functional medicine workup that I use, I’ve expanded beyond pure functional medicine into what I call the seven stages to health transformation. And I use an Ayurvedic model to explain the different layers and levels that come to the table when you’re trying to diagnose and treat somebody. Anywhere from the family systems into which they originated into the early emotional experiences and ego development and defenses, through to unresolved emotional traumas through the brain states and brain functions and then into biochemistry and toxicology. So, it’s a much broader diagnostic roadmap that we use ana a therapeutic roadmap, and I just found the drug-based model limiting. I enjoyed being a traditional MD. But now that I practice a much more expanded paradigm, it’s much more exciting and your results are tremendous when you apply this sort of wider model, you know.
03:17
Yes, indeed. So, after studying traditional Ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy and looking at health care, from a mind, body, spirit perspective, I’m wondering what fundamental conclusions you’ve drawn about wellness that led you to your inspiration and the creation of the Hoffman Centre.
03:37
Wellness is a strange term because it denotes what I really try and help people with, which is to try and live in a state of maximum wellness, maximum potential. And that moves everybody from a disease-based paradigm into what we you know, what is called a wellness paradigm, but is somebody living at their maximum potential, are they fulfilling the desires of their most innate, instinctual talents and abilities, and illnesses and symptoms often sort of create a, what would the word be, they create a block in that person’s trajectory towards optimal performance of their destiny? And so, we use symptoms and diagnosis to, to sort of ask a lot more deeper questions and dive right into the potential reasons why a person may not be fulfilling their ordained destiny. And that’s what I love to do. And so that’s why I created the center to try and explore those possibilities with people and it’s very rewarding, and not everybody, somebody may just have something that’s physically based but many people with chronic illness have led many layers and levels of stressors on their systems, and the detective game of trying to diagnose and treat is what inspires me to keep doing what I love to do. 10 Center.
05:00
Very cool. I’m wondering what some of your fundamental theories that you’ve developed are as a result of your work that you could share with us or what some of your underlying ideas are, that are part of your mission.
05:18
Certain things that stand out, when I have somebody sitting in front of me with a complex illness, a) you’ve got to take into account all the basic lifestyle factors, diet, sleep, exercise, stress, if you don’t look at those in great detail and sort of dissect them into the multiple subsets, you know, like a diet, for example, there’s many different diets that you can therapeutically apply and what may fit one person may not work for the other. You have to really know your nutrition and dietary issues in great, great detail. A high histamine diet versus a ketogenic diet versus a paleo autoimmune diet versus the Ayurvedic Vata pacifying, that there’s many, many permutations, you got to know those things thoroughly. So that’s huge. And as you know, diet affects the gut microbiome. And the gut microbiome affects the vagus nerve and the vagus nerve runs into the brain. So, your brain-gut microbiome is huge. If you’re not looking at the gut-brain microbiome you can’t really work out what’s going on. So, diet is big. The gut microbiome is big.
Dentistry, I use a lot of dental insights in order to try and ascertain what may be going on particularly with people’s brains, because the inferior alveolar nerve in the lower part of the jaw runs back into the brainstem as well. So, you get a lot of toxic buildup in root canals, cavitation sites, etc, etc. So, dentistry, a lot of respect for dentistry. Everybody to get a panorex X ray and a 3D Cone Beam CT scan of the jaw, and then I send them to a biological dentist to do a complex workup and treat accordingly. So, dentistry is big. Diet is big.
Sleep, sleep, almost everybody I see has a sleep study, not one of those sleep apnea tests they take home. Do a full in-house sleep study. And I rely on that tremendous extensive can’t tell you how many people suffer ill health from sleep issues, sleep is huge. Which brings me to the whole thing of emf, electromagnetic field exposures, radio frequencies and electrical fields, magnetic fields. That has become a very dominant part of my intake history taking to see what people are doing, how much screen time, are they using blue light blocking glasses, are they turning off their routers at night? So, I take that all of that into account? Huge, huge, huge.
And then another piece that is huge in my work is I really don’t start to work with somebody unless I understand the family system into which they originated. The ancestral lineage not from a genetic but from an epigenetic perspective, what are the experiences of their mothers and fathers and grandparents? I find that is where I really begin my curiosity through taking a history. Are you in relationship with your mother or in your relationship with your father, if people say I can’t stand my mother, I can’t stand my father, I don’t want anything to do with them’ I know right then my task of healing is being brought to a halt. You can’t heal somebody who isn’t aligned with their family system in a flow of love, can’t do it. It doesn’t work. You can treat a symptom but you’re not going to help that person reach their maximum potential if they’ve shut down the influences of their parents or their ancestors, because people are half their mother, half their father, if you say no to your mother or say no to your father you are saying no to half of your life force. And that needs to be worked through. And I use family constellation therapy for that. And things like that, you know?
08:45
Yes, I was going to ask what you do for that for that situation? Because that, you know, there are a number of folks who are. Is it family therapy?
08:57
No, it’s not family therapy, its family constellation therapy. Its different form family therapy
09:01
Can you explain that?
09:02
Well, you take a history or you ask people certain questions about their family of origin. What do you blame your mother for? What do you blame your father for? Those are the first question. And if they have a whole string of complaints that begins the diagnostic and therapeutic process. It was developed by Bert Hellinger, called family constellation therapy. He just died a few weeks ago, actually. And it’s a method of working people up through understanding the entanglement of the family system. We try to understand the laws that operate in family systems and those things that lead to good outcomes and those things that blocked the flow of energy in a family. You have to sort of study it and learn it.
09:46
Yes, it’s very, very intriguing. I’m wondering if you could just mention briefly, you described turning off your routers at night. So, these electromagnetic fields that we’re constantly in relation to in this digital age. They are really, truly bad for us.
10:03
Depends, yeah, there’s certain subtypes of people are more susceptible than others. And some work is being done on basic detox for liver cytochrome p 450 enzymes. Liver enzyme pathways, detox pathways, people with certain liver detox enzyme susceptibilities do much worse, in terms of the electromagnetic hypersensitivities. So, when you sleep at night, you should be in a very deep parasympathetic healing state. Most people you see, particularly say in inner cities, have about two volts running through their body from the electrical fields around them. And then they have these electromagnetic radio frequency fields. This is from the cell phone towers and routers, like if you live in a condo, you’ve got everybody’s router beaming into your bed at night. And when you’re sleeping at night, you are meant to be in this very deep, relaxed state. But if you are surrounded by radio frequencies and electric fields and magnetic fields, you’re in a stress state. And that opens up the blood brain barrier, opens up the gut barrier, leads to suppression of melatonin, the whole glymphatic system or brain detox system doesn’t work, you’re in big trouble. And it’s not being emphasized enough, you know. And then with dentistry, if bite problems and grinding, you don’t detoxify through the glymphatic system and down through the, you know, through the lymphatics that go down through your internal jugular vein and other parts of your neck and thoracic region. So, you want to know these things. I send in Baubiologists or building biologists into homes to measure all of these things before I start treating people with cognitive difficulties or sleep difficulties. They go turn off routers, they help people with sleep, you know, screen time, they use blue light blocking glasses, they do all of these things. So, it’s an integral part of the work I do?
11:41
Well, that’s very exciting. I’m just wondering, I used to erase floppy disks by just touching them. So, I obviously have some sort of electromagnetic thing going on. would that mean that I would be more susceptible to energy from digital influences or to electromagnetic? Well,
12:01
I don’t know. I used to feel tingly and confused when you arrived cell phone towers. They go crazy. They can’t handle it.
12:10
Well, I used to be affected by Bluetooth. So yeah, perhaps perhaps. So environmental and lifestyle factors are considered by functional medicine doctors to be as you’ve been speaking about it very important, especially in complex situations with patients with chronic illness. So have certain input environments or lifestyle factors been linked to chronic Lyme disease.
12:31
Well, lyme disease is an immune disease, right? So, the bug gets entry if your immune system is compromised. So, you need to have reduced natural killer cells for Lyme disease to take hold. And so, to treat Lyme disease, you know, there is a whole emphasis on using whole rotating antibiotics and, and using herbs and/or pharmaceuticals to treat it. But really, it’s an immune incompetency disease. So often when you have a compromised immune system, you’ve got to look at factors that may have led to that and one of them, apart from the genetic imbalances in immune competency is stress. Stress is the greatest suppressor of the immune system. We know, people with stress they get viruses, they get colds and things; that’s the same principle, your surveillance system of our immune system gets compromised under chronic stress. And what causes chronic stress. Well take your pick, hundreds of factors cause chronic stress, it doesn’t just have to be a boss that gives you a hard time, it can be poor sleep, it can be poor diet, there’s many things that cause chronic stress. That dental infection that hasn’t been treated; they all can cause chronic stress in the body. So, for Lyme disease, the thing you got to look for is immune competency and that’s why one of the tests we do is called natural killer cell function, or CD 57. And we look at that to see if that’s suppressed. If that’s suppressed, your ability to fight Lyme disease is compromised and Lyme disease and co infections can run rampant. So, it’s just one of the things we look. There are genetic components to this as well. One researcher has done work on the genetics of people with Lyme disease, and specific markers that are upregulated. And then anything that compromises your overall resilience and homeostasis and mitochondrial resilience, anything, diet, any other factors, lack of exercise, obesity, any of them.
14:23
And if you’re tuning in just now, you’re listening to healing wisdom on WOMR 92.1 FM in Provincetown and WFM are 91.3 FM in New Orleans and streaming at Womar.org. We are speaking with Dr. Bruce Hoffman, functional medicine doctor, founder of the Hoffman Center for Integrative and Functional Medicine.
What are risk factors in Alzheimer’s? Have you seen significant improvements in patients with Alzheimer’s using integrative approaches?
14:53
Yeah, Alzheimer’s is very fascinating. I don’t know if you’re aware of the recent work that’s put out by Dale Bredesen and his group. He wrote a book called The End of Alzheimer’s. And I wrote a summary of that book on my website, there is a blog on it. Alzheimer’s is fascinating. He’s worked out that there’s six subtypes of Alzheimer’s disease and 36 biochemical pathways that need to be addressed. And he basically says that Alzheimer’s has six subtypes. The first can be anything that’s inflammatory, then anything that’s deficient is number two, anything that’s blood sugar, glucose, insulin related is number three, anything that’s toxic, like mold and heavy metals is number four, anything that’s cardiovascular related is number five, and anything that is head injury related is number six. Those are the six subtypes of Alzheimer’s disease. And there’s many biochemical pathways that you look at when treating Alzheimer’s. So, for instance, all the deficiency issues, one of the main deficiencies in Alzheimer’s is all the hormones: growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, DHEA. So, we look at all of those pathways and try and repeat them, when we are treating Alzheimer’s: inflammatory, all inflammatory chronic conditions, you know, eating an inflammatory diet, mold, illness, heavy metals, look and treat all of those issues. People with high blood sugar, high insulin, insulin resistance, treat that, that has a huge effect on people’s brains. And then a key underlying factor that seems to be very problematic if anybody has what’s called the Apoe 4/3 or 4/4 gene, that predisposes to a much higher risk later on in life of Alzheimer’s disease. We test for that gene, hopefully, you know, if you have a 3/4 or 4/4 gene, you should really increase everything you can in terms of lifestyle factors to make sure that gene doesn’t get expressed later on in life. There’s a whole website devoted to people with the Apoe4 gene, what they need to do in order to down regulate the risk? Well,
17:08
Yes, it’s interesting, because I know with my own grandmother who suffers from Alzheimer’s and my mother-in-law, and also one of my clients, it’s amazing how quickly an anti-inflammatory diet can help heal the brain. I mean, it seems like overnight, a person can have access to memories that they didn’t have before.
17:31
The other thing we do is, down regulating the gut microbiome and neuroinflammation through the vagus nerve. But we also assess all the fats. I test with the Kennedy Krieger fatty acid analysis and we look at all the Omega 3/6/9 and saturated fats and we treat very aggressively with the ketogenic diet and high fat intake, particularly something called phosphatidyl choline. Choline is one of our key nutrients to help restore brain function back to normal. In fact, the patient I saw just now had a huge deficiency in phosphatidyl choline with cognitive deficits.
18:11
Wow, can you dispel the mold myth mold illness is not an allergy, correct?
18:21
You do get IgE mold allergies, but we do not worry about that. That’s the least of one’s worries. Mold is a huge trigger of the innate immune system causing a condition called CIRS; chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And that plays havoc with your inflammatory cytokines, which then down-regulate areas in the brain, particularly the melanocyte stimulating hormone, MSH. And MSH controls many things; sleep, pain, gut function, and all the sex hormones and the diuretic hormones. So, when you get exposed to mold and you get inflamed from mold, and it appears that only 25 to 35% of people have a susceptibility to mold illness. They don’t downregulate the mycotoxins that are expressed. And they get very inflamed with consequences to their brain, consequences to their hormone’s, consequences to mitochondrial and to oxygen delivery, sleep, gut function. Amazing. So moldy allergies is the least of our worries. I don’t see people with mold allrgies, I see people for mold toxicity, mold inflammation. It’s a whole different subset, not taught, not understood. Respirology don’t know about it. The insurance companies certainly don’t want to know about it. It’s a huge problem. And I treat mold illness all day. Huge. Most homes are moldy.
19:46
Yes, many, many homes on Cape Cod, for example, are moldy. There’s just a ton of dampness and can you talk a little bit about mold illness?
19:55
Yeah, well, I work like as much as I work with a dentist and I work with building biologists for EMF’s, I work with mold, remediating indoor air specialists, we send people into homes to do a visual inspection. Anybody that I suspect, with mold illness, we have a questionnaire. And if people score very high on the questionnaire, we immediately suspect mold. And then we ask questions. Do you have any water damage? Do you have any damp areas? Do you have any condensation on your windows? Do you have any visible mold downstairs, or air conditioning? Have your ducts been cleaned lately, a whole bunch of questions. Then we send in the mold inspectors to go and do a good visual inspection, which takes hours. If somebody walks in with an air sample and waves it around and says you don’t have any mold in the air, run for the hills, because that’s was not a proper mold assessment. We also send people home with ERMI kits where they actually take swabs for DNA particles of mold, they take a swiffer cloth, mold samples from dust collected, or they vacuum the carpets and they collect the DNA spores and send it off to a lab to measure it. And then if they’ve got mold in their home, we assess the degree of the mold. And then we send in a remediation crew, and then we start to treat the mold illness. And there’s about 12 steps in how to treat mold illness. First step is to get out of the moldy home. Second step, bind the mold with binders like cholestyramine or charcoal or whatever. And then there’s a whole series of other steps that you do.
21:29
What are your thoughts on ozone for killing, mildew and mold?
21:33
Doesn’t work?
21:35
Oh, no.
21:38
It affects our immune system. Yes.
21:42
Mold exposure causes inflammation upregulation of the innate immune system which causes inflammation.
21:51
Yes. So I’m wondering about andropause. And why is it worth talking about? It’s not something that you know, people talk a lot about menopause, but not so much about andropause. And I noticed that was on your website. I’d love to hear
22:06
Andropause. Yeah, it’s grumpy old men. Yeah. Men age slower than woman so they’re not as you know, andropause, it takes a year or two. Women and perimenopause take about a year, but they notice when they start getting hot flashes and night sweats, it’s pretty quick. Men, their testosterone levels fall slower. And they don’t go into like an acute sort of jump off a cliff so to speak, it’s a slow, gradual decline, they put on weight, they get grumpy, they get depressed and they ache. Their libido goes down, erections go down. And when you start measuring all the sex hormones, you find that they are deficient or you know, low normal. And that you know, usually in the age 50 onwards, and we measure all those hormones and treat accordingly and it can have tremendous effect when you start treating, particularly testosterone, dhea, sometimes growth hormone very seldom, melatonin, and then using thyroid hormone and adrenal support, some can make a tremendous difference to people’s wellbeing. So andropause is a real and undiagnosed, under treated condition. It is very rewarding once diagnosed and treated appropriately, you know.
23:28
Yes. Now this might seem like a strange thought. But I’m wondering if there is an evolutionary reason that people as you know, over a certain age tend to get up earlier. And earlier. And you know, if the oldest troubled sleep, maybe has, you know, if that’s really how people were living, organically naturally. I mean, I know, overall, people are dying, at much older ages, and so on and so forth. But I always wonder about this early rising business that seems to happen and be so much a part of our hormonal evolution over our lives.
24:06
You mean why older people sleep less.
24:08
Yes.
24:11
So succinctly said,
24:15
Multiple factors for that, you know, I mean, it’s definitely based on diminishing hormones, particularly, melatonin, melatonin levels go down as we age, too. Melatonin is a major brain antioxidant. It’s also what turns on the suprachiasmic nucleus, which tells you that it’s nighttime. So, melatonin deficiency, as we age, affects the suprachiasmic nucleus and affects the ability of somebody to stay asleep for longer periods of time. There are many, many factors, but that’s just one of them.
24:53
As we go into colder months, it’s very important that we use preventative measures and make sure that we’re as healthy as we can in the fall so that going into winter, our immune systems are as strong as possible. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are on just simple things, people can start doing better to take care of themselves in the colder months?
25:14
Well, the thing that I always worried about the colder months is when people go indoors, and they shut themselves in. And so I always want you to worry about the indoor air quality, and these tightly sealed homes. So, when we not exposed to the outside sunlight, when we get sealed into our homes for six months of the year, the question is, what is the quality of your home? What is the quality of the indoor air? Are you being exposed to mold spores and mold toxins, volatile organic compounds, off gassing? That’s the thing I’m most concerned about in winter months, and many, many patients will tell you “ in October when winter comes, I get sick, I get worse, I get depressed”, or I get this or that” a lot of it’s to do with the fact that they get sealed into their homes, and they don’t spend any time outside, you know. So that’s what I started to think about – quality of indoor and environmental indoor homes.
26:16
Okay, so we have one more minute left. So, my final, final question is just, if you could, if you could tell everyone, one or two things that would help improve most people’s lives, you know, mind body spirit, what would that thing be?
26:34
If you’re not connected with your mother and your father, if they are alive or dead, go do some work and try and reconnect yourself to their life spirit and to their love. If you’ve got a complaint about your parents, go do your work. I really mean that.
26:57
If you cannot say yes to your mother and father for giving you life, your work is incomplete. If you are in complaint about your mother and father, you have got work to do. They gave you life, be grateful. All the rest was just an excess. It’s just the fact they gave you life that was enough. That if you’re not aligned with them, and the flow of love isn’t from you, to them to your children, you need to do your internal work to try and correct that. That’s what I say is the principle, the cardinal aspect of healing.
27:29
Thank you so much, Dr. Bruce Hoffman for joining us today on healing wisdom.
27:34
Okay, thank you very much. Thank you so much. Bye.
You’ve been listening to healing wisdom. I’m your host Pandora people’s certified chartered herbalist and psychic medium. You can find healing wisdom podcasts at Womar.org. Contact me with any feedback questions or show ideas at peachy pandora@yahoo.com. A big thanks to the Wizard of operations Matthew Dunn. Join me again next week.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman, MSc, MBChB, FAARM, IFMCP is a Calgary-based Integrative and Functional medicine practitioner. He is the medical director at the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine and The Brain Centre of Alberta specializing in complex medical conditions. He was born in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the University of Cape Town. He is a certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (IFM), is board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging (hormones) and regenerative medicine (A4M), a certified Shoemaker Mold Treatment Protocol Practitioner (CIRS) and ILADS trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and co-infections. He is the co-author of a recent paper published by Dr. Afrin’s group: Diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome: a global “consensus-2”. Read more about Dr. Bruce Hoffman.