In this talk with Rachel Jennings N.D of Heal Yourself Institute, we discuss how to solve chronic health problems, adrenal fatigue, and mitochondria.
This transcript was automatically generated, please excuse any errors.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to the high energy woman online event where our vision is to help women step into their power to heal, to supercharge your energy and to break free from feeling burnt out. We really hope this conversation will inspire you to take action to live life with more passion and more purpose for the things that are meaningful to you. Today, I could not be more excited to highlight Dr. Bruce Hoffman. Dr. Bruce Hoffman is a Calgary based integrative and functional medicine practitioner. He is a medical director at the Hoffman Center for Integrative Medicine in the brain center 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 is board certified with a fellowship and anti aging and regenerative medicine practitioner, a certified Shoemaker mold treatment protocol practitioner, a certified Ayurvedic practitioner, as well as certified in Family Constellations, and eyelids trained in the treatment of Lyme disease and CO infections. He is the co author of a recent paper published by Dr. Alfred’s group diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome, a global consensus. It’s quite the bio. And it’s quite demand. So I’m super, super excited to be chatting today. Dr. Hoffman. Excellent. Thanks very sure. I always like to start, the first very first question is very apparent, it’s a personal question.
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Really just tell us your personal journey that led you to do the work that you do today.
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Um, the personal journey Well,
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I never came to medicine. The I didn’t come to medicine the right way. I, I was interested in literature and poetry and thing arts. And I was actually employed by the circus and by an opera company, when I got a phone call from my mother, this is after I graduated from high school. And she said, Oh, by the way, you got into med school. And I said to her, What are you talking about? She said, Oh, you didn’t you know, I applied for medical school for you. Oh, my Wow.
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What are you talking about? Well, there was a scholarship and I applied and you got in. So you start med school in six months.
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And so I found myself in med school scratching my head when not knowing what on earth was going on. But it’s, it’s the most
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the best serendipitous event on my lap. Because when I was a younger boy, before that I was I learned a lot about philosophy and religion, and poetry and literature from a high school teacher of mine. And he exposed me to the arts. And that’s why I wanted to pursue the arts. I was sort of geared to do that. But once I went to med school and learned to become a family physician, and then started to study Chinese medicine, I have better I was able to bring all my love of arts and poetry and literature into the process of working with complex illness patients. So I was able to finally marry my love of medical arts with medical science and do what I do today. So I thank my mother for getting me into med school.
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Hell, I was doing this for years. I was like, What the hell is this?
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Well, I guess maybe you’d be like a circus performer still. So it’s amazing that you’re doing what you’re doing today. But I couldn’t I love my life. I love my work. I love my page. I love I mean, just 15 minutes ago, you very kindly allowed me to prolong this interview because I was just on a, you know, another conference.
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As you know, you never know enough you always feel ignorant. You keep studying and studying and studying and never getting ahead. It’s just an ongoing issue. I’m 65 now and I you know, I love what I do, and I love learning more and more all the time. I think that’s the true definition of a great doctor is constantly learning and innovating and changing selects amazing. I counted last month. I’ve attended 278 conferences since since 2007. Oh my gosh, I love that. I love that
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you probably a couple of assistants that you’re probably got all the time right attending conferences.
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Oh,
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that’s so great. Um, I know you have so many talents we really talked about, you know, you dealing with lyme patients with Lyme and mold and chronic illness. If we could start off really talking about histamine, and really giving people just a brief explanation of what histamine is and what it does in the body. Sure, sure.
5:24
Well do talk about history, what is step back a little bit and talk about the so called mast cells that everybody now my, my South African accent gets, people say, what do you do? So, I think the correct explanation and mast cells, they say, in masks, yeah. So, my cells are these little they 1% of the white blood cells, and they vigilante cells, in the sense that they sit on the art on the interface between outer and inner environments. And they also reached the innovators and multiple tissues in the body, the brain, the brain is richly integrated with myself. And they release the contents whenever they become provoked.
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And they release over 1000 mediators of inflammation shook tazers, the last days is all sorts of proteases. And they release histamine. Histamine is the most well known the most common, and the one which usually gets people to start thinking that whether they have sort of a histamine intolerance to versus a mast cell activation syndrome. And a mast cell activation syndrome is is characterized by those individuals who not only have histamine release, but they have inflammation in general. And they also may have a whole release of growth factors as well. So it’s not just the histamine that gets into the practitioner. It’s this whole cascade of multiple symptomatology and multiple organs. That sort of fits the criteria for what we call consensus to criteria. There’s two criteria for the diagnosis of mast cell activation syndrome. There’s sort of the original, my consensus one by Aiken, which said you had to have this tryptase Elevate, after a flare. But we in the consensus to the Efrain group, we say that you just need a whole constellation of symptoms that respond to treatment. And if you happen to have an increased
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set of lab data, that’s all to the benefit, but they’re not essential for the diagnosis of my cell activation syndrome, whereas the consensus one the more stricter criteria, so you’ve got to have that chip days increased to make the diagnosis. So you’ve got these two sort of standards of care, so to speak, and many things in medicine have two different standards of care. As we know, like Lyme disease, the IDSA versus islands, there’s two standards of care as it is with myself two standards of care out there right now. Hmm, interesting. So I was gonna my next question was going to be about mast cells. But we covered that a little bit. So what what do you think triggers the release of histamine is good in the body? But what triggers the excess? And the issues created with too much histamine? Well, that’s a fantastic question. Because the answer is
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look around
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you know, anything that’s a bloody pus, you we have a homeostatic mechanism, and anything that the body can’t hold me aesthetically, self regulate, will then create an escalation in the ability to regulate and has the potential then to trigger muscle activation, anything, it doesn’t matter whether it’s physical, electromagnetic, mold, lime infections, or thoughts.
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We have 60,000 thoughts a day. And every, every, you know, Deepak Chopra made that statement famous, he said, and then, you know, 90% of the thoughts we have today are the same as yesterday. And so we self perpetuate our internal dialogue creates a sort of chemical messenger cascades that then triggers receptors on every cell in the body, which then turn on DNA and messenger RNA and, and then that lead to the expression of my cell activation, if you will. So, our very thought processes and that brings into account you know, the whole
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people who’ve undergone particular traumatic experiences and traumas the big catchword now but it’s incredibly real people with
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Early adverse childhood experiences seem to have a much harder time in the ability to self regulate their disability, inability to self regulate the OIS isolating and waxing and waning between sympathetic overdrive. And what we now know as dorsal vagal collapse or small dangerous bonds when the system just gets overwhelmed with inflammatory triggers and just shuts down. And that’s the basis of many chronic diseases and many people who stuck in the cell danger dorsal vagal response can’t get out
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of perpetuating these inflammatory cycles. And, and that’s who we see, I mean, those of us in this field and there’s many, many of us
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those are our patients and they don’t feel they don’t fit the you know, n squared d squared criteria name of Disney’s name of jug is just forgetting that playbook got that’s yeah, that’s that’s 30 years ago thinking I
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really love that you brought it Robert navios cell danger response because we talked about that briefly on the on the event about mitochondria and things like that. So I love that you really brought that in. I think that’s the missing piece. People don’t really realize that histamines and then just an inflammatory condition, ya know, that my the mitochondrial shutdown is the probably if I had to, I work in layers and levels from Spirit to toxicology based on Ayurvedic model. And
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the, if I had to look at level two, which is the biochemical piece,
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the mitochondrial destruction, mitochondrial autophagy, and cell danger response is probably the deepest insight we now have as to why people get stuck in these inflammatory cycles or cancer cycles
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because the cell danger responses different cell data one, two and three, these different levels of you get into the cell inflammatory response, then you get the proliferative, then you get the repair. And there’s different diseases that different sequences of the cell dangerous bone, and all we see right now people shut down and
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just not running just and with COVID Oh, my goodness, me. Here we go. Yes, the viruses just totally burned out. Yeah, it’s interesting what you saying that histamine? So um, I know some people do. I don’t know if you do clinically do LDA or LDI therapy in your office? No, but um, you know, type of incident. I think he’s on your Summit
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is the great sort of proponent and expert in that field.
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I did his conferences, and I’ve done a lot of LDI LDA courses, but you’ve got to have a number of staff to sort of help you coordinate it all. And I’ve already got too many stuff.
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Yeah, I’m trying to go fishing not make more work. I think you’re trying to go to another conference is what you’re trying to do.
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Yeah, I serve I don’t fish. Sorry.
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Yeah, no. So that that became a sort of stumbling block, but I wish to goodness, I mean, some of my greatest colleagues do fantastic work, they use LDI. And I think it has its place, but you know, like anything monotherapies, without the, without the algorithms, and all the interlocking bits and pieces. I’m not a big proponent of monotherapies for anything.
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I get patients phoned me up and say, well find my stuff and they want, I’ve got mold. I want to I want you to prescribe colas, tyramine and then Alright, fill out the questionnaire, we’ll do a two hour interview. And we’ll see what other issues are co morbid or coexistent. And this usually 50 other issues that play the mold diagnosis is just somewhere in there, but it’s not it. And, you know, we spend our lives trying to sort out people’s beliefs about what they have and what may be truly going on. And even then it’s we sort of pushing a mystery into a mystery. Yes, we do know certain things. We have landmarks, we have ability to objectively measure
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or moving towards the strange attractor of who knows, right? Everybody’s so individual, right? Like now your data, everything, it’s just bio individuality. The only thing the only thing that the only thing that stays true is that is if you keep asking the questions, and you keep in dialogue with your patient, you have to stay present to what they telling you because, you know, there’s this now this whole concept that’s been introduced that if there isn’t ever
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evidence for what the person seeing then there must be only in their mind
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that that paradigm is given the recipe that must be stemmed out, you know, that’s just ridiculous. And patients are, you know, I’ve yet to see a patient who lingers or who’s a hypochondriac. No, they just may have a heightened sympathetic drive, and they may have increased anxiety neurotransmitters, but that’s a byproduct of the entire Gestalt that leads to that expression, it’s not that they have a DSM five diagnosis of
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some sort of psychiatric condition. It’s, it’s the, it’s the in our bodies are the endpoint of our entire lived experience. Mm hmm. And that’s how we’re gonna get filtered through ancestors. And
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then here, we sit with this, you know, this finite, which is not finite, but the so called finite system that’s not expressing expressing either wellness or disease. And we just got to be humbled to the mystery and listen, listen, listen, and, and, and try and interrelate with what we’ve been told and what what’s being exchanged, and then objectively measure, and then build from the basement up what we can, you know, do you ever see patients come in who tried all kinds of different things for mast cell? And let’s just say they have puffy eyes running, you know, runny eyes, histamine issues? And, you know, just nothing works?
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How do you like, what’s your kind of philosophy on treating those patients that they’ve tried everything? And just nothing seems to be kind of shutting off that response? Well, that’s a complicated question. Because
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first of all, when you’re working with complex illness, and people who have my salary activity, one of the first things you’ve got to do is to stabilize micelle expression.
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And that can be whack a mole, like in nature, because there’s, you know, there’s 1000 Different mediators. So which one do you work, you know.
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So what we try and do is we try and remove as many triggers of the micelle exposure. And my cell expression, of course, food being one of the most
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one of the huge drivers of my cell activation, particularly in the gap, which then leads to a whole cascade of immune dysregulation and permeability issues.
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So we, we try and remove what we can, and then we stabilize mast cell activation. If you find that somebody, and then you try and restore the cell danger response, you’re trying to work through mitochondria and immune dysregulation, and hormonal and you’re the whole cascade, if you still struggling,
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very often those people have ancestral or early developmental trauma.
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You’ll see that all the time, you know, and I then I use another colleague of mine, whose name is Mike Walden. And he’s written a book, it didn’t start with you.
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It’s all about inherited ancestral and early developmental trauma and he has a gift of being able to in two hours work out the the antecedents, mediators and triggers of hyper reactivity to internal and external influences. And many of these people have tragic, you know, ancestral inheritances or early developmental traumas, never seen never heard neglect abuse traumas. And then there was heightened sympathetic amygdala overdrive with dorsal vagal you know, with the vagus being realized they always in the sympathetic adrenaline noradrenaline, which activates histamine
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and so unless you down regulate that system,
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you always going to be whack a mole in the micelles and, and it can be you know, there’s that Toby this video I don’t know if you’ve seen it of a guy who gets on a bicycle. And he you and he turns right the bicycle goes left. And so it’s it’s this video, it’s on YouTube, you just read backwards bicycle just typing.
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And this guy, he thinks it gets on the stage. He says, I can do that and he can’t and it takes him nine months to learn to ride the bicycle the wrong way around.
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That’s probably the whack a mole you talk about right? Well that’s the neuroplasticity in order for people to reprogram you know they in their belief systems, the internal dialogue their defenses, they downed wood expression of the you know, when we look at brains of people who have been through
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aromatized you can see this heightened beta brainwaves and low alpha and increase theta. To change through neuroplasticity, it’s, it’s literally like going to the gym, you’re not going to get big biceps. So I just doing a couple of, you know,
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biceps, cause you gotta go for it and the same changing for people who have not learned to self regulate very well, to learn to self regulate and be in their bodies, and not dissociate and fragment or resist or project and not have this very rigid defense system that keeps any therapeutic intervention from being taking hold. That requires a lot of heavy lifting. A lot of neuro biofeedback and we refer to Somatic Experiencing practitioners to do fabulous work body workers. There’s a whole cascade of different people on your team to try and assist people deal with traumas down regulate their brainwaves up regulate the vagus tone, feel their bodies, be in their bodies know when they go out of their bodies know when they’re dissociated. Know when they fragment, learn the attachment styles, learn the eye or very profiles, learn the Myers Briggs learn, know yourself, you
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I love that you’re going here. And then not take yourself too seriously. I’m thinking of Annie hoppers work with a limbic system and, you know, being vata or Pitta or Kapha. And I didn’t know that stuff you’ve got if you’ve thought, or you, you know, your Vita and you go on a Pitta diet or Kapha diet, it’s toast.
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And if you don’t know your attachment styles, and you don’t know your Myers Briggs styles, you’ll be blaming yourself, you’ll be sort of beating yourself up. And meanwhile, it’s just a sort of a constitutional preference that you’re going to born into. Learn to modulate those behaviors when you get to know yourself.
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I love that you are Vedic principles there. Oh, I use them all day long about it when a patient walks in the door immediately does instinctively have to know if they buy to Peter Kafka because of either patient, provider patient, you know, they’ve full of ideas, and they implement your ideas for short periods of time, and they get bored and they want something new.
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And they always react to everything. Of course they they always you know, my Sally? Yeah, that would be me that would be mass selling.
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And then the pitches are, you know, the more aggressive fiery types always you have to be on time and if you late and they get mad, and they blame you if things don’t go well then you got to be the best in the city or the best in the country. Otherwise, you’re not good enough and your waiting room must be tidy and must be nice chairs and
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probably not a pig. Ah, are you?
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Well, I got Peter in, okay.
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puffers are more sweet. You know, they the earthen water they, they tremendously sweet and loving and kind. They’re very kind. They’re very loyal. They,
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they do every, you know, they, they come to every appointment, and they are very nice and very kind. But they, they very difficult to budge. They don’t,
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don’t do a single thing you ask them to do, but they come back, they come back to the next appointment.
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I love that you brought personality types and constitutional types into this because I think like you said, it’s really the underlying, you know, factor about how people are going to respond and what they’re going to do. And if you if you treat, if you even Myers Briggs, if you treat, you know, an extrovert a certain way if you don’t read them, right, or thinking type, or feeding type, oh my goodness, you get a feeding type person wrong. You’re like, Hell how?
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Yes, it is. Most of us doctors are, you know, thinking types. And so when we when we, when we download our database on a feeling type basis is like, what the hell is right? Yeah, but doctor, that’s not how I feel. Okay.
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Yes, I’m definitely feeling tight. So I actually don’t know a ton about the Myers Briggs. I’m gonna look into that about the concept or those constitutional types are feeling tight. It’s interesting. They pay us draw Hmm. So you talk a little bit about diet being so important. So I know you know things you know, high histamine foods like tomatoes and what are some of the
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Super, super high histamine foods that you would have people avoid even just for a short period of time leftovers for sure.
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The protein histidine breaks down to histamine the longer you leave it particularly in fish, you know,
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there’s a particular disease Grom broad poisoning, which is eating old fish. It’s a histamine reaction, you get the red face and everything. Go to er think you like when you take nice and you get the red face? That’s a histamine flush. Same thing. Yeah, Okay, interesting. Yeah, yeah, I do.
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Citrus is big.
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is a big one. And then all the yeasty foods, of course.
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I have a we have a cheat sheet. One, one pages, all the things you can eat. And then the other pages will things you can’t even eat. You know, we’d combined paleo autoimmune, low histamine, because the Paleo autoimmune diet lowers the inflammatory component. And then we start to subset it into low histamine, low FODMAPs, low oxalates bla bla bla. So you’ve got to know all those diets, you got to know all the diets, the lectin diet, the low lectins, you got to know them more than you got to know how to use them or
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they’re interested. If you don’t know those diets, you can’t really you can’t work with patients with the multiplicity of presentation, because you’ll get all types all kinds, you know, I oxalates, high salicylates. Hi, FODMAPs. Hi. So those are all all in the same patient, then you got not much food list, right? Yeah, maybe yeah, I would say a beat or something.
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Yes. And then in many people have that heightened amygdala, you know, they have early trauma, where the amygdala is highly sensitized. And the mere thought of the food will trigger my cell reaction, they don’t have to eat the food.
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Just the thought will trigger the response, because the amygdala is just firing all the time. Yes. So you talk a little bit about the foods do you do you use any certain nutraceuticals that are really good I’m taking core certain are things that really down regulate the histamine response, one of them.
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Oh, wow, that’s a lot. Everything and anything that works from vitamin C to quesiton, to Dao to luteolin, to like cumin, C to PE A, the I have, like 30 that we could potentially use but I, I tend to use his Dao natural D history as my foot one two punch. And then I use Barbara protect or quesiton and then I start going down, you know, PE A, you know, all the rest of them. Okay, I use I use pharmaceuticals a lot of the time to Oh, interesting. I prefer pharmaceuticals in the beginning stages of complex ill myself patient because they work and they get they just calm the system down so you can get things done.
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h1 h2 blockers and mast cell stabilizers and anti leukotrienes and like singulars I use them liberally. Wow, okay, interesting.
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No shame and no fear just
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just for a short period as long as it’s needed long as is needed while you regulating that system. Remember nine months to change neuroplasticity to change the system? Guy minds. Wow, it takes a long time I patients asked me how long what’s my prognosis? Doc, I say
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I have no idea. However, on average, it takes about six months to a year to get the mitochondria to your you can’t put
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this pathogenesis there’s disease and they Salya Genesis that Nivas spoke about healing and what caused the disease is not often what heals the disease. And you’ve got to really put into that cell danger response you got to put in the healing nutrients and all the missing building blocks of which there’s 50
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Kind of, you know, you got to remove the pathogenesis and you got to put in the healing nutrients and, and that’s process a lot of them are fat soluble and fat soluble nutraceuticals they, they don’t they don’t want to be pushed upstream they want to be is you got to sort of seduce them into place you know? Yes, yes. That’s interesting. I know. Dr. Clean heart talks about parasitic infections and that’s one of this where he sometimes where he starts because that can also cause that as well. Yeah, he’s he’s big on parasites is one of the primary drivers of these chronically stuck people. Very interesting. So if you’re
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Okay, we’re switching gears just a little bit. Um, do you treat I wanted to chat with you a little bit about adrenal fatigue or cortisol issues, since like the conference is really all about women, you know, with energy issues and burnout and brain fog. And do you treat that in your office? I’m sure you do.
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Do I treat anything else? I mean,
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the adrenal cortisol, you know, the HPA axis is sort of secondary. It’s a driver of this whole cascade of mitochondrial shutdown. Those are the it’s not you know, people say Oh, I went to see my naturopath I got adrenal fatigue, no, your adrenals are fatigued because of a constellation of multiplicity of factors that are just pushing your system into the shutdown cell danger response and the adrenal the adrenal issues a subset within a subset you know, you got to you got to pull out like as a stupid saying is you got to you know, grab 30 nails in your feed you pull out as many as you can. But if you only pull out 25 You still got five it still hurts. So the adrenals will correct once you reduce the allostatic load once you start taking the bad things out and repairing and balancing the system the adrenals will self correct
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the adrenal issue I think is a very much a secondary issue and I I measure the cortisol awakening response of measured on measure serum cortisol in the morning pm ACTH saliva cortisol 24 hour urine cortisol urine cortisol metabolites, measure them all but I don’t they all self regulate once you start to write the ship
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they come back on board when the system is more regulated. When you say right the ship do you mean down like down like regulated nervous system? So it’s not constantly in a sympathetic state, though the whole the whole, you know, the whole person, okay, hormones, you know, mold whatever early ancestral trauma belief systems defense mechanisms, early developmental trauma, structural problems, brain autonomic nervous system vagal tone, nutrient deficiencies, micro macro, removal of toxins, removal of heavy metals, removal of infections, removal of parasite,
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the whole concept the whole saga of life
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seems like quite a bit, right? What is it? We’re looking for one thing, but apparently it’s not. One thing isn’t.
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Do you think hormones like low progesterone or you know, any issues with hormones play up play a major role, huge.
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hormone dysregulation is is always at play, you know?
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Woman fourth woman, particularly the estrogen progesterone ratio. I mean cortisol, you talk about adrenal cortisol gets made from progesterone, and progesterone regulates estrogen. And many women have estrogen overload you designer by Zenner, estrogens, weight and so forth. And so, estrogen progesterone dysregulation with PCOS and hyperinsulinemia those conditions are epidemic.
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And hormone regulation is crucial, which is one of my postgraduate things is hormone therapy. Okay, do you do saliva or blood or urine dried urine for hormone testing? Are all your
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saliva and urine all three at once? Interesting gametime because hormones are bound to proteins in the blood. They then get dropped off at receptors saliva, and then they get metabolized through genetics and organs urine. So you gotta measure all three components to get an idea where you’re at. I shudder when people come in with a with all due respect, a Dutch test and say, you know, this is I’ve got this No, you don’t necessarily let’s look, you know, let’s look at the blood. Let’s look at the saliva. Let’s look at the urine. Let’s take your history and then work it out. You know, what is your insulin doing? What your LH FSH doing? What you know, what’s your hemoglobin a one C? What’s your freestyle liberal showing with your blood sugar? All of these interrelated factors have to be taken into account to take single hormones and just replace them. I gave that up 20 years ago. Don’t do that. Yeah. Wow. That’s interesting. I haven’t heard that strategy. That’s amazing. So I want to ask you quickly about cell membrane health. Um, do you use things in your office like faster time
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choline or I know
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there’s some other things some other lipid replacement do you use those in your office? My middle name is phosphor title
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wow I’m thinking of plasma and plasma halogens I guess word yes. Yes. Okay.
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Yeah so we do you know we do the body bio fatty acid test, we do the IgM mitochondrial test, we do the David good enough plasminogen test. I had the good fortune of working with Justine Stanger, who works for body by and Dale good to know the plasma origins and she’s an excellent chef and nutritionist and health coach. So we have can objectively identify fatty acid deficiencies, mitochondrial destruction, all the toxins that are sitting as adults on DNA and on cell membranes. We can measure cell membrane voltage cell membrane phosphate title, choline, phosphate, tidal ethyl el Amin levels, we can measure Plasma halogens, and you just look at those and all of a sudden, everything starts to make sense.
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And I really use that as my baseline the you know, I use the ion panel from Great Plains from Genova for the macro micronutrients, I use the methylation panel from health diagnostics, or use the body by a fatty acid per AGL plasminogen plus then the hormones and everything else but those become my coal panels to look at what’s going on at this cell membrane, mitochondrial level and those until those get repaired the job’s not done.
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Very interesting I did a body biome I think was from Meridian Valley labs years ago. I think what body bio first came out at least that portion of the company
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but yeah, that’s been a huge game changer for me as well. Fatty Acids crucial crucial the body bio fatty acid, which goes to Kennedy Krieger but they put their software
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that that tests wow, I mean, that’s changed lives. People come in everybody’s fish oil overloaded they all got
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you know, they Mica 60s. Oh, shut down. Yes, I was gonna ask you if you use fish oil, but I assume that’s a big no, I take people off fish all day long.
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But I use it when it’s needed. For sure it is needed. Okay, everybody’s taking fish oil, mica three saturated
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and Amiga three shuts down Vegas six shuts down. A lot of the cell membrane precursors or the Omega six fats are necessary to make
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phospholipids with great integrity, and arachidonic acid for immune regulation. So if you overdo your omega threes, you got immune issues and you’ve got cell membrane issues.
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I’m thinking all the autoimmunity out there people are just you know, wow. I love that you start there. Um, I wanted to ask you about I don’t think people really know what plasma halogens actually are. I just recently learned of them. So what’s a like a kind of an elementary explanation of what they are? Well, as I understand them, they sort of the end products as phosphate, phosphate lipid production, and they modulate the immune response, and inflammation.
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Dr. Goodenough, who’s a Canadian, Saskatchewan by chemists sort of put them on the map.
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And he’s manufacturing them from some obscure gets him from Ukraine or China or somewhere, the raw material and then he makes them and he’s fact in his facility. I’ve only recently started doing the test and with Justin’s help, sort of learned how to plug it into clinical practice.
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But it’s a sort of recent, recent progression in my work, it’s only the last six months, so don’t have a huge database to say.
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The benefits outweigh the costs because the cost is high.
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Like many people do report tremendous improvement in things like brain fog, and energy. But I don’t have a huge phospholipids Yes, Omega six fats. Yes. I can vouch for those changing lives. Those margins, I’m still in the infancy of using them to see what clinical outcomes. Okay. I think they’re going to be a major player in the future. Hmm, very interesting. Very interesting. So what did they ask you? This is a personal question.
39:49
What does wellness mean to you, Dr. Hoffman?
39:54
Well,
39:57
it depends if you’re in the first month of life.
40:00
For the second half of life, we’ll say the second half if I think you might be in the second house.
40:08
Well, I happen to be
40:13
what’s glass half? Empty? Yeah.
40:19
All right. So we have a trajectory, the first half of life is taken up by drives, we have an innate capacity to become something with somebody, and we drawn towards some illusionary desire to fulfill our destiny on earth. And we have this sort of sense of immortality, if you will, because we don’t really think of N days, right. So we taken up. And so we sort of have a slight inflation, we have a slight increased sense of ourselves and our capabilities and possibilities. And all the hormones and the genes drive us to become and fulfill the drives to be seen by parents drives to be seen by the opposite sex drives, to educate, create financial security, and then pass on the genes. So in the first half of life wellness is to maximally fulfill those criteria, and keep your body as healthy as possible. But in the first half of life, it doesn’t matter what you do, you can be sort of, you can be a reprobate and still kind of get through quite well.
41:31
They can half of life, well, then then that’s when the rubber hits the road.
41:38
The drives are the first half of life, withdraw, hormones withdraw. And the ego drum is to become somebody that you’re not so driven, right? So that’s most soldier, who are you really? How much did you leave behind in your pursuit of the first half of life? what pieces do I have to go back and retrieve to fulfill who I’m really meant to be authentically myself? So then it’s not just the absence of disease, it’s really, am I living at my most maximum capacity as a human being fulfilling my destiny and fate for this one tiny life I’ve been given.
42:20
So there’s a gradation of disease management, sort of homeostasis, and then am I living that which are meant to live at my highest capacity. So I will think of it as stages of from disease to self actualization, there’s a whole spectrum of possibilities,
42:41
I guess of cynicism to throw it into.
42:46
You need a dash of humor as well write
42:50
it
42:51
in all halves of your life.
42:55
You can look back right when you’re in your 20s on 40. When you’re in your 20s or 30s, for me, at least. Oh my gosh, what was I thinking? And so I can imagine at your age, do you look back even at my age and think Oh,
43:08
no, I look like my son that loves to tell me I’ve only got 20 summers left, and what am I going to do with the remaining summon? And then the other day, I just went and got a big statue in my god and like to time statue, and I thought, Well, I’m gonna leave that for my son’s because I’m gonna be gone. He’s gonna have to move that off my property.
43:31
That’ll show you.
43:36
Oh, well, I really loved that. We talked a little bit about mast cell and a little bit about adrenal fatigue and mitochondria and hormones and phospho lipids rounded it off with classical lipids. So yeah, I love your perspective about the total body approach, you know, with the limbic system and the nervous system so and the soul, who are we rarely and what are we meant to fulfill? And who are we meant to become? Because you know, at birth, like acorn and the oak tree, the oak, the acorn knows it’s going to be an oak tree.
44:10
So in the pursuit of life and all the pleasures and pains you know, can we truly identify with who we meant to be? Do we know our soul from a young age? And can we fulfill and spread out into all the areas that it’s meant to become without without too much hubris and arrogance? Just can we live you know, an authentic life?
44:31
In the absence of disease, hopefully?
44:35
Do we know our soul?
44:38
Do we know who we are? Do we know so can we can we live with ourselves? Are we okay? You know,
44:45
that could be a whole a whole 40 interviews in itself. Do we know our soul?
44:52
I’m not that I lucked out with one of the great they’re one of the great traditions I caught
45:00
right into my work is the union card Young’s tradition of
45:04
union psychoanalysis, which is dream analysis, which the hypothesis is that our unconscious drives us towards fulfillment in the second half of life, while we fulfilled the conscious ego drives, does it, then through dreams and synchronicities? Can we fulfill the parts that we’ve forgotten? And that’s driven through the unconscious through dreams. And so I use lies and refer to Union analysis a lot for people who are struggling with sort of existential issues of Who are they and what they meant to be. So, integral part of the work that I did in fact, I only went to med school. In the end, once I realized why I was there was to become a union analyst that I never did. I did this. Oh my gosh, I love that part of your story.
45:53
That’s amazing. If people are interested in finding out about that, what’s it called Young called Young Carl Jung and Freud, Freud and Jung. Yeah. And Jung broke from Freud and set up his own thing and became psychotic and wrote the Red Book and yeah.
46:09
Okay, Carl. Yes, I’ve read. I’ve read one of his books before. So that’s amazing. I’m gonna pick that up again. So thanks for the little gentle reminder. It was his book memories, dreams and reflections, which made me want to do psychoanalysis. And I think my mom said, Oh, he wants to do psychoanalysis. Send him to med school to become a psychiatrist. So you can go do it. I think that was her reasoning.
46:31
And it wasn’t wrong.
46:34
It’s funny, I’ve learned maybe that was the unconscious mind at that point. Right.
46:40
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Hoffman for the time. I know you had a probably a long conference today, so I appreciate it. No, no, thank you. And thank you for putting the date the time later do
46:54
of course, of course. Alright, well, we will put all your information where people find can find you and all that good stuff. So I know you’re in it. So thanks. Okay. Bye for now. Thanks. Bye now. See you Bye
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 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.
This transcript was automatically generated, please excuse any errors.
Hey guys, it’s Judy from nutrition with Judy.
Thanks for joining me today. While you’re here, please make sure to like, and subscribe. If you’re listening to this on podcast, please make sure to leave a review as this allows my content to get in front of more people. And thank you for that. My name is Judy Cho and I’m board certified in holistic nutrition.
I focus on root cause healing, and oftentimes I start with the carni cures meat, only elimination diet. Okay, so today I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Bruce Hoffman, Dr. Bruce Hoffman focuses on so many things, and he really tries to get people that are suffering with chronic illness to root cause healing and truly heal people to a place that they could have a better life.
As you listen to this conversation, you’ll see that it gets very complex. There are layers of healing and he is not somebody that will sugar coat things in a sense. You just need to do this and therefore you will heal or you need to do that, or you need to take this magic pill. It’s not like that for him.
And he’s just very real in terms of chronic illness is difficult. Chronic illness can cost a lot. Um, it can take a lot of effort and time and energy, but. The point is that he says that there is hope and that you can heal, but there are certain things that you just need to go through and it takes time and diligence and the fortitude to want to heal.
Sometimes it’s working on our mental health and working on traumas from our past or even limbic system retraining and focusing our brains to not be as heightened in a immune response or a fight or flight. And it could even be deeper than that. And working on somatic retraining, I will put a lot of the stuff in the show notes, but this is a very important conversation, especially if you’re dealing with chronic illness, you’ve been to so many different doctors, you’ve done so many different modalities, tried different diets and nothing is fully working to get you better.
I talk a lot about SIRS as I spoke with Dr. Eric Dorner, and we continued from that conversation to talk about little nuances about some of the medication, as well as how it. Combines with limbic system retraining and other things. What I want you to really get out of this conversation is to understand that healing is very comprehensive, but if you want it enough, and if you try enough and you do these things, that there is a way to get to root cause healing.
I know that sometimes it may seem like our lot in life where illness is just prevalent, but it may sometimes be that we need to focus on healing our past traumas, as well as even the way that we are viewing the world. As Dr. Hoffman brought up, we often think about 60,000 thoughts in one day. How many of those thoughts are actually making you sicker or an unwell or in a negative state, that’s then bringing that into your life instead of healing and the belief that you can actually heal.
So while this conversation, isn’t the easiest, I think it’s the most real and most open and genuine that you will find in terms of really trying to heal chronic illness so that you can have a better chance at optimal health. Dr. Bruce Hoffman is board certified and he has a fellowship in anti-aging medicine, as well as a master’s degree in clinical nutrition.
He’s a certified functional medicine practitioner and in his clinical training, Dr. Hoffman has also studied with many of the leading mind, body and spiritual healers of our times, including Deepak Chopra, Paul OSHA Rames Baskar and John Katz. Dr. Hoffman was born and educated in South Africa and obtained his medical degree from the university of Cape town.
As you’ll see in our interview, Dr. Hoffman is a lifelong learner. He is always wanting to learn and grow and learn from other practitioners and just provide the best level of care to get people to healing with his patients. I’ve met many functional doctors and naturopaths and integrative doctors that really tried to consider the body as a whole, but Dr.
Hoffman truly takes it to a whole different level. And that was one reason why I wanted to interview him because I felt that he can provide more answers for some of the hardest cases that we may find in the Carver community. Let’s get right into the interview. Hi, Dr. Bruce Hoffman. I am so excited to have you on my channel.
I heard a lecture of yours and I was enamored because you were able to consider all different illnesses and understand that the body is really one body and how so many things are affected. And you talked about how chronic. Is just more than one thing and how everything is connected. So, um, I really wanted to have you on my channel.
I think so many people will benefit from your knowledge. I loved also that you knew about the carni diet. So that was a bigger plus to me. But if you can introduce yourself. Oh sure. So I am a south African trained MD, um, graduated from the university of Cape dun where the first heart transplant was done. And, uh, moved to Canada in 86 and first was a rural physician. And then. Started to be influenced and started to investigate all forms of healing. Um, having been originally exposed to Eastern philosophies and religions as a, as a teenager by my high school teacher, Roger. And so when I found myself a medical school, and then when I started to become a family physician, I started.
Visit some of the ancient heating practices that are investigated as a teenager and some of the philosophies. And then all of a sudden fell across Larry DSY and Deepak Chopra and all the leaders in the field and went and met them and studied with them. And then just kept expanding my diagnostic paradigm and therapeutic paradigm wider and wider to incorporate as many levels and layers of the human experience as I could, and then fell into Ken Wilber’s integral theory of everything.
And once you start, and once you start looking at external and internal and, and individual and cultural, and you just start looking at all the determinants of illness, you end up with a very large roadmap, if you will. And I eventually ended up taking the, um, ive. Roadmap of the, the, the Ko, the bodies that people seem to have.
So if you look at the ancient tic text, they say, we’re not just a physical body where we a physical body, that’s constantly in exchange with the external environment. So we always exchanging atoms, you know, right. As Deepak lights to say, we’ve got, you know, a million atoms of Atel Jesus Christ and Hitler, you know, , we’re constantly exchanging information.
So, so the first level of the, of the paradigm I use is the external world of air and, and water and earth. And that incorporates all the toxicology because we in touch with that. And it, it interfaces with our second level, which is our physicality, our biochemistry, and our structure. And that’s what we do in traditional medicine and functional medicine chiropractic and, and.
All the therapies that to do with structure and, and biochemistry. And then the third level is to, you know, to do with the, um, energetic, the electromagnetic fields, as we’ve learned from Cal, uh, from Albert PA and, and others that are light emits from our body in a coherent form from DNA. So DNA S squeezes light and it emits, and there’s a standing wave around us, which is either coherent or incoherent.
And it also resonates with human resonance, which is the sort of resonance of the earth. But then you got all the manmade fields that are interposed deployment now, and then you have this dysregulation of that are own innate. Coherent electromagnetic fields and that’s correlated with the brain and the autonomic nervous system.
So I have a brain treatment center where I do Q EEGs and we do heart rate, variability studies and stress response testing. And that’s the sort of the brain and the autonomic nervous system is the, is the sort of gateway between our internal experiences and our external world. It all eventually comes through the brain.
The brain sort of records everything that our internal dialogue, our 60,000 thoughts a day, right? Our values, our perceptions are all run through the system. And we know that our thoughts and beliefs influence our biochemistry and our immunology and I sell receptors. So the fourth level. The emotional body.
So trauma plays a big role in that, as we know, and this is very real, uh, people with early developmental trauma attachment disorders, either neglect, trauma, or abuse, trauma, or disorganized attachment, they have much higher, um, negative sort of health outcomes. And they have a much more difficulty in self-regulation and self-regulation in the parasympathetic state is, is the healing state.
And if these, and if these individuals with, you know, early separation from mother or early neglect trauma, if they don’t develop a sense of self, they don’t have a ability to self regulate. And that sets these so-called HPA access in this heightened state of, of hyper vigilance and inability to self regulate, which then shuts down the VA tone and so forth and so on.
So that’s fourth level is the emotional level. And then the fifth is the ego based. The part of our, our reality that sort of gets us through life. Mm-hmm , you know, ego based. Um, ability to negotiate the slings and errors of life is based on the resilience or the fragility of our ego self, which is very much the first half of life drivers.
You know, we are driven in the first half of life by the ego to be a, you know, find safety with mother and father, find connection with other, and then find our way in the professional world, which is the three stages of development of the brain. You know, the reptilian brain, the limbic brain, the prefrontal cortex.
We are driven to develop that, you know, neurodevelopmentally so that in our thirties, we’ve now got a nice prefrontal cortex that can inhibit any fears or any, uh, trust issues we have from early developmental support or not. Uh, so that’s all to do with. With the fifth level, which is the, which is the egos, the ego drives and our defenses, when life gets to difficult, we develop defenses against certain things, right?
And people have very, sometimes very rigid defenses or very fragile defenses and are often not open or susceptible to the healing movement. They just, they defended against any further intrusion into their sacred innocence. You know, they’ll protect you. And so you’ll launch into a, a mold diagnosis you’ll launch into.
Marcel and Liam and whatever you want. You’ll be working at level two with toxicology and physicality. But if that person’s unconscious belief system is shutting out and defending them against any sensitivity or any vulnerability you can work until, you know, the cows come home. You’re not gonna penetrate that, that system, that person.
And you’ve gotta be subtly aware of defense structures, internal dialogue value systems. You’ve gotta know those subtleties, I think in order to best help that person. Because if a person’s sitting in front of you and they don’t trust you, you can work till you can run test all accounts. Come on.
Nothing’s gonna shift in that system. Well, the sixth level is the soul. Um, second half of life, the authentic self that we often leave behind in the first half of life pursuits. You know, we go out and find safety and companionship and educate and. Safety. And we slay the dragons, the drives, the, the Freudian drives, right?
You know, the bitterness drives the Adlerian drives to power, but Carl Yung came along and said, the real drive is to know yourself. And that only sort of starts the surface in the, in the second half of life, when all the machinations and twisting of your psyche to get your needs met in the first half of life, you leave your authentic self behind in order to get seen and met and, and to get educated.
But then in the second half of life, you gotta go and reclaim all the parts you left behind. right. In order to get where you are going. So that’s soul driven and the soul is. Personal and collective, uh, and families, the family soul. We now know from early, you know, family in constellation work that is initiated by ber Heminger and, uh, and, and taught by others, including mark Warland, who does fantastic work in this area that we, when we born, we not only get exposed to our parental influences, which have a, the whole set of determinants in the fourth level, but we also inherit, um, epigenetically, right?
The experiences and emotions of our ancestors. And so you’ve gotta like diagnose and treat ancestral inheritance of early experiences. And that’s another whole subset that we look at. And in union psychotherapy, we look at the individual soul. What is, what, what is the most authentic and instinctual. Core of this human being that’s sitting in front of you.
What is being asked to manifest? Because symptoms, as I’ve said in other webinars, symptoms are not, they don’t fall out of the sky. You know, they, they teleological, they have meaning and intent and sometimes symptoms, whatever silent in the system in, in your psyche will often show up as some form of illness or tragedy or bankruptcy or betrayal or whatever you want.
And symptoms are like that. They they’re often pointing to that, which is unseen in your evolution. So if you lose symptoms, it’s just things to get rid of, you know, suppress the mild cell, press the, my cell response. um, as opposed to why the, my cells active is it because the child was never safe with mother.
So she, they developed my cell activation as a means to, to keep people at a distance with the skin rashes and the eczema IM not worthy of being touched. So I will keep my defenses. So sometimes that can be teleological in that. And if you don’t ask that question, you often miss the boat. And then the seventh level is everything beyond the ego-based pursuits.
You know, we in the infinite universe, the evidence for our insignificance is rather overwhelming and, uh, And so sometimes we have to sort of give up our hubris and arrogance and, and know that in the vast scheme of things, just give thanks because we really don’t know what’s going on. You know, there’s something, there’s some divine intelligence that’s manifesting that we need to be humbled to.
You know, I, I love that. And so I’m sure the people that are listening it’s it makes sense. A lot of what you said, it’s, it’s really everything. That we have experienced, but it’s also a lot of what we don’t know. And, and it includes the brain. It includes mindset. It, it could include religion and even just ancestrally a lot of the things as well.
The question becomes then, I mean, we, or Western medicine is all about, like you said, it’s you have a symptom. It’s how do you alleviate that symptom? And most of the people listening to this and watching this know that that’s not good enough, right. We need to figure out why do I have pain so that I don’t have to take that anti-inflammatory medication.
But beyond that, then we go to naturopaths and functional doctors and they say, it’s an autoimmune or it’s thyroid related. And again, it’s treating a certain thing without considering all of the things that you just mentioned. Yeah. So if we are, for example, struggling with chronic fatigue, how do we start?
Like where, where do we journey and how do we start getting to root? Cause because most people that are consuming this information, understand, we do need to get to root cause, but it gets confusing. Do I need to treat the limbic system first, do I need to get out of the environment? That’s um, I’m struggling with mold, you know, where do I start?
Because I really just wanna heal and I don’t wanna waste my money in this journey, but from everything you’ve said, it’s it’s complex. Objection. It’s complicated. So I, I can only tell you what I do. I don’t know if this is correct. I don’t, you know, it just works most of the time with P I’m sitting in my office here, and three feet for me is where patients sit or six feet and I take history.
So I, you know, I have a methodology of doing that. So I have a 70 page questionnaire and I ask, and I read everything on that. And I take the history from that. And my question is like, is set up so I can quickly go through what I do is ask, first of all, what are your top symptoms? And I write them all done, and I go through fatigue, cognition, sleep dentistry, and then all the systems.
And then I look at hormonal issues of male, female diet, um, psychological development, uh, family systems, uh, spiritual practices. So I grow through all of those and I, I. Try and do it as quickly as I can. It takes two to two and a half hours to take a history. And then what, but the thing is to attune to all the UN unsaid cues, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta limbically relate with the individual in front of you and you gotta look for hidden cues and symptoms.
Cause it’s not just knowledge, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s limbic resonance. It’s it’s you can’t only use your thinking function. You gotta use your feeling function as well. If you look at the Myers Briggs type and so you take this history, you feel into it, but you also use left brain didactic reasoning.
And then once you’ve taken a history across all the layers and levels, you then. Diagnostically work out where, what do I need in order to help fill in the gaps of knowledge that this patient, uh, needs in order to diagnose potential. As we use the words antied mediators and triggers. And then I usually set out a whole series of labs, but I can tell you what I use more often than not.
Um, I almost always do a Q EEG. I look at the different speeds of the brain, the Delta theater. Alpha and beta brain waves. And I look to see if they’re amplified or depressed and the ratios between them. I look at the autonomic nervous system through heart rate variability. I do bio Imped studies, looking at fat muscle fluid content.
Um, look at the phase angle to see if the cell membranes intact. Then we always do never forget this piece. Always, always like if there’s one thing I’m passionate about is this one always do the NASA lean test, the 10 minute lying and standing test. Oh, okay. Because I tell you 20% of people are pots.
Right. Get really busy and, and you won’t treat anybody with, unless you get the pots under control. There’s no one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So do the lean, you know, do that test. My staff are trained to do it on everybody and we train patients to do it at home. And so many pots. Yeah. I also do a neuroco MRI. We looking at different parts of the brain.
Uh, we pixelate different frontal lobe. You know, temporal lobes, looking at the coordinate nuclear gray matter white matter, and looking at the amygdala, cuz you’ll see a amygdala hypertrophy from traumatized people who are highly stressed and anxious and also look at the thalamus. Cause the thalamus is richly innovated with my cells, this rich with my, and, and so we look at these different parameters, then I do all the sort of functional I do standard labs, everything I could possibly get my hands on that hasn’t been done before.
And you’ll often find all sorts of things, you know, find. Thyroid antibodies that nobody’s looked at before, or you’ll find, you know, tssh levels that are sort of suboptimal with a low T3, which if you just tweak that things improve, you’ll find prolactinomas, you’ll find, you know, pituitary, micro, OMAS, you know, you’ll find these things.
If you really keep your diagnostic net quite wide, I always do a Panex dental x-ray and then get a 3d coin beam and get a dental opinion on everybody. If somebody’s had a head injury, I always get a nuclear chiropractic assessment of C1 C two. And if there’s any suggestion of creating a cervical instability, I send people off to that group of people who specialize in that like Dr. Boies and others. And then on the functional side, I do food sensitivities, not just I G G, but I G G IgE. IG, and I do the lymphocyte sensitivity test as well. Oh wow. And I look at the trends in it. I don’t look at one. People come with the, I G four test isn’t it’s hopeless, you know, so I look at all of those.
I do many stool tests. I do the GI maps. Mm-hmm I do the Genova tool test. I do the dun wit precision lab Lin, his D AO, um, histamine levels and the lip polysaccharide I do that. I do the intro lab test. If I suspect any gluten issues looking not only for the, the genes, but looking for. Uh, tissue trans determinates antibodies and fecal fat mal absorption. I also do, um, CIBO testing on half my patients. Cause most of them huge majority, if they have a history of bloating, uh, Sibos always a role, but there’s, CIBO, there’s C nav, quite the term. LIBO large bowel bacteria, Leto, the words we use, you gotta treat them all. And then you look at Vaal time, the whole motility issue, and that’s through heart rate variability and specific devices we used.
Then I look at the, I use the ion panel. I know some people use the, uh, neutro valve, but I, the ion panel I can read in 15 seconds and look at amino acids, minerals, antioxidants, steady acids, but for fatty acids, I mostly look at the Kennedy Krieger body bio fatty acid panel for am omega three, six distribution saturate a fat distribution, the ratios between minimal and look to see if the lipid content of the cell membrane is high or low.
Because if the lipid content is low, like minus 25 minus 30, and you go put people on binders for mold, you’re gonna crash that patient like instantly. And so I look at that. I look at fats, uh, we look at the organ, the oats, the part of the ion panel. I do oats testing. I do the great. It’s heavy metals and the microtoxin test, but I I’m really moving away from the microtoxin testing because there’s so much bad medicine being practiced at that test.
It’s it’s I think it’s, uh, I think Richie Shoemaker for all of his, you know, he’s, he’s, he’s got some certain opinions about. Things. And one of the opinions he has is on the microtoxin test, not being indicative of SARS, chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And on that, he’s incredibly correct. You cannot go and diagnose mold illness based on a urine microtoxin testing.
Don’t even begin to tell me, you can, you know, you can’t and it’s it’s bad medicine and I wish it would stop, you know? Yeah. I learned that too, because essentially if you’re healthy, you will be able to remove microtoxins from even your diet, um, in a urine test. So you can’t differentiate between a healthy person that’s releasing versus somebody that’s really poisoned from it.
And so you need more markers than that. What’s interesting is I’ll find some SIRS clients that will then take the microtoxin test and they’re not releasing any because I think they’re unwell. And so that part of it is interesting, but you’re right. The test itself is not enough, but well, they they’ve done testing with healthy controls and the healthy controls have the same microtoxins in urine cause they had corn and uh, pizza the night before.
Right. You know, if I was your patient and I didn’t have all the funds to do all that testing, is there a baseline you can start with with, based on my symptoms, maybe running some of the lab tests? Maybe not all of those, because that’s a lot. Well, I haven’t finished yet. let me tell you the, let me tell you the test that I really rely on now.
Okay. That’s the IGL test out of Germany that. Has changed my practice, cuz that measures the ducts that sit on DNA, affecting DNA transcription, and you can find mold and mercury and aluminum and glyphosate affecting how messenger RNA is transcribed. It also tells you about cell membrane voltage. It tells you about mitochondrial numbers cuz when you have what’s called a cell danger response.
Mitochondria undergo oage die and you can measure how many mitochondria there are, and you can see it’s low or not. You can see if the cell membrane voltage is low, you can then look at superoxide DYS glut levels. You can look at phosphide choline, phosphide ethyl, OME, the outer inner membrane of the cell.
And you can see how depleted they are. You look at cardio lipins and whether that enzyme is making cardio Lipin. And on and on and on. It’s just a fantastic test. It also tells you about, it gives you a lymphocyte sensitivity test to mold, fungal elements and metabolites. So you can see if mold is sitting on the DNA or whether there’s fungal metabolites or fungal SPOs in the bloodstream to which the lymphocytes are sensitive.
So I find that very helpful. Now you’ll often find people with a microtoxin test in the urine that’s negative, but when you go and look at the DNA, there’s mold micro mold for sitting on the DNA affecting, you know, um, transcription wow. Of messenger RNA. And that person is often, far sicker than the one who’s got microtoxins in the urine is excluding them.
Right? So you in answer your question, what tests you run and how do I do it? Well, I’ve got to the stage in my career where they, everybody who comes to see me now, it appears has done lots of these things, you know, but never. Never enough. And so I say, look, here’s what I need. Here’s the tests. I also do Cyrex antibody testing.
I do the neural Zuma antibodies to brain. You know, I do all the almond lab mold, Lyme testing, and iGen X. If I have to. So I say, here’s what I need to complete your diagnostic profile. And my staff then send it to them. And then it’s their decision with their budgetary restrictions. I try not to interfere with that.
Cuz some people have funds. Some people don’t, if they don’t have funds, I then try and adjust my practice accordingly, but then you’ve gotta adjust their expectations as well, because they’ll always come with you and say, oh, I’ve got, I’ve got mold on this. Look at my microtoxin test. And then you take a two hour history and they’ve got 50 other determinants of being unwell. Right? So then you give them the diagnostic roadmap to give them the, what you believe I believe is the insight into that. But then they on, you know, they’re they don’t have funding. So then you try and work with what you can, but you’ve got to taper your expectation and they’ve gotta taper theirs. And that’s a tricky relationship with people, you know?
They’ve been traumatized because if they don’t trust what you’re saying, they’re gonna project all they distrust onto you and then they’re going, you know, they’re gonna, it’s tricky. It’s a tricky relationship working with ill people. Not always, but it can be. Yes. Yes. So let’s, let’s talk about an example of sir, somebody that has the genetic haplotype, they’re all the blood markers that Dr. Shoemaker brings up, like the MMP nine TGF beta one, Ms. They’re all low or they’re all high. And the weight they’re all low, right? SOH is low. The other markers are extremely high and their environment isn’t the greatest because they don’t have the funds to really fix the environment. But then, then I meet people that are limbic system retraining specialists, and they talk about how they.
Force their body to rewire their brain and, and be able to get better, even in an environment where their army score isn’t the best. So, you know, you talked about all these layers of health. Yeah. How do we know that if we were to just pull the layer of trying to manage the brain and how it reacts to stress?
Like what if that will just heal some of the other areas, even if in tests they’re off tricky, tricky dynamics so if you take the history there’s water exposure. Yes. You do the army testing. There’s positive, you know, all hurts me too above 10, and they got all the bad ones and the, the symptom questionnaire they’ve got, you know, 25 symptoms in 13, 12 clusters, and they fail a visual contrast test.
And then you do the Shoemaker markers and the TGF B is 10,000, the C four H 20,000. Ms. H is five, you know, and. The person is highly reactive to the mold that they’re exposed to. I don’t believe that you can only do DRS or Gupta’s retraining program and treat them with that methodology. I think that methodology is important when the amygdala gets sensitized.
And is hyper reactive to the incoming biotoxins, but I do think you’ve gotta work biologically to downregulate the innate immune system while addressing the amygdala hyperactivity at the same time. And often you’ve gotta work sooner logistically. Yes, but there’s even a deeper layer that the DNRs and crypto training program often don’t get to the hidden defenses of the individual who’s hyper reacted because they’re protecting their, the last vest of their innocence, which never got traumatized.
And they are so defended against anything. That’s could be perceived as toxic that they can’t downregulate the amygdala because the trust is not there and they can’t trust anything. And that’s when you need to go into internal psychotherapeutic work. Uh, and you can’t just work with dynamic neuro retraining or cook program.
You have to address the defenses of the individual. So it’s tricky, but it can be negotiated. And some of my patients with the amygdala sensitivity, they just think of mold and they react that they do. It’s a real reaction. It’s not, they’re just so sensitive. And you look at the neuro quite, and then amygdalas in the 98 percentile it’s hypertrophy is big.
It’s two standard deviations than everybody, and then their colleagues and their age match controls. So then you’ve gotta, you gotta do all sorts of neuro bio, all the whole things around neuroplasticity and cell membrane, integrity and fatty acid manipulation. And it’s complex. That’s interesting because that’s kind of what I’m coming down to.
So just to give you a background, I specialize in the carnivore diet because I believe it’s the ultimate elimination diet in terms of just getting food off the table as a culprit of your illness, and then we can work on everything else. And so there’s a handful of people, including myself that have healed a lot.
In terms of illness, mental illness through a meat, only diet. But as I worked with more people in more complicated cases that the food doesn’t fix everything. So they get a lot better, but not enough that they feel better. And so they start working with me and I started noticing there were people that had this serves and I fell into shoemaker’s work.
We started testing some of the markers and they had the genetic type. They had all the markers we just mentioned. And, and so they started some of the coolest tyramine. They did some of the excess fish oils and it wasn’t enough. And my guess is like, you mentioned that, um, Kennedy test, they would’ve probably had really low markers and you not touch tyramine unless, you know, the lipid content it’s fatal mistake.
Second fatal mistake. First is treating a person with, with a microtoxin test is having mold illness. Second is throwing tyin at they prematurely. Sorry, carry on. Yeah. Yes, yes. And so, well, that test is not part of the NA the original protocol. And so, no, no, no. I, I actually learned it from you and it made so much sense of, well, this is a bio acid reducer, which also was known to reduce your cholesterol.
And if you cannot take in fatty acids, you might not have the wherewithal to even take the colony remain. And so the, the phospholipid flush the, and the fatty. That all made sense, but this and cholesterol, cholesterol forms is structured in your cell membrane and is a precursor to all your hormones. You don’t wanna block cholesterol to the point of extinction.
You want a cholesterol to be sort of highish normal, not yes, yes. You wanna block Cho. And I think that’s where carnivore is so powerful that if somebody has been eating carnivore with a high fat diet and their cholesterol markers are high, they’re more prepared to take tyramine yes. Than the average person that’s eating a low fat diet.
Exactly. The don’t get me started on the vegan diet and I’m gonna get everybody’s kinda scream at me on social media. No, no. Well, my community is not plant based. Um, I actually got sick on a plant-based diet, so, but yeah, I was, I was the head of the vegetarian society for 17 years, so I’m familiar with it.
OK. But my experience, you don’t get people well on a vegan diet, if they’re in a chronic ill health multisystem, multis symptom, complex illness mode, it’s just not gonna happen. Right. Right. And I, and I fully agree with that. And so. Happened was some of the people as they got diagnosed with SIRS, they started going into the excess research of what do I need to do now. I need to be super mindful of every building I go into and, you know, that fight or flight mode, just really high gear of stress and, um, just being in their illness all day long. And I think those people then using the, the limbic system retraining. So it seems like it’s a lot of these modalities together that can actually heal people more than a lot of them together.
Yes. Most of those people, and I say this generically and somewhat, I hope it doesn’t come off as sort of prejudicial, but a lot of those people with the limb. Hyperactivity have trauma. Oh no, I believe that too. And they can’t there’s no, there’s no re they can’t self regulate. There’s no window of tolerance.
And I send them to somatic experiencing trauma therapists. I don’t, they do good DS, but they often need to do body based body up therapy, where they need to actually learn how to tolerate more and develop a window of tolerance. Um, uh, that I use se practitioners a lot somatically. I refer to that. I’ll have to look into that.
That’s fascinating. Yeah. Just check that one out because it’s, uh, it’s a, it’s the game changer. Yeah. When DNRs fails and Gupta fails, think trauma think early thinks se uh, body base, you know, be off on cult’s book. The body keeps the score. Mm-hmm yes. That’s real stuff, you know? Okay. And it’s, if you look at Robert Navo cell danger response, you look at PGES body vagal, uh, dorsal, Vago, shutdown, response, those people.
Autonomic nervous system shut down. Mitochondria are shut down. They’re in an inflammatory response. So is part of, uh, Robert NEAU cell danger response, number one. Okay. That makes sense. And they shut down and they don’t have a capacity to self regulate. It’s not happening cuz they, they, their whole system is in a state of freeze, not fight flight that’s, you know, beyond they’re beyond that.
Yeah. And they, and se practitioners know that stuff backwards and they can help you negotiate that territory. Yeah. And PGE developed a sat and sound protocol, which is a series of, of sounds and music and patients with severe trauma reduce up and sound. This is the feedback I’ve got. It found. It sounded.
My mother’s soothing voice had finally spoken and got through to me. wow. Is that, that, what does the mother’s soothing voice do to a child? The child in trains with the mother’s voice and tone, the right prefrontal cortex of the mother resonates with the child’s right. Prefrontal cortex. They entrain with each other.
Over 30 years, the child looks away, looks away. Self-regulate looks to the mother. Mother’s still there. Mother still loves me, challenged me a bit, you know, support challenge. Over 30 years of neurodevelopment, the child learns to trust the environment, learns to trust safety, learns limbic resonance. They learn to self regulate their system.
If there’s been early trauma, doesn’t work self, a sense of self doesn’t develop the sense of self trust. And self-regulation, isn’t there safe and sound recreates that which is missing the mother’s voice. That’s hard like Clinton, like Clinton in the mother’s eye mother just has to have be 30% present, apparently to have a reasonable child upbringing.
oh wow. You be a perfect mother. You just felt be present about 30% of the time and you gotta support and challenge that child and give it appropriate sort of boundaries to work in and, and create a sense of trust and safety. So would you recommend then for a lot of the people that are dealing with chronic illness, chronic fatigue, let’s say they don’t have a lot of funds, but some of that trauma work and, um, the somatic, as you were talking about doing that can be very beneficial with, in tandem with someone like yourself that can also support improve, provide care.
It’s so difficult here, Judy I’m so used to working with a very broad diagnostic. Okay. That I, I can say yes, but, and you know, yes. What else is going on? right. Is the theater brainwave feed standard deviations higher than the peer group. And if so, that person doesn’t do well. They in a disassociate in, in pathy.
Okay. So they may not be able to do safe and sound work, you know? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I know. There’s always nuance and I, I totally understand that fully. I wanted to shift topics a little bit. I know that you, on your Instagram page, you share a lot about M a histamine responses. Yeah. Yeah. Can you share a little bit about in the carnivore community?
For example, a lot of people will remove certain foods and then they try to reintroduce it. It could even be salmon for example. And they say that they have more mass cell activation and more histamine responses eating the carni way. I don’t know if it’s because part of the reason is that they’ve removed the food for a while and now as they’re introducing it, they’re just a, um, reacting.
And maybe it just takes a little bit of reintroduction, but what are your thoughts? Well, histamine, you. Breakdown product OFTA Dean right rights more there. And where’s, HETA Dean found more in salmon. Right. So, you know, um, if they’ve got my cell activation and I, you, if you go and do an ion panel, you’ll see histidine there.
Oh, okay. And all my, my cell patients have high Heine levels. You see it all the time. And so if you’re introducing salmon in particular, if it’s not flash frozen on the boat. Sure, sure. Aged one of the worst triggers of myself that, and. You know, and all the fermented foods that are so popular now I know.
So, so you gotta be careful with that one. You gotta, you know, beef, if it’s, you know, a lot of beef is old too, they let it, the it, the, yeah, the it, and so of course, you know, that’s a, something duck for myel activation, but that’s where you gotta do the precision done Woody test and see what the DAOs doing and see what the histamine levels and the Lin levels, and then ready prepare them, you know, use your umbrellas or your, his Dao in huge amounts, 30 minutes along with chromosome.
You know, if you suspect you’re gonna react to meat or, or any food for that matter. And then you use all your myself, I’m very aggressive with myself. Like, cuz I use. Okay. I use pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals, but I, I, I happen to use pharmaceuticals more than nutraceuticals because I find they get the job done quicker.
And I do intravenous myself blockade for the very sensitive people, the ones that just wiped out, they can’t function. They can’t leave their hospice. They’re reactor really. They they’re down to three foods. Right. So we, we bring them. Look for parts first, look for hypermobility. Number two, then treat them with intravenous ma cell Benadryl ol Aban.
We use I IV Avan, which is a Maal blocker. Unden Thero for some of the nausea and GI symptoms. Get them stabilized then onto pharmaceuticals. Then maybe nutraceuticals. I work that way around. I know lots of people work nutraceutical, but I, I just because I’m an MD, but you’ve gotta use them without excipient or diets.
You’ve gotta get compounded pharmaceuticals. Sure. So what is the root cause of this? M a right. So it’s obviously there’s a hypersensitivity to histamines. Not everyone has that same reaction. I mean, some of it is maybe they have gut permeability, but something triggered the M a to occur. Like, what is the root cause of why are people getting diagnosed with M a S and it, sometimes it just happens in their thirties and forties, but what is causing it?
And so Aron Lawrence Aron, who I work with. Okay. And part of his little group we wrote, he wrote the paper, which we co-authored on the consensus two statement of what is my cell activation, how to diagnose it. There are genetics to it. There’s not the same genetics that are there with systemic master psychosis.
So my cell activation syndrome is just an overactivity of my cells. Systemic mass cytosis, as you know, is increased numbers of milestones. So in, in my cell activation syndrome, you’ve got twitchy, my cells and my cells sit in all the surfaces of a body to protect you from incoming, toxic load and internal mental stresses.
LA Ron’s Han believes that the mental, uh, trigger of myel activation is more powerful than the physiological triggers. So what you have is, you know, these vigilant cells sitting there ready to pounce, whenever something comes in that shouldn’t be coming in and they send out thousand mediators of inflammation.
Right. Of which we measure 10 histamine is one of them and histamine. Yeah. So you’ve got these, my cells sitting on all the RFS in your nose, um, your GI tract, particularly richly innovated in the judum all the way through to the anus in the skin, in the brain, in the. Cardiac tissue and lungs in particular.
And they send out a thousand mediators of inflammation, histamine being one of them. Right, right. One out of a thousand. And they send out these in these signalings to try and dampen the incoming, toxic load. So they protect it. But they’re overreactive. Why? Because. Look around you. We’re inundated all day long with, you know, toxins or triggers.
Biotoxins chemicals, metals, insecticides, pesticides, EMFs. Oh my don’t have you started on the EMF story, terrible trigger of muscle cell activation in a subset of patients. So those with the electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome, just to, for your, for your, um, clients don’t work without a building biologist, looking at the EMF exposures of your patients, ask them about it.
The same is don’t work without a biological dentist looking at the bite and the root canals and the capitations and the metals and the alloys and everything else. So the reason why the, my cells are so active is because our toxic load is so active. It’s so huge.
And so you get, there’s a genetic predisposition to some people.
For my cell activation syndrome. Mm-hmm but it’s a toxic load. That’s exceeded like capacity to self-regulate once again. And so they’re just throwing out, you know, Ava trying, trying to keep the lid on a massive inflammatory response, but they trigger my cells, trigger oxidative stress. They trigger peroxide nitrate.
What does Pery nitrate do? It rips through your outer membrane and your inner cell membrane phosphocoline phosphine gets to your DNA, your mitochondrial DNA, mitochondrial DNA unravels goes outside the cell with ATP. Wow. Outside the cell. They become pro-inflammatory and they, then they call purines, they then trigger my cell activation to trigger Parx nitrate. And all of a sudden you’re stuck in an inflammatory response you can’t get out of. So that’s the cell danger response, which is so beautifully described by Robert paver. Again, for your audience, please don’t go far without knowing his work backwards and forwards. Yeah, sure. And I’ll put that in the show notes.
Yeah. So then do you think if people get out of the toxic soup and they change their environment, work on some of the trauma, you know, and I’m saying it so simply I know it’s not that simple, but that we can actually reverse some of the M C. So that our bodies are not reacting as much. Oh, absolutely. Yes, absolutely.
Okay. I’ve had people, you know, they do the MQ symptom questionnaire, which is the IFM standard questionnaire for toxicity. All the symptoms score 180, 1 90 for add up all their symptoms, normals 20 or less. They come in a year later, they scores down at 20. Yeah. Now people get better. Now the ones who don’t get better are the highly traumatized individuals who with personality disorders, they are trickier to work with, you know, borderline and, and people with severe mental health issues like anxiety.
Sure. OCD, OCD is a big one. Yeah. They often don’t get better until they use it. S Sri or some form of control of the, uh, hacker activity of the system. How much do you think diet plays a role outta curiosity? A hundred percent, but is not the only thing. Diet is everything. Of course, diet in general, a hundred percent diet with M C.
99%. It’s big. You know, it is big now Lawrence Aron doesn’t believe diet is as big as some of us do in the functional world. But those of us who work in the functional world, I mean, there’s no way you’re gonna treat a severe mass cell person. Who’s eating eggs and drinking kombucha and you know’s drinking wine every night.
It’s not gonna happen. There’s no way. So you have them on lower histamine foods. Then I work with Justin Sanger and nutritionist, chef Revis, a cookbook together, and we do paleo autoimmune, low histamine, ketogenic, maybe FODMAPs, maybe isolates, maybe Oates. We do. We have to know all the diets. Yes. And that makes sense.
We know, we have to know how to juggle them. And we’ve developed a two page cheat sheet with every food color coded. So, you know, onions, it’s got a color code for oxalates orates or Fatma. So a food may have four colors on it because it’s got four different potential effects in the body and to try and work that out.
You’ve. Look at your food testing, you gotta take your history because the food testing doesn’t tell you about my cell necessarily, but you’ll see trends showing up quite a lot. You’ll see pineapples in there, Kiwis in there, Candis in there. A lot of the beans are in there. A lot of the beans are always in there.
That’s fascinating. Yeah. And so you just look at trends and you gotta think it through and you look at their diet and, and you eventually work out what to do. But I think the mildly ketogenic, paleo autoimmune low histamine is where, uh, we sort of trend towards to restore the cell membrane, integrity and repair mitochondria.
Yeah. And that’s where I love the carnivore diet. I mean, obviously I have my biases, but so I know that there are foods in the carnivore diet that are high histamine, but if you were to remove those, so let’s say the eggs, let’s say some of the fish, but if you were to focus on mostly meat based and then, um, I mean, it’s so similar to the paleo. It’s just, I think I, I forget if the autoimmune paleo contains nuts. I don’t think it does, but maybe it does. Um, well, you take out all nuts in nap pale or two. I, I include three, three of the non mini nuts sometimes just in the beginning, Brazil, Nu pine. And I always forget the third one. Is it Macada okay.
Okay. There’s three nuts. That aren’t many. Okay. How funny? So people are really, I got no foods. We always use those to begin with. And then when you see, yeah. Oh, sure, sure. So you do it like a trickle down effect. Okay. Does that make sense? But I take out all grains, all legumes, all nitrates, all dairy, all fermented foods, all alcohol.
Oh, uh, you know, we take them out, right? We start from scratch meat, fish, chicken, stir fries, salads with oils and fats, the oils, and the fats are the piece that people do not do properly. I agree. and, and that’s why if you stick, stick to mostly carnivore, you’re not eating seed oil. So then it becomes so so much.
I know it’s a lot more restrictive than at least giving them. Those three nuts, but in general, if you do a meat only, it becomes easier because it’s really easy to figure out which ones, um, you just focus on meats and then you’re not eating seed oil. So you’re just sticking to the lad or the, um, the sewed and other types of fat. And, and then you may just have to have a list of what foods in the animal based world that are higher in histamines, and you may just have to reduce those. And it becomes a lot more simple when these people are trying to do so many different things. And that’s where I personally like the Carver diet, um, especially as an elimination diet first, and then as they heal, they can introduce other foods.
So I think, I think it makes a lot of sense is another player on the, on the market these days is, uh, Gooden, ours work with plasmin. Okay. And he does a test called the prodrome scan where he measures all the, all the plasman and DHA and okay. Hospital co. So now I’m learning to work with that test, the, um, Kennedy KRE of fatty acid and the IGL mitochondria and our, all our work is to repair some membranes mm-hmm and to work with the right fats to, to, uh, improve, um, neuronal tissue, uh, white matter, and to create a anti-inflammatory effect through DHA and so forth and so on.
But majority of people that come and see me are a omega six depleted. They all, none of them are doing all, uh, vegetable based oils and all of them are onco and they officially interesting. It’s completely suppressed the omega six side and the omega six side, the line lake acid is the raw material for phosphide choline.
That’s so fascinating. So a lot of people in my community are so scared of omega sixes because of the line lake acid that’s causing. Oh, obesity. No, no, no, no. So can you explain a little bit, so these people are, have been on a diet and they’re they’ve, they’re now becoming deficient in omega six, omega sixes.
Ole linolenic RONIC, it’s all wiped out. They minus minus a hundred on the, a omega six profile on the Kennedy Krieger test. And that’s the precursors to a lot of your phosphide co, which is the major fat that’s made from methylation that helps run outer and inner cell membranes go figure. And so the reason why they don’t use the vegetable oils is because most of them are toxic and they ran it and they got deodorizers in them.
Yes. Hide smell of the rans body bios fuit co I think is, you know, uh, is a fantastic omega six precursor. If you deficient in it, I would take the body bio balanced oil, which is ad. Oh, okay. Okay. I’m aware of that one. Yes. Yeah. And, and it’s, it’s, it’s prepared in a very clean, you know, cold press for okay.
Yeah. Very clean, no oxidation. And if you lower it in a lake, that’s what we plug in. Mm. Um, Justine St again, the nutritionist I work with, she, she consults on the plasman PLA the prodrome and the body bio fatty acid, and works people together with those nutritionally and supplementally. Yeah. It’s, it’s amazing that.
We hear certain context of certain nutrition and wellness, and then people take it to a lump to an extreme, and then they become deficient in omega sixes. And, and I started seeing that a little bit in my, um, I, I do a basic omega three, six test and people were starting to get more omega three rich because they were afraid of the omega sixes.
And now people are standing to get deficient because of all the polyunsaturated fatty acids that can cause obesity or insulin resistance. And also because of the fear of these seed oils. And, and now we’re becoming super more it’s either that we don’t have any fats or that we’re becoming more omega three rich, and we’ becoming deficient.
And I didn’t even think about the PPH ti choline. And that makes sense because I do recommend PPH ti choline, but without thinking about the omega six and the pre, because six often the omega the little lake is the, you. Pho often made from saturated that could be made from saturated. Fat was Lu lake is one of the major contributors towards fus curly. Right? And so is the methylation panel, the folic acid, B12 zinc, magnesium ATP, that whole, uh, Sammy, that whole methylation panel, 70% of methylation and methol transfer is all to do with making phosphate. Possible is rules, you know? Right, right. And creatine, I mean the, the methylation cycle is big on creatine too.
So, you know, one marker in the service protocol is that our Ms. Sh is low and the goal is to increase thath so that our brain is not atrophying. And you know, a lot of the protocol says that the way that you increase sh is eventually you go through the whole Shoemaker protocol. Yeah. But you take V I P yeah.
But when I was doing some re research, the pituitary is what produces the UMH or melanocyte stimulating hormone. And some of it gets activated by UV rays. So couldn’t, we, some of us go outside every day. And get more UV rays and maybe it’s not enough, but could it actually increase some of theh? I don’t know the answer to that.
I do know looking, you know, at the sunrise and sunset has a tremendous effect on the duty function. Okay. Me production. But with Ms. Being low, most people with serves of low MSA, like sometimes super low. Right. And, and you’ve gotta all the up upstream, you know, inflammatory cytokines have to be downregulated.
And then you’ve gotta look for marks because the, you know, the nasal staff is what suppresses the MSA. Right. So you gotta treat the marks first. Treat the marks don’t regulate all the up, you know, all the steps, get them out of the toxic thing out the toxic building. And some people are now using peptides to help treat the Ms. Stage or me. Yeah. Peptide. But again that you see that’s an N squared D squared thought process. Yes. Yes. Name of medicine. Name of symptom. Name of drug. Yes, it’s true. It’s not like that. You’ve gotta look systemically. How do I remove everything? That’s suppressing Ms. H right. And then how does Ms. H naturally start to find its way back up?
Yeah. And your patients, do you ever see them fully heal and their markers all normalize over time? If they follow the no, no, absolutely. Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh yeah. And, and white matter lesions in the brain disappear. How much do you think the environment needs to be pristine? Because that’s the biggest thing I get the hangup is it’s nearly impossible to have an environment that’s has zero mold.
So it depends on the level of the amygdala sensitization to that patient and the level of trauma and the level of trust it’s it’s algorithmically complex. So some people who. They are say HLA positive, but they’ve got good ego strength and have resilience. They can tolerate a lot more than somebody who’s, you know, in VEIC terms, vital imbalance.
Sure. Fatty active deficient, sympathetic dominance, or in polyvagal shut down. They can’t tolerate a lot. And so they just look at our building and if they just catch a whiff of a, of a nasty smell, they are in a full, you know, flare surge reaction. Yeah. It’s so individual, you never know. That’s so fascinating.
And that makes a lot of sense. When I think about my individual clients, how certain people are a lot more resilient, even though they have the haplo type and then other ones, just the fact that they have a split second, where they feel finally I have an answer, but then the split second later is, oh no, I have this haplo type.
And then they start reacting. So it is interesting, but because you see says. You can often not be exposed to mold, but serves in and of itself is the disease that you now have. Right? You have a chronically active, innate immune system that is now your problem. Yeah. And you may not be living in a moldy environment, but you haven’t gone through the steps of reduction of the, of the biotoxin that originally was there that triggered the whole surge response in the first base.
Right. Right. And that’s what nivo called the cell danger response. You stuck in the cell danger response and Robert nivo brilliantly said, we need things. He called the word emesis. You need to input therapeutic signaling to change the. The cell danger response. You can’t just hope to get better. One day, you’ve actually gotta do things.
You know, what are some of the examples that he, um, that Robert Novo recommends to improve the cell danger response? Well, he’s a researcher and he used the drug serum, which is a, uh, an old drug that you can’t get. Oh, okay. And serum blocked the receptors for the, um, DNA fragments and ATP fragments for triggering this whole self danger response.
Oh, okay. Okay. But he also did all the work on what are the biological changes on the self danger response and what is the one that is most consistent, fast choline? Vaso. Choline is big. That is so crazy because I do, I have been adding that before people even consider tyramine. So maybe do some of the omega threes.
I, I did see that balance of the omega 6 36. And I wasn’t sure if I was gonna use that one, but, and then I thought of the PPH title calling for the membranes, but it’s so fascinating. I’ll definitely have to look more into his research. Many people overdo the DHA component of omega three S yes or the EPA.
Now the I don’t, this is right Dr. Good’s research. I’m not sort of up on it as much as I should be. Okay. But I do know that alpha little Lennic. And EPA, uh, signaling molecules and they don’t do much for the whole equation. It’s a DHA that does everything. Okay. So here’s a Smogen DHA specific plasma Mogen, but you can overdose on DHA as well.
Right? So everybody who comes in with this amigo, you know, three, six index that’s off the chart for a MEUs sticks, the end danger of being very deficient in some of the essential fats to regulate cell membrane and mitochondrial functioning. So I wouldn’t go off those simple tests. I would, I would look at Kennedy Krieger or the, uh, fatty acid test.
Okay. No, no. Even the, even the ion panel, fatty acid is not robust enough. Sometimes it even contradicts the Kennedy credo and that’s fascinating. Okay. Okay. No, good to. A question about the IME test. So, um, I had a client that took a, you know, like a, I think it’s just a air sample from a person that normally, you know, sells homes and they do the mole testing.
And then I told him that he should pro and so his house came out clean, and then he did the IIE test and his number was maybe in the twenties. And I told him that you have high mold and that the other test is not really accurate. The first mold inspector came back and showed a link to the EPA saying that IMI tests are not supposed to be used.
Yeah. Yeah. What are your thoughts of the testing? So the answer to that question, you know, the one you, the person you want to read, who’s done so much work is Richie Shoemaker. Okay. He’s already dissected this issue backwards and forwards. Okay. And he did a series of, uh, articles in the tons and letter, which we just Google it.
One to five on mold and he discusses that question in detail. Okay. And so the world out organization has come out saying that the air sampling test is irrelevant. Uh, it’s worth us and meaningless because a you’ve gotta circulate air through. First of all, a lot of the toxins aren’t in the air, they’re on the ground.
Secondly, the particulate size of the, of the, the spores or the microtoxins are lower than 0.3 microns. And they pass through the, they pass through the replace. They don’t pick them up. And so, and, and thirdly, like STAs, the most damaging of all of them is on the floor. It’s not in the air. There’s this whole in the Shoemaker group anyway, this whole.
Sort of don’t they don’t use air sampling. It’s not used they, right. You see. And he says, do not even somebody comes at you with the air sample, throw them at your hearts, but it’s the industry standard. I know that’s and the lawyers and the insurance companies, that’s what they use. So, and army test was not supposed to be used clinically, but I can tell you now that I hurts me to test with the added Acton SIS and other components.
That’s what, I don’t even look at air sampling. I just wanted to clarify for the audience. I mean, there are people that’s, what we are known for is the air sampling. But if you have anyone that’s struggling with mold illness, the recommend the IEN and the SME. So I, it hurts me too. And looking at the aspergillus for, and the other thing is doesn’t differentiate the, the Asper species. You don’t know if it’s for or Pallo. It doesn’t look for Olevia it’s it’s not good. Okay. Okay. Good to know. Yeah. There are some people that struggle with Lyme and Lyme is they say it’s really, really hard to detect that it’s really hard to figure out the co-infections people will do the Western blot and it doesn’t always, uh, show that you have it.
There’s like the other, the galaxy. And I forget the I Genix one, I think. But do you recommend a certain test that people can figure out if they have Lyme? No. And I, and I, I, it is just such a again, I mean, I, I think one word that’s coming on mouth repeatedly. It’s complex. And I hate to say that, but it’s complex.
I know you’ve gotta get a history from a patient. Okay. Not necessarily the tick bite and the MI, you know, the, the erythema rash and the weak followed by flulike illness. If you get that history. Okay. That’s great. But many people don’t have that history, you know? Okay. Yes. And so you’ve gotta do a history.
Then I do, I do questionnaires. I do the NCE questionnaire by Horowitz and I do the can lime questionnaire revised, which is from the Canadian Limus associate can lime.comal.org or something. And then I added Boris’s questionnaire and I made my own, okay. So I do Horovitz my own. I take a history and if I’m suspecting tickborne infection and co-infection, I then run T-cell testing or through Armon labs in Germany, and I run iGen X, full iGen X immuno block testing.
And if I suspect, and I’m looking there for IgM, I G G PCR, um, and I’m looking for RNA fragmentation, and I’m looking for all the. Added lime biomarkers that have recently come up with relapsing fever and MIMO and things like that. So I do all of those iGen X, Y Armin lab, El spots. I don’t do the tick Plex plus much with Armin because I get what I need on the, um, agen X.
And then I run galaxy labs for . And then I sit with the awareness that many people will have negative labs and still have tickborne illness. And that’s the sort of current teaching. Amongs one of the PI all the pioneers in lime world, which is vilified by the, uh, I S D a association. There’s no such thing as chronic ly, right?
The test, you know, the testing’s irrelevant. It’s a, it’s a mess. It’s a minefield. And what I do know is that many people come in with a, you know, an I G G I X Lyme test. On one of the bands and say, I got lime. It’s like coming with a microtoxin test and say, I’ve got first, that’s a perilous mistake to make.
Okay. You gotta really, you gotta have your wits about you from a, for a number of reasons. A if you, the diagnostic testing is expensive. Yes. B patients love to find single point causation. If they say you’ve got lime, you’re gonna send them down a rabbit hole of two to four years of whatever treatment you choose.
Sure. And C you are going to be vilified by your traditional colleagues.
If you’re not surefooted on this one. And most of our medical boards will take your license away. Wow. If you, oh yeah. If you start dabbling in this field, so it depends on your resilience to withstand the whole onslaught of the lime world. Now there’s people out there who do lime beautifully and who are experts like Horovitz and.
Steve Harris and others, you know, mm-hmm and I recommend you probably go to the, the most prominent, most qualified, loud, you know, most outspoken expert in the field and go treated by them, but to be treated by an inexperienced naturopath or has been to one eyelids course and has one test, I be careful. Yeah. It’s a perilous path. Um, okay. Yeah. As we’re closing, if people are, you know, have tried many different diets and they’re just not getting fully better and you know, standard care is really not been doing. Good for them. And diet helps somewhat, but not enough. And they’re just feeling chronic fatigue.
Where, where should they start? Like what should they do to maybe incrementally start getting better? Should they save up money to work with somebody? I mean, what are your thoughts? So a person who’s. Changed their diet, but still chronically fatigued. Yeah. I guess mostly fatigue. Maybe they’re still struggling with hypothyroid and they’re, I guess maybe we don’t take talk about the hypothyroid because maybe they have to balance their medication, but somebody that’s just still not fully feeling well.
And I guess the main symptoms would be chronic fatigue, maybe some brain fog. But just generally unwell, Julia, I hate to sort of be the bearer bad news, but you gotta do all layers, all levels. You gotta take your history. That’s fair. You know, if so, so let’s look at one of the variables. Yeah. A person may be uninspired. They’re living a life. They’re not living their values system. They’re living their fathers. And they’re go to get up and go to work every day, not inspired and not being called from above, if you will, by that, which is speaks to them and evokes their creative spirit. Yes. And, but they got a positive microtoxin and a Mo or whatever test you want, and then you start taking the history and you realize.
Is this person, what do they have to get up to every day? What, what in sport calls I get up every day and do what I do. Cause I love to do what I do. What’s calling them from above to get up and do what they love to do. Why? Because the particular activating system in the brain is designed to shut you down when you’re not doing what you inspired to do. Mm. So their fatigue, maybe just the fact that they’re not living their value system, they’re living their fathers, or they don’t even know what their value system is. They don’t even know who they are. They’ve got no self inside. They’re not inside. They don’t know why they get up every day. They’ve got nothing that calls them from above.
So yeah, you can go and do the mold in the diet. But they have no reason to get up every morning. And there’s a lot of patients like that, you know, and you have to start appealing to that aspect of them. Look at their value system and see what’s inspired them. And some of them, you know, patient, how many patients have you had chronic fatigue, sick unwell. You work beautifully for two years. You go through every single test in the book, you do everything right. No better. And then you go. And you find out they go away and a year later they come back and they fine. What happened to you? I left my husband. I left my job and I fell in love. How much of, how many of us work in that?
You know, we ask about that, but you don’t know. Until the person has changed some of their experiences as to what role those played in their life. You may have hinted it, but until they, they get insight until they change, some of their determinants healing is must. We know so little, you know, We know so little, uh, and sometimes it takes, sometimes it takes, if you will, an act of God, it takes, I don’t mean that in a religious sense, but there’s some movement that sort of enters their field that pulls them into a new experience.
And all of a sudden they shift and they buy chemistry shifts and the molecular signaling shift shows, then they, they feel inspired and life’s meaningful. Again. I don’t know the answer to that question. No, I, I think that’s good. I mean, for me, I struggled with mental health and depression, anxiety. I didn’t like my job.
It was a very well paying job. I traveled the world. Everyone loved the kind of work I did in that sense. But at the core of me, I hated what I was doing. It wasn’t fun. I didn’t enjoy it. Um, and, and I struggled with depression and so I changed the diet and that helped me a lot, but it was really when I.
Found my purpose and yeah. Um, and God had something to do with it too. Yeah. And all of that together has healed me a lot. So now I no longer share that. It’s just the diet because it diet helped me a lot, but it was like you said, it’s all the layers and I will always have something to work on in that whole sphere of things that you mentioned. But I think acknowledging that because a lot of my clients will say I have stress it’s, um, that’s normal. This is just the life we live in nowadays. I think it’s making us more sick than we realize. Yeah. There’s a term in the integrated field called the allostatic load, you know? Yes. The incoming load versus the resilience and often that’s, you know, and people are often, people are so habituated to living in the world in a certain way.
They don’t know any other way. And so they think that’s their norm. Right. But then they go on holiday. They fall in love, they have another experience and all of a sudden they go. That wasn’t harmonious or coherent with my values. Now I can see. And only in retrospect, can they look back and see, or they leave a difficult relationship?
You know, sometimes people through Mayas, Bri typology or through attachment styles or VEIC styles, they just oil and water, but they try out of the goodness of their heart to make it work. And it’s, but it’s the allostatic load of that relationship is push them out of homeostasis and then something happens and that relationship breaks.
And all of a sudden the life force gets released and the patient’s back on track, but they were, they were just pushing against an aesthetic load that they weren’t conscious of until they somehow they got out of it for an act of guard or whatever, and then out and they look back and they go, oh my goodness, how did I persevere for so long?
It’s a lot to think about. And I love, I love it because I’ve just found so many of my clients that this is the way to heal is they have to touch everything in their life and it’s not easy. And people want the magic pill to fix everything. Whether it’s the diet, a supplement, a medication, a test. But I think from our conversation, it’s probably a difficult one to listen to because it’s not that simple, but if people really want to get to a level of healing that they can reach, um, It’s really looking into a lot of these layers that you so eloquently have brought up.
So thank you for that. Yeah. Layers, layers, and levels. Yeah. In the, in the roadmap thingy that I do here, which I haven’t published yet because I it’s in my book, but it’s, you know, each level is experience and anatomical conceptual designation as related science, a diagnostic method and the treatment method.
So it all layers. There’s sort of a template of possibilities and many people go to the wrong level. You know, they go, they go and see an acupuncturist when they should be seeing an oncologist or they go and see a shaman when they should be going to see a chiropractor. So there’s different layers and different levels.
So try and educate as to what layer, what level, when and how to integrate. All the possibilities. Well, thank you so much for your time. You, if so I know you’re in Canada. And so this was my struggle is I always need to find a service practitioner to work with my people that have the markers that need to start going through this journey, but you’re in Canada. So one, how does that work with insurance? If people are in America, is your clinic open for new patients? So I, I do see new patients, but with the us patients, I act as an educator and guide an advocate because we, you know, we. Sort of practice across state lines, so to speak so I can suggest and guide, uh, but they have to have a primary care provider that will implement suggestions and, uh, advice.
And then do you normally have somebody in the states that you recommend? I recommend people go to the ICI website. I S E a I and find a practitioner in the area that has the most experience. Yeah. And so where can people find you your clinic? Um, in Calgary, Alberta, and, um, I have a website, that’s got a lot of my blogs where I write about all these things. And that’s the Hoffman center.com center is T R E not the American ER . And then I think my staff may have sent you my Instagram thingy and yes, I’ll, I’ll put it in the show notes. I know. Yeah, I know you’re busy. Okay. No, no, no. I understand. I have read. Several of your blogs and you are so well versed and comprehensive, and I, I was totally drawn to you because of that.
So thank you for all your work. No pleasure. I’m glad you, uh, were able to make use of some of the late night research. yes, no, I get that. Trust me. Um, so I will put all your information in the show notes. I’m excited to just see people really take a look at their illness and, um, take it to another level and look at the different layer. And I would, I’d like to say thank you to all the, you know, the saying that’s cliche, but the standing on the shoulders of others, but Deri Khar Neil, Nathan, Richie, Shoemaker, Larry Doy, Deepak, all of these people that, you know, you just, you make your way. In relationship to all that they’ve done before you.
So we are not isolated in that way. And, uh, it’s good to say thank you to all your teachers and, you know, gratitude for what we can pass on and integrate and make new, you know, constantly reinventing the diagnostic and therapeutic. Uh, platform, you know? Yes. The goal is always the people and trying to get people better.
And if we can fine tune someone’s work, that’s absolutely the goal is because we want people to heal. So, yeah. And, and, and, and advice just stay related to your patients, you know, through limbic resonance, just, you know, the masks I done away with that, you know, The eyes, the tone of voice, the, the connection, um, that’s where trust gets established and that’s the, the hidden alchemy of healing, you know, that makes sense.
I love it. I believe it . Well, thank you so much. All right. Thank you, Judy. I was chatting to you. Okay guys, I know that this interview is not the most rainbows in unicorns in terms of healing. It may be a long journey, but always have hope that you can heal. Sometimes it takes a lot more extra work than the average person that may eat a meat only elimination diet, but you can still heal.
And there’s a lot that you can do, even with all the. Nuances and depends. And it’s complex from Dr. Hoffman. He says that diet is a hundred percent. Part of the equation. Carnivore is a perfect diet to do while you’re trying to heal all these other levels and modalities in your life that you need to focus on.
It’s never really about the carbs. It’s never really about the POAs. It’s never really about those other things. Oftentimes the illness is far deeper than that in our conversation. One thing that was really fascinating was that Dr. Hoffman brings up how a lot of his patients after having learned a lot about the damaging seed oils and the toxins in canola oil and soybean oil are now actually showing up that they’re really deficient in omega sixes.
He talks about how we need. Some of these essential omega six, such as linoleic acid and the other omega six is to even produce fossil tidal choline. We may be hurting ourselves by trying to reduce our omega six to the point of illness. It’s just something to consider. I know there’s a lot of advocates that are so against omega six to the point that we are just focusing on omega threes, but it is in balance and we are required for both for optimal health.
It’s just something to consider. If you are removing all levels of omega six in your. I hope that this conversation really makes you think and figure out what you need to do to help you get to root cause healing. Make sure to eat a lot of meat, take care of your bodies because it is the only place you have to live.
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.
Dr. Hoffman
Well welcome everybody. Today I’m going to be talking about complex patients and in the setting of mold illness, but I want you to know that this isn’t going to be about how to diagnose mold illness, sirs, and the steps A, B, C, D, E, F, G, which you can get, and I’ve listed some of the fabulous sites that are out there that you can go to to reference some of the logistics of how to diagnose mold illness and what to do about it every step of the way. This is more of just about what I, as a physician who treats complex illness, find when people present to me with a diagnosis or suspicion of having mold illness as a trigger for the complex symptomatology. And what I found problematic and difficult sometimes to negotiate when trying to understand where the mold may fit into the complex scenario. So these are some websites that you can go to Dr. Andrew hymens YouTube videos on SIRs are fabulous. Richie Shoemaker has been teaching mold illness for a very long time. The ici website has got some amazing people that belong to that group and present on mold all the time. They have an annual conference coming up soon. And then many of you may know Neil Nathan and his approach, real time lab have lots of information. And Dr. Dennis is an EMT surgeon who does a lot of work on sinus colonization of mold and performance surgery and treats mold illness as a occupant of hollow spaces. So those are some references for you.
But here’s the scenario. A patient presents at your office, this is what I see. This is what I see all day, every day. I’ve seen patients this week already with this type of presentation. patient presents, they say I have mold illness. So I suspect mold is playing a role in my symptomatology. And they’ve got many symptoms. You know, as we all know, when dealing with chronically ill people, they fatigue, they got body pain, they got brain fog, mood disorders, got GI tract is always involved, immune systems always involved, they feel inflamed, they hurt, they saw, they ache, and they very symptomatic. And they’ve often been that way for a very long time and have seen every specialist in the book and seen many times many naturopaths, chiropractors, you name it. They’ve been there. And then they show up with a host of lab tests and specialist letters and special investigations.
And now I once but to sort of sift through this and try and make sense of it and see where does mold fit into this complexity. So this is a common thing I get patients say I’ve got mold illness, and they’ve seen everybody. They’ve tried everything, and they always want to get onto Colas tyramine. I don’t know why. It’s a very common presentation. Can I get a colostomy today? Can you prescribe it for me, and I’ll show you as this presentation progresses, that this is probably the very last thing that you want to be doing. So the most common way people are presenting now is with a mold urine test. And they think that from this urine test of the mycotoxin, which is a toxic byproduct of mold, that they could have mold illness, and this is one of the biggest mistakes ever made. In my clinical career when it comes to dealing with complex patients and etiology of disease processes. This test cannot determine whether you have mold illness or not. And I hope my presentation will enunciate why I say that.
So where do we begin? So I’m not going to go straight into SIRs or mold illness right away. I’m going to just give you some background to how I sort of orient myself to these complex patients. You know, where do we practically begin? When we know in systems biology that everything’s connected to everything else? Everything’s embedded in deep chains and networks and systems and we are very tempted as physicians or clinicians to plunge into the typical n square D square approach to medicine, name of disease, name of drug, and this sort of prescribing an allopathic way, something to help relieve the patient’s symptomatology.
But over the years, I’ve developed a system of trying to work through complexity. And I adapted the eidetic model of the cultures or bodies, these different layers or levels to our reality model somewhat on a bit antic literature. It is very training that I’ve done in the past and also German biological medicine as developed by Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt. So I’ve sort of melded all these models together. And I look at the person presenting in front of me having different layers and levels of of their, to their reality.
So the first level is the environment. Outside, we can’t just do an exchange with our environment. So we all the toxicology issues come into play. Level two is the biochemistry and the structure, the physicality of our being. Level three is the energetics the sort of biophotons that radiate from us squeeze DNA, and the interaction with our nervous systems and brains. Stage four has everything to do with our emotional body and how we’ve been seen or not seen in our early developmental years, and what our attachment disorders may or may not be, and how we’ve oriented ourselves to the world in terms of developing a window of tolerance for self regulation in the midst of complexity and challenge. Level five is the the ego, the the operational sense of self that gets us through life. And that has our value systems, our defenses, our beliefs, or morals or values. And there’s a lot that goes on at that level.
And then level six is the so called Soul the most authentic part of yourself, that part of you, which is calling union, psychology the daemon. It’s your true authentic self that sort of, sort of holds yourself together consciously or unconsciously, it’s usually only accessible in the second half of life, I’m afraid to say. And I don’t mean that flippantly, it just seems to be that as we progress through life, the first 30 years or ego based, we driven to become something. And so we have these drives that that force us to be seen by our parents to be seen by our peers, to find a mate to procreate to educate and create some stability and safety in the world. But the second half of life is all to do with authenticity. Who are we really, and how much of our true self that we leave behind in this in this search for authenticity, or in the search for gaining something in the world and procreating the species.
And then the last level is that which is above and beyond and has nothing to do with our individual reality, which we call God or the grand organized design. And some people are very connected to that aspect of their non-local reality and other people aren’t. And it plays a role in diagnosis and therapeutics. So this is the model I use. When a person sits in front of me, can I use a practically very practically. And it looks like this on a map. Where we this is what it looks like when I when my book eventually comes out, this will be there. But this so these are the seven stages of reality and all the experiences anatomical designation sciences, diagnostic methods and treatment methods. And so here we have a lady to make it more practical and less easy to Tarek, a woman may present say, in her 50s with mold illness. And she’s got all these complex, additive diagnostics. That when you go through the layers and levels, they sort of show up. At the first level. Yes, she’s been exposed to mold. She’s lived in a moldy environment for 10 years and it’s deadly well since. But she also has other toxic exposures, mercury from fillings. organophosphates because she like lives next to a farmer’s field. She got a lot of dental issues, she’s lived in tick, bite country, and so forth and so on. You’ll see a lot of these different in functional medicine we call them antecedents, mediators and triggers of illness. Level two or two you know, we all know about food, gut, brain immune system issues, level three auditor electromagnetics and, and brain function, level four all about early trauma and inherited trauma from ancestors, level five or to do with ego strengths, personality disorders or mood disorders, and then level, that’s level five, and then level six, inherited family trauma, meaning and purpose in life.
Some people have no idea why they get up every day. And so people without that drive to, towards what we call a strange attractor, people get driven, there’s a biological urge to become something. And some people feel very disconnected from that, and that has vast diagnostic and therapeutic implications. And then at level seven, this woman had no connection to anything outside of her own reality. And so these sort of these, this sort of presentation becomes very palpable, very practical. I had a patient just last week, and she came to see me with severe muscle activation syndrome and reacting to foods she had, she was eating like three foods, she was breastfeeding her 15 month old son, who was also had very little to eat. Because everything was rejected.
He vomited continuously, she could only hold on a few foods. And this person was never sleeping through the night. She lived in a moldy home food was an obvious trigger as well electromagnetic fields, which as you’ll see are huge triggers of my cell activation and the so called Cell danger response, which we’ll get to in a minute. In a bit upon deep inquiry, it was apparent that she’d had a tumultuous upbringing with with lots of trauma, and interrupted bonds with the parents, their parents got divorced when she was three. And she spent the next two decades going to court and having to choose sides between her wearing parents. And she had allergies from a very young age.
And then I was just talking to her and I said, Oh, you know, I think we’re going to have to use a tighter, firmer h1, first generation h1 blocker for your son at night to help him with his micelle quietening. And to help him sleep. But she said to me, I just Google that in my chat group, and I heard that it’s gonna induce rage in children. So immediately, her fear based brain her amygdala was on high alert, she was already rejecting a potent life transforming treatment. Ketotifen is amazing when it works. And she had no trust in any allopathic intervention, she already had rejected it. And this you will see, when children had Don’t be unseen, and don’t have limbic resonance with parents, they often have, they’re not able to self regulate, and inhibit, they fear or they fight flight responses. And so they see everything as a threat. And they often have these very distorted relationships with their parents and projected onto therapists, doctors naturopaths, because our profession is very paternalistic, to put it mildly, in that we direct and tell people what to do. And so we act as authority figures. And if this person from a very young age has not been regulated appropriately by the parental influences, and there’s a lot of confusion and inability to self regulate, she will project her fear onto you as a parental figure. And she won’t be able to take anything in. So no matter if she has mold illness or anything else, it doesn’t matter what the diagnoses are, if no trust is established, and if no limbic resonance is established with her as a client, and no stable ability to self regulate is established, you will never get anywhere, no matter what the illness, you have to start at a much deeper level to try and really see that patient and understand the defense’s and understand the trauma before we drop into western or alternative functional medicine diagnostics.
So that’s one of the clinical pearls I would like to introduce when dealing with complex patients when they come in with a urine mycotoxin panel and say can we use code and stymied take a deep take a big step backwards we you know, we familiar with ranch rushing in and going you know, we take functional medicine, even a western medicine diagnosis and then we we want to treat it in diagnosis and then treat it but use a much larger or wider lens when you’re sitting in In front of these people and really start to see who this person is that’s sitting in front of you, what story is wanting to be told through this presentation? And where do you have to really start relating to this person? How many layers and levels are at play? Do they trust you?
Now, obviously, trust is a huge issue. And nobody’s going to trust you on their first visit, they’re going to not trust you on their first visit. So trust is earned. But if they were never seen by their mothers or their fathers, they won’t trust you. And so you can’t come on all strongly occupying the hero archetype and say, you know, I know what’s going on. And I’ll just, let’s do this and that, you have to really enter into the field and create the limbic resonance with them, and hear them and listen to them. They are dying to be heard and seen. So please don’t make that fundamental error of imposing all your knowledge on them. Right out the gate, really, really hear what they say. And these people, as you all know, have been to so many places and just got a sliver of information and not being able to do anything with it. Because in systems biology, there’s nobody practicing systems biology work. It’s all compartmentalized into silos, and square d squared, kind of organ systems.
Very few people are doing complex workups and treating them in a complex way. And again, be aware of the projection of unresolved early issues, the relationship to parents, because this is recreated in the clinical encounter, you will very often be the object of unresolved parental complexes. The other concept that becomes very important is to understand Robert Nivas work on the cell danger response. And also Steven Porges, his work with the polyvagal dorsal response, people who have been sick for a long time, their mitochondria are stuck, they are stuck in CD one or CD two roads famous responses, and they just can’t get out of it. They stuck. Even though the initial trigger may be gone, they stay stuck in this shutdown response. And in this collapsed response, and that’s a whole nother skill set to try and recognize if they in this shutdown cell danger response or if they you know, polyvagal, dorsal shut down, withdrawal from the world. And then you’ve also got to ask yourself, are they cognitively capable? And do they have enough ego strength to really take on the complex workup and treatment protocols?
So we do all sorts of things to try and help us we do heart rate variability, you can see this person is highly in high sympathetic dominance with parasympathetics in the Negative Zone, you can see her Moca score was 2323 out of 30 is not good, there are some you know, memory issues and the hippocampal decline in this person. And then we redid the CNS vital signs computerized executive functioning test, she was in the low average too low to very low functioning capacity. This is not normal for a young, you know, 50 year old person. And then we did the Toba which is a method of ability to concentrate and stay focused and fail this one miserably. And then looked at a Qt T and saw that she had very high the CETA brainwave which is a slowed brainwave, which occurs as a result often of toxic and capital apathy.
Oxidative stress and toxicity generally came from head injuries as well. And that was associated with very high beta brainwaves with joy, anxiety brainwaves. Often this whole part of the brain is lit up like a Christmas tree due to early trauma, which which shows up in brain to E G’s. And then if you look here at the Alpha brainwave this alpha brainwave, here is the brainwave that chills, people are to calms them down, and that’s deficient. That’s one to two standard deviations below normal. So this person’s in fight flight. Her brain is slowed. So she’s cognitively impaired and she can’t regulate her. Her her her physiology, her autonomic nervous system, she’s really, you know, very ill and very depressed and very anxious and can’t sleep and fatigue and so forth and so on. So without these additive insights, you know, if somebody just walks in the room and they go mold illness put me on Curtis datamine and you don’t have some background data at the sort of higher levels of functioning.
You can really run into a lot of trouble and to, I don’t want to say harm, but really not be of much help. In the autonomic nervous system, we meant to self regulate and have coherence between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. But many of our patients are in this fight flight, or even hyper freeze where they are actually frozen, they just they shut down. This is poisonous polyvagal theory, dorsal vagal, shut down. They, they they freeze, they withdrawn, they dissociate, they really sick and they stack you can’t get out of it. So, so learn to recognize these states. What you will then want to do is help them build a window of tolerance. And this is a slow process, they often have to refer to particular practitioners like Somatic Experiencing practitioners and others. We do a lot of work with neuro biofeedback as well as refer to Somatic
Experiencing people and help these patients, you know, develop some capacity, some resilience, before they either hyper aroused or hyper arousal was completely shut down. Many of our patients they, you know, they are not thriving, they’re not incoherence, they’re not solving, self regulating. They are in crisis, they struggle, I can’t keep this up, I can’t survive, really learn to know these people and also learn how to diagnose and how to enter into a therapeutic relationship with them because you can’t go touch them mold, or their micelle or their life, you cannot go near those diagnoses, until this person has developed some resilience or some capacity to self regulate. So that’s the first sort of big insight. We’ve got three brains, as you know, the the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain and the human neocortex. It’s the it’s the neocortex, the executive function that learns to inhibit the fears of the amygdala, and the fight flight from early trauma and lack of trust. But many people’s prefrontal cortices are very damaged from mold exposure, and they can’t inhibit the impulses in their peers and they stay constantly upregulated. So the second sort of Pitfall, if you will, I don’t like after I wrote this, I thought, using the word pitfalls, pretty negative, but I hope you don’t take exception to this. It’s not implying it’s a pitfall, but it’s a sort of, it could be a stumbling block in your therapeutic encounter.
You’ve also got to know yourself a little bit. And you got to be attuned to your own blind spots, your unconscious complexes, your defenses, and where your knowledge begins and ends and don’t try and occupy the hero archetype and just be all knowing and impose everything without really relating to the individual. Are you present? Are you related? Are you resonant? Are you tuned? Your whole thing with these masks, you know, Porsche has has developed this polyvagal theory of social engagement. The ventral vagus is all to do with our tone of voice and eyes and facial muscles. And here we are walking. Two years we’ve all been unrelated and dissociated from each other for the last, it’s I think there’s significant consequences and, and a lot of parents notice, hence wanting to remove masks and things. So that’s another whole saga.
But there is a there’s a physiological price we pay when we don’t establish trust, by by looking at somebody in the eyes and looking at the gaze and, and seeing the smile and hearing the tone in the voice because those are the unconscious signals we used to attune to others missing for the last two years. The other thing I asked you is, symptoms aren’t, they don’t fall out of the sky. You’ll those of you who are more experienced know that symptoms often point to somewhere in the system of this individual where unconscious dynamics need to be made conscious. I take symptoms as highly highly teleological they have they have they have meaning and often teach my patients to actually go quiet and go into their symptoms and ask their symptoms. What is it I’m not seeing? And sort of like a conscious meditation if you will, and you’ll be shocked at how many patients will come back with saying you know, I did that and I heard something my dream showed me something some synchronistic activity showed up and guided me through the process.
So don’t take symptoms. There’s objective, like we learned, let’s call a symptom that has to be destroyed and gotten rid of No, you vote lean into your center, what is it, trying to tell you that you’re not making a conscious symptoms are often pointing to what is silent or hidden in a system, or highly defended against so, so use symptoms teleologically again, are you acting as a authority figure upon which your patient projects all the rage? You know, if you look at the stages of emotion, anxiety isn’t an emotion, it’s a defense against emotion. But beneath that comes sadness and depression, anger and rage, murderous rage. So people are often highly defended against feeling things they don’t want to feel because those things are so awful, or were awful. So they will suppress a lot of the emotional self. And then because it’s so uncomfortable projected on you because it was projected onto the parent that they couldn’t engage with for various reason.
Again, what stage of life are your patients in first half first, second half and what defenses are active in you and them when you when you find when you find yourself becoming dogmatic and insistent know that you probably in a defense, you you’re activating your own core complexes. And it’s very difficult sometimes to not become self righteous and sort of have that patriarchal approach. We trained to have that approach, forged. As we’re learning more about trauma and empathy. Many of us have done you know, our work on this and know that that patriarchal attitude doesn’t really get you very far. You wanted in an era when you have a heart attack, you want to patriarchal person takes control and does exactly what they need to do to save your life. But in a therapeutic encounter, it can be disastrous. So, again, establish who is in front of you established your body felt sensations or the way you feel in your own body in front of this person? Are you in limbic resonance with them? Or are you completely disconnected? Know when people are shut down, know when they struggling to even show up with appointment? Know what the ego strengths and cognitive abilities, if they’ve got low motor scores, and they’re not going to be able to take on your program, you’re going to have to make some decisions on how best to approach that.
Person personality disorders are which they are out there borderline personalities, narcissist, and those people are difficult, be careful and know your way around them. Because those are the three that threaten to be lentiginous they often aren’t. It’s just a threat that they can be they can take up a lot of your time. But do your very best to create a trusting relationship? Not? Not? You know, it’s not it’s a genuine relationship. It’s not a false sense of camaraderie or anything. It’s a genuine sense of getting to know this person and what’s really what’s it like for them? You know, what’s the internal dialogue? We have 60,000 thoughts a day? What’s What’s the content of that thought process? Is it despair? Is it rage, often, you know, because it’s hidden behind the fences, and then help them to self regulate and create windows of tolerance. To to coin a phrase from Somatic Experiencing world and learn about neuroplasticity and neuro modulation, how the brain changes it states, there’s a lovely video of a guy who learns to ride a bicycle. And when he turns right, bicycle goes left. And he took him. It’s like a party trick. He goes on stage and asked everyone to come up, nobody can do it. And he took eight months to learn how to change is fun when you turn right.
The bicycle went left and he learned how to ride this backwards bicycle but to him eight months to do it. And the same is with your brain and your neuroplasticity and your defenses and your psyche. You can’t just shift a person’s consciousness overnight. And you’ve got to really almost juice that relationship into being through multiple modalities of information and salience and education and empathy and referring out to the right people. So I mean, I’m not trying to make this complicated, but just be a healer first and not a doctor. You know, just just the healing archetype is very different from the from the doctor argue To become a very good doctor know your western based diagnosis and treatment protocols, but also approach it from an empathic point of view. And a related point of view and know that any change is going to be particularly with these complex people is not overnight. It takes time, and learn all the ways to treat this neuro plasticity and vagal tone. And many of you know all these modalities, but I just listed some of them. And then know about the cell danger response. It’s an incredibly important concept to take into account.
It’s the concept that Robert Novo has developed over the years of research, which basically says that, when you’re, you know, you’ve got 30 trillion cells. And each cell is surrounded by a cell membrane inside of which there’s been 100 to 2000. Mitochondria, also surrounded by membranes with an electrical charge of approximately 170 millivolts. And the mitochondria are the canaries in the coal mine are the first thing to detect oxidative damage or any incoming stress. And as the incoming toxins come in, the the voltage on the cell membrane changes. And then that launches a whole host of metabolic changes, which leads to mitochondrial autophagy, which leads to the intracellular contents of the mitochondria going outside the cell, which creates another whole pro inflammatory response, and then the body stays in the so called Cell danger response never being unstuck, because the triggers are never addressed, and the metabolic machinery is never addressed. And so learning the cell danger response, I think, has become a very therapeutically, almost essential, We fortunately have some labs now, that can show us some of this before it was just in the research phase. But now, we have labs that can show us how to note if somebody is in the cell danger response. And we have therapeutics that give assist body by being probably the main one that I know of anyway, to help repair cell membranes, and how the outer leaflet the inner leaflet, how to get rid of very long chain fats that are produced by toxic load.
By using beauty rates and taxes and things. We’ll get to that a bit later. The important thing I know this is a mold talk I’m getting. But the mold exposure initiates a cell danger response. If you’d see the CDR one, and that is initiated by chronic activation of the innate immune system, and that can stay stuck in the cell danger response. Long after the initial signal has passed, people can just stay there and not shift. Now Robert Navarro has incredibly listed a number of different scenarios like the cell danger response, one cell danger response to cell danger response, three different conditions that are in different phases of the so called Cell danger response. So he’s reframed this, as I said, the pathogenesis of chronic illness in this way as a biological systems response that maintains disease, rather than focusing only on the triggers or triggers that initiated the original injury. We want to run a chain and cheat mode, but what’s happened to the metabolism of the organism? How can we identify and treat that and that’s where cell membrane medicine in the body byproducts have a fantastic role to play?
Yeah, so that’s just some more graphs of the cell danger response. And he’s also came up with this incredible insight that you know, we’re always rushing in, in functional medicine to look at oxidative stress and antioxidant defenses. And this is the teeter totter. But he’s positive the theory that you know, and oxidative reactive oxygen species are released by the mitochondria to protect the cells from further damage in a dysfunctional cellular response, and it continues to be activated despite the neutralization of the threat and these reactive oxygen species act, dysfunctional, damaging healthy cells, and he says he had contrary to long held beliefs about the etiology of these diseases. This D redefines reactive oxygen species activity in the context as a defense mechanism and oxidative shield. Therefore reducing reactive oxygen species would not necessarily address the root cause of disease, which actually lies within the destruction of the mitochondria and they have normal cell danger metabolism. Many practitioners were rushing to quench free radicals. I know I did still do for various reasons, with antioxidants, but this can actually cause further harm, as these free radicals may be providing a protective response very important to keep that in. Here’s the oxidative stress markers we often measure.
These are the antioxidants we often use. Common. The another pitfall that we encounter when we rushed into diagnose mold illness, is we we don’t consider a background understanding of other possible differential diagnosis. I use a lot of questioners, this is the MS Q questionnaire, which you’re all familiar with, I believe from AFM. I really have found it essential to know about methylation. And I like to look at methylation through the eyes of William Walsh’s work that he he’s is still teaching right now. On is the old Carl Pfeiffer work with over and under methylation, zinc copper issues and crypto Pio issues. He’s done a fabulous job of initiating the whole methylation complexity. And we need to sort of know that when we addressing mold illness, whether the person’s under over methylator, whether they have cooked up piles, and that they they have copper overload or cryptic barrels.
And then we have to sort of know this methylation panel backwards, because if you see here, here’s the stressors and total toxic load of environmental toxicity level one in my model and stage one more is there more than juicers, peroxy, nitrate peroxy, nitrate being the or it’s also called no or No, which is sort of the nature of free radicals that initiates the destruction of the mitochondria. And we can measure peroxy nitrite. There it is right there. If you do a methylation panel, from a company called Health diagnostics, it measures the peroxy nitrate there we can see how high it is and how much damage is caused into the mitochondria and whether the mitochondrial contents are being released from the cell along with ATP and when that’s released, that then triggers the micelles that they perpetuate this ongoing cell danger response that goes round and round in circles.
So we do have to know our methylation pathways. In red all the bad guys or pro oxidant issues and in blue are all the sort of good guys good to find catalase superoxide, dismutase. We don’t want to go rushing in with all antioxidants, when we don’t understand the cell danger machinery and we don’t understand all the triggers that are initiating the cell dangerous buttons. But we do want to use them where we need to Lyme disease which is which is a biotoxin illness in the same camp as mold illness. Very important to differentiate between biotoxin illness and chemical toxicity. Explain that in a minute. I use a lot of questionnaires I use Dr harvesters, MC lime questionnaire, and I’ve made up my own sort of conglomerate of many other question is that the basis of the kanlaon questionnaire, this is an alternative activist, patient advocacy group in Canada called kanlaon. And I’ve used the equation added some things to I found the use of question is very helpful. And then you’ve got to know your mast cell activation issues, because most of these patients with illness can’t tolerate a lot of things.
And if you don’t down regulate and put a lid on my cell activation before you begin your therapeutics, this patient will never get better, just like if you don’t help them self regulate and go from sympathetic to parasympathetic, which is the healing state. You can’t you know, if you don’t help them and assist them in that process, and if you don’t help them damp and myself, my cells are a consequence of the cell danger response. They don’t have cause just like people walk in and say, Oh, I have mold. They also walk in and say oh, because I’ve written many blogs on myself. They will say, Oh, I’ve got my cell activation syndrome, and I’ll go really okay. What are the triggers? Then then starts the whole diagnostic complexity where the triggers of my selector, so my cell activation is a consequence of an upregulated oxidative stress pathways and it’s our task to find out all the triggers we have which there are many, in my cells being they release 1000 mediators of inflammation, which damage the mitochondria, as do mold toxins. If you don’t understand my cell activation, know how to dampen it.
That’s another patient you can’t treat because they can’t take anything. If you give them 10 supplements as a one sometimes forget about it, they won’t be able to handle, they will, you know, they’ll have all kinds of reactions, and you’ll get lots of phone calls. This is the paper Lawrence app. And one of the main researchers put out on on the consensus of my cell activation, which is different from there’s different ways to diagnose myself. And this is a paper a whole bunch of us, co authored with him, but he was the main author. It’s a good paper, it’s on my website, if you want to read it. Know About pots, POTS is extremely important. Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, if you don’t, if you’ve missed pots, that patient will never feel better. Learn about it, learn how to treat it. And always have somebody in your office do blood pressures, that 10 minute blood pressure test.
You get them to lie down, you take the pulse rate and blood pressure, get them to stay in that one minute, three minute, five minute 10 minutes pulse systolic diastolic blood pressure, and then you work out the difference between the two. If they’re stuck if they post rate increases by 30 beats per minute. That’s parts by definition. And this is this simple little test. This is as good as doing a talk table. And many people will come in with the pulse rate differential 4050 beats per minute, that person’s not diffusing their brain. They’re not confusing their periphery. They’re not confusing the mitochondria. They are sick, and they know they sick but nobody’s done the 10 Minute blood pressure test. So when I learned about it about 10 years ago, I now I won’t see a patient before this is done by my staff before they come in the door. And if I’m doing a zoom consult, they have to go by a blood pressure cap and do this. The question is do you get dizzy when you stand up? 50% of my patients with mold illness or myself illness? Say yes. You have to learn to differentiate between parts orthostatic hypotension and idiopathic Tachycardia Syndrome. That that’s another whole subset of issues know about hypermobility and Ehlers Danlos.
These patients are very different are very difficult sometimes to treat because they so loosey goosey and they got so much muscle activation and their collagen fibers I’m tired and so they got leaky guts and leaky brain barriers and they really can be in quite a lot of distress. And no Dr. Andrew Maxwell cardiologist has put together that triads and paint ads, people who have my cell activation pots and Ehlers Danlos, plus dysautonomia, plus autoimmunity. These are groups of patients that you’ll get to, you’ll get to see them over and over again. And if you go on his website, he’s done some beautiful PowerPoint presentations on this complexity of how to put these things together. Never work with a patient without knowing their dental history. The the lower jaw the job, the trigeminal nerve goes back into the brainstem. So toxins in the lower jaw affect the brain in a dramatic way, just like the vagus nerve in the gut goes back up into the brain. And the sinuses affect the brain tremendous way you can colonize hollow spaces with mold and Candida.
I think 80 to 90% of all chronic sinusitis is yeast or mold related. So you got to know this area of the body. A good panorex X ray or 3d Cone Beam or getting somebody to interpret it for you, a biological dentist who knows what to do can help you tremendously. Root canals cavitations these are all issues that you’ll learn about as you get more deeper into complexity. Know about sleep. This is you know everybody knows the sleep issue. You you don’t you know you don’t restore If you don’t go into deep sleep, you don’t restore a lot of your circadian rhythms and your detoxification through your glymphatic ‘s, this doesn’t, things don’t go very well if you don’t get enough sleep every night.
So I know how to assess the patient and know how to take a sleep apnea history and I refer probably 95% of my patients now to sleep clinics for sleep studies, 90 to 90 and then also know every diet in the book you got to be very clued up on your diets because everybody’s got something else going on. From carnivore to low oxalate to. It’s everywhere and low mode, Candida. Justin who works with me as a nutritionist health coach, and also is very connected to the body by a team. We use a mixture of paleo, Paleo autoimmune, low histamine and membrane stabilizing. Those are that sort of scenarios where we get our most benefit. When we start treating patients, we often have to do low FODMAPs, low oxalates. And most patients now seem to do better on a ketogenic approach. But some people are really sick. We go, we haven’t do carnivore diets for a month or two.
Now we get two more. Sorry, they took a little bit, but the topic was more and complexity. So I address the complexity part first, now we get into more. So this is a pitfall not understanding chronic inflammatory response syndrome. If you look at the immune system, here, we’ve got two new parts, the adaptive and the innate immune system. The innate immune system is the primitive, not too intelligent by the immune system. And it’s the first thing to go into action when any threat approaches. But the innate immune system hands off to the more sophisticated adaptive immune system to T cells, by the use of antigen presenting cells, when the antigen presenting cells of the innate immune system detected danger, they envelop little epitopes little DNA fragments and present them to the adaptive immune system to the T cell, which then triggers the B cells to create antibodies and memory cells. Now, this is this is SIRs or chronic inflammatory response syndrome. It’s a chronic, chronic more than six months inflammatory response, where people get sick and remain sick and don’t know why. And what happens is people with this condition often have a poor transfer of the innate to the nt body part of the immune system.
They have an inability to hand off to the adaptive immune system to call in the troops to put out the fires of inflammation, so they stay stuck in a chronic innate inflammatory response. They don’t create a transfer, they don’t create an anti inflammatory response. And this has been shown by Richie Shoemaker and others to be dependent on the nine gene sequence on chromosome six was houses the so called HLA set of genes, of which he believes about 22% of the population have this gene set. Now this, this theory of the HLA origin of innate immune activation has been contested by a number of practitioners who’ve sort of broken away from shoemakers original research. But I I’ve sort of returned to it recently, because when people have this set of genes is HLA a set of genes. I do think there’s something to be said by the fact that it is those set of people with those gene issues that don’t get out of the innate immune activation, they just don’t have an ability to turn off the inflammatory response.
And I do think there’s something to it, although as I said, it has been highly contested by other people as not being reproducible in terms of research. Once you stay in a chronic inflammatory response being triggered by mold exposures or any biotoxin, whether it be Lyme disease, secretario, or any, any biologically active substance. If this immune threat increases, you can’t turn it off. You’re constantly making inflammatory genes and proteins that circulate, they go to the liver, the biliary tract go emulsified by bile. Many people have Kali cystectomy. They don’t make bile, and it’s dumped into the GI tract. Then it either go out through the store, that’s your where people use their binders. And that’s where they want to call the stymy to bind the toxins or remove them, or it’s reabsorbed through the entropy circulation. And this goes round and round around in circles, you just can’t turn it off, you keep recycling toxins.
So what turns on this in the heat system is a biotoxin, an organism or a fragment of an organism? tick borne illnesses do it, some pathogens do it or multiple pathogens to turn on the innate immune system. This is not a chemical, it’s not a plastic. It’s not a heavy metal. It’s not an organic type. It’s not glyphosate. This is a biotoxin that turns on. It’s an organism this is important to realize. So pitfall number four, you confuse SIRs with chemical heavy metal toxicity. A biotoxin is not a toxin, as we learned, many people think this is a toxic problem, and they go rushing into detoxify without really understanding the biochemistry underneath it. So this is a chronic, persistent, innate inflammatory response induced by biotoxin. And these biotoxins can be mold. buildings contain over 30 Different inflammatory foods, many of which are bio toxins like actinomyces, etc. It’s mycoplasmas. They are not just mold, there’s many other inflammatory diseases can cause all kinds of trouble, really secretaria for stereo, and these people, they can’t turn off this innate inflammation due to these HLA gene problems. So it’s a genetic is genetically influenced, epigenetics turn on but genetically stays on, you won’t get these patients better by detoxifying them.
You won’t get them better by doing chelation therapy. So last thing you want to be doing, even though they may have a heavy metal burden that has to be addressed at some stage, you’ve got to address this chronic persistent innate immune system activation first, but you’ve got to measure it first before you can address it. So another problem that people often make is confusing mold allergy with SIRs are many of the mold remediation specialists, they end a lot of the even even practitioners risk virologists make this problem that patients will go see them with, say, I have sirs and they said no you don’t you’re IGE antibody to mold is negative, complete. The two ends of the spectrum serves as a chronic innate immune activation. mold allergy is an IGE antibody induced response to an allergen like mold. This shows up on an IGE test, which I do all the time. Very different from innate immune activation. If you’re allergic to mold, your immune system is overly sensitive to specific spores and treats them as an allergen. Ige is often upregulated. But the markers of serves the innate immune system, they’re not touched, and there’s no downstream damage to hormones and other parts of the body that occur with innate immune activation. And so the pitfall here is not fully grasping the subtleties of the SIRs diagnosis and the treatment options. Often, you’ve got to you got to ask yourself when you start treating and do these patients fit the SIRs criteria, and I’ll show you how to determine that in a minute.
There’s a patient for further criteria for a tick borne illness notoriously difficult to diagnose. Lab diagnostics are not reliable by any means. That the person get bitten by tick, turn on the HLA genes and then get exposed to mold very common. Are they still being exposed to mold or is it historical exposure? Often the disease the chronic disease, the ill health of the person, it’s the chronic inflammation itself. It’s not the mold of a lamp. It’s the fact that these HLA genes are turned on in a system which is just running with recirculation of the biotoxin nobody’s addressed it. Nobody knows what’s going on. And so there’s a lot of complexity involved in making the diagnosis and then how to treat it, which is on the other side of the slide, which I’ll get to. So how do we make a diagnosis for mold toxicity, or biotoxin illness? First of all, symptomatically. It’s a multiple unexplained multi system non responsive symptoms across many organs or regions of the body. And this question is that we use to determine that there must be a past or present history of exposure to a water damage building. You’ve got to exclude other diagnoses like putts, although they often coexist. And your mold score count the DNA probe for mold spores must pass a certain threshold the either it mustn’t be more than two, or the five molds that are pathogenic Aspergillus Penicillium IDs Aspergillus vesicular, ketone, yum, Stacie, vitalism Alinea together and there’s a scorecard they must be greater than 10 to 15.
These questions here and these diagnostic assumptions, they help you make the diagnosis. And then in order to assist you go over to the proteomics to the labs that help assist you in establishing, you’ve got to have three out of six do you have this HLA set of genes, this is a relative risk of susceptibility. Some people get sick from mold and they don’t have the HLA genes. Dr. Shoemaker said the prognosis is much better. But those of us who sort of broke away the ICI people that Neil Nathan people, we have found people with the so called dreaded gene that Dr. Shoemaker has spoken about get quite well. And we found people without that gene stay sick. So it’s not as cut and dried and as linear as one things. And then the next thing we need to measure are the direct and indirect markers of innate immune dysregulation. And sitting at the center of that is melanocytes stimulating hormone. This is a brain hormone that gets damaged by the innate immune system upregulation of cytokines that then cross the blood brain barrier and damage melanocytes stimulating hormone in the anterior pituitary. And that’s a neuro regulatory neuropeptide that is very much suppressed when the brain is on fire, which is in mold illness, and it starts to drop, and when it starts to drop, all sorts of things go haywire. I’ll enunciate those in a minute.
Another test is C four a, it’s an alternative pathway of complement activation, it’s an expression of huge inflammation. MMP nine is a is a molecule that gets expressed whenever there’s breakage in in blood band barriers, it it causes endothelial disruption and allows like the lime bags and the mold toxins and mycotoxins to penetrate your tissues, anti diuretic hormone and osmolality, which get affected by mold. These are people who pee a lot. They drop their blood pressure because they don’t concentrate the urine because they don’t retain salt. That’s where you get your pots. And they appear they pee a lot. And often those are the people who, when they touched door handles, I get shots quite frequently because of all the sodium that gets excreted because they don’t have that antidiuretic hormone. And then often when Msh drops, you get dysregulation of the ACTH and cortisol pathways with lack of loss of feedback, which is very closely related to the hippocampus in the brain. Cortisol originally goes up saturates the hippocampus, the hippocampus degrades, shrinks, and then you get hyper adrenal states. Now people come and say, Oh, but I’ve been diagnosed with low adrenals. Low adrenals are a consequence of chronic inflammation. They not a diagnosis. So if anybody says I got low adrenals No, there’s more going on. It’s a down regulation of the HPA Axis due to chronic ill health. It’s not a diagnosis, just like my cell activation is not a diagnosis. It’s a consequence of incoming toxicity not being regulated through the cell danger response and getting you out of being stuck. So these are the tests. Now this is the fabulous.
You must know this diagram to understand biotoxin illness and those of you who’ve dealt with mold or SIRs know this pathway backwards, and it sort of summarizes everything, if you will. Here’s the bio toxins in HLA systems trouble person 22 to 25% of the population affecting and inducing inflammation cytokines, those cytokines then have an inflammatory effect on the hypothalamus. And they down regulate leptin, leptin receptors called Dark. These are people who get heavier and heavier and heavier because they can’t regulate appetite. Not it doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen occasionally. But most importantly, it reduces melanocytes stimulating hormone. This is the main neuropeptide, that when that goes haywire, the consequences are traumatic sleep gets affected, pain gets affected, and melanocytes stimulating hormone controls. Guess what? intestinal permeability, here’s your famous leaky gut or intestinal permeable gut, which is at the root of many chronic diseases is often because the melanocytes stimulating hormone has been suppressed due to a biotoxin load, that then creates a permeability issue. That also when your Msh is suppressed, it allows for the growth of resistant staph in the nose, which releases the toxin which goes up and affects the brain. And then here, it affects the antidiuretic hormone it affects is the sex hormones, you get decreased libido, and you go into premature menopause.
And here’s the cortisol and ACTH. And hear you get all these hormonal consequences to biotoxin illness, as opposed to the other 75 80% of people they have, they don’t, they don’t have the HLA gene, and they just get rid of toxins and they you know, husband of a spouse will go what are you complaining about I’m fine. And not understanding the genetic, multi heterogeneity of the gene process. They they, they just, they have an antigen presenting cell that sends it to the B cell. And a B cell mounts an anti inflammatory response. And that’s the end of it, they don’t get sick. But in 25% of the genetically predisposed, this is the scenario that’s installed for them. And all these cytokines are released. And you get all these immune system dysregulation, downregulated T reg cells and shifting of the th one th two axes, you also get hypoxia because of VEGF, another hormone. And oxygen isn’t delivered for the mitochondria to make use of to make ATP. And these are the people who can’t take a deep breath and often do well on oxygen supplementation. These you can really affect your hypoxia of your cellular tissue. Here’s the I mentioned this already. Another pitfall is not understanding other conditions, parts myself, hypermobility, etc, we’ve gone over that. And another pitfall is not using this questionnaire, I encourage you to fill out this questionnaire and get your patients all of them to fill it in.
If they come on this questionnaire, they’ve got 27 symptoms in 13 clusters. And they don’t pass the visual contrast test that Asians got says until proven otherwise. Very helpful. I had a patient this morning, who had this folded patient presented with a head injury. And this was form and no history of mold exposure. So no history of modern exposures. So this questionnaire of four, which is anything less than eight is considered a pass. I didn’t go down the mold pathway. I didn’t ask him. I asked him as a mold on the windows and things but there wasn’t so mold wasn’t an issue with him. But this question helped this questionnaire helped me. Now, you cannot, you cannot tell what the exposure is based on the surface questionnaire, all you can say is that if you have more than eight, you look here, the symptom clusters. If you have more than eight of these clusters symptoms in eight of these clusters, the probability of having SIRs goes up quite substantially and if you have the HLA set of genes, this confounds the diagnostic probability. And if you don’t pass the visual contrast test, or the visual contrast test this is a test that Dr. Shoemaker and Dr. Hudnall in 1997 they, they show that if you’re exposed to by a toxic illness, the neurological functioning of the optic nerve, from the retina to the cortex, you aren’t able to discriminate between shades of colors. And the more the by toxic load, the less the discrimination. And you want to pass a seven C and 60, you want this whole bottom part of the chart to be the tick mark. If you’ve got this all filled in the probability of having SIRs with a positive questionnaire, symptom cluster greater than age 98.5%, shown in multiple studies, first one in 2005.
So just by doing that, taking a history of knowledge pleasure. And doing this, you right there, you being launched into the probability of mold exposures being part of a differential diagnosis. And people. I do this a lot. And when people are being treated, I follow this. And you’ll see these bars clearing beautifully, and the patient feels better than they know. A few people 10% will pass the visual contrast but still show signs of inflammation. And some people have very good visual acuity. Professional baseball players apparently can have sirs and pass the test because they’re so used to having visual acuity. And some other occupational exposures can cause you to fail the visual acuity but generally speaking, it’s a very good test. And that can be done online at surviving mo.com $15 I believe. And then another pitfall is not doing some of the additional lab tests. Now encourage you to study with shoemakers group, or read up on this, I’m not going to go into all the different tests that we do in order to substantiate and gray the severity of the illness. But there’s certain ones that are very important. The Urmi test, which is a measure mold spores in the house essential marchands is a measure of the infected bacteria in your nose that that releases neurotoxin.
And then see for a TGF beta, I run these tests on most of my patients, if not all of them. And then the one at the bottom where it will do quite a lot is the neuro quant MRI, the neuro quant MRI pixelate the brain so that you can put the different areas of the brain the temporal lobes the frontal lobes, the gray matter, the white matter, you can put it into algorithms based on age match controls. And you can see if the brain swollen or atrophied and you get specific findings in mold illness of deterioration in some of the basal ganglia nuclear and inflammation of white matter. So I do neuro cleanse, and probably 80 to 90% of my chronically ill complex patients just to see the state of the brain as it’s been exposed to mold or head injuries. People with a lot of early trauma have a enlarged Amygdala on an MRI two to three standard deviations above normal because they’re always in a fear and fight flight response. You’ll see that all the time.
And that correlates with a beta brainwave being upregulated on the QE G, people with muscle activation syndrome will have very high thickened thalamus is because the thalamus is richly innovated with micelles, and those with head injuries will have asymmetry of between the two sides of the of the brain with the ventricles being different. It’s important to look at these things. If you if you need to know if that brains on fire or not, which you do need to know. One big pitfall is not looking through the lens of standard medicine and through functional medicine. And these are the list of you’re probably quite familiar with this list. I run many or most of these tests all the time on everybody. There’s a stupid thing which you’ve been exposed to that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. And it’s true. We try and do it because everybody, you know, nobody can afford the test. And that’s a given. It’s just a given that you’ve got to try and establish a practice whereby you are comfortable with the amount of labs you’re running, to give you insight to help the level of patients that you see. If you seen somebody just for hormones or leaky gut, then that’s fine. But if you see complex, sick people, we’ve been sick for 1020 years and we’ve got binders this thick and Mayo Clinic console.
You cannot run your practice by doing a few tests just I don’t encourage you to do that. So you have to find the ways and means to spread your diagnostics quite far and wide. Now some people have, who do you know, trickling hearts muscle testing protocols find that they can cut their costs by doing muscle testing, which is, if you skilled at it, I believe it has significant validity and I studied it for 10 years with Dieter, I prefer to work left brain with labs. But the drawback is the cost. People have been sick enough will often shift their value systems to find the means to pay for what they need in order to get better. And you really do need a broad diagnostic brush to bring a lot of this complexity together. You cannot do a stool test and treat these people do you know VCs and the urine mycotoxin test and hope to to help somebody it’s just impossible in my experience anyway. And so here’s some of the labs and all the links that I found helpful but again, that’s subject for another election.
And here’s the biggest bugbear I have is using the urine mycotoxin test is proof of diagnosis answers. I know neon Nathan and the real time people believe that this is enough. But I I think I think that’s too simplistic. Why? Because many healthy controls have lots of mycotoxin in the urine. So just because you’ve got mycotoxins in your urine doesn’t mean you’ve got mold illness. foods contain mycotoxins. You don’t know if you had mycotoxins in your urine, whether they were three years ago, one year ago last night what you had oatmeal for breakfast. And you don’t know if you’re good or poor excreta. I much prefer the next test which is coming up soon as the AGL test which actually measures cellular toxicity, whereby mold mycotoxins get attached to DNA and mitochondrial membranes, and they affect the translation of genes. And you may be a terribly terrible excreta of mycotoxins have a negative test. But if you do the ideal cell test, you’ll see that these micro toxins are sitting right on the DNA affecting translation of proteins and fats.
That’s a much sicker patient, often with neurodegenerative type diseases than somebody who’s got some mycotoxins in the urine. So please don’t make the mistake of just doing this test and diagnosing mold illness. And now that this, these tests have become popular, I see it, it’s everywhere. And I get this test all the time. And I get told I’ve got mold illness based on this one test. It’s not you can’t diagnose mold on this on this test. I hope I’m not sounding you know, the negative on this test, but I think it has to be. I think it has to be the truth has to be told on this one. If you join the ICI group, they debate this test back and forth in the States. It’s a fabulous dialogue to be part of, because Richie shoemakers work originally when he put this all together, he was most indignant that people were using this test and he made us made as those of us who pass these exams, write essays or why this test was so useful.
But then people left his group because some of the things that he said couldn’t be correlated with other evidence. And then those who left his group started to use this test and just use this test for diagnosis. And so the field is in its infancy, just bear with it. I’m sure over time, things will shake out in the wash you know. Many foods contain mycotoxins so one of the things we do you know, people outs and corn and peanuts, I mean, it’s full of market toxins. So these are everyday foods that people eat. So people do get put onto a low mold diet and sup to some benefit. But it’s, it’s really, you know, if you got my cell activation, you got to be on low histamine diet. I find that people got mold illness going on low mold diet isn’t isn’t the therapeutic input that makes the big difference.
Now, here we are back to the cell danger response and membrane medicine. See when these toxins come in which mold is one of the causes oxidative damage, they they destroy the cell membrane, and the sum of these toxins attached to the DNA. And this causes poor translation of messenger RNA into the ribosomes. And then often the cell due to this ongoing toxic insult, undergoes autophagy due to the DNA and the ATP go outside the cell becoming pro inflammatory, inducing my cell activation with 1000 mediators of inflammation and further destroying the cell. And this is this perpetuation of the cell danger response. And so, here we have a lot of research showing how mycotoxins which are the byproducts of mold spores affect the mitochondria, causing the cell danger response has been published. Here’s some of the publications and these mycotoxins disrupt the the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain and many, many different sites. This is all being published. So we know mold damages, ATP production and citric acid and mitochondria. There’s many papers published presenting that by the way, there’s a very good presentation on the GPL Great Plains laboratory website by Kurt Warner, on mycotoxins and mitochondria.
It’s worth watching I got the slide from him. Sorry to say I didn’t obtain permission. But I do know him and I will seek permission when time permits but I’m acknowledging that I got the slide from him. And he got the slide from a publication. So mitochondria are these micro toxins they affect the mitochondria in many different pathways in this Krebs cycle, they you know, we have our macronutrients that have to be eaten, shut fats, for instance, shuttled through by carnitine into the mitochondria across the cell membrane, and all these mighty micronutrients that activate these enzymes that then activate NID, NADH, that then go through the electron transport chain on the inner membrane of the mitochondria that make your ATP here, and these mycotoxins disrupt these pathways in multiple sites, they are crud toxin A affects ATP production inhibits ATP production. Many studies done on this now. So here’s this test, which is sort of revolutionized the way I practice medicine the last five years is a German based test and you can actually measure it can measure mold, fungal species and mold, fungal metabolites, by measures measuring lymphocyte sensitivity to these mold toxins. And you can see here that all at the level of the genome and the mitochondrial membrane, you can get mold. You can get your lymphocytes being high, react highly reactive to mold species and to the mycotoxins. And this is this test is what I rely on now. Apart from doing my traditional shoemakers sort of workup, I look here to see if this person is has mold still in their system. I only saw two patients this morning. Because of preparing for the lecture and get everything set up. One of the patients was from Switzerland, chronic fatigue syndrome, 10 years, supposed to mold in Lyme disease. And she was here in Calgary in December doing very well in Calgary home. Normal. We’ve done me tests looking for mold spores. She went back to Switzerland.
And I got this test, which she had done a week after leaving Switzerland and she had dramatic levels of mycotoxins that had gone from her previous one we did two years ago. The levels jump from 1500 to 500 600. And I just looked at this and I said so and so you’ve you’ve been exposed to mold, you are highly mold, toxic. And she said I knew it. This house I’m living in in Switzerland, there’s mold everywhere. I’ve tried to clean it up and it keeps reappearing. It’s in my shower. It’s on my window. I said, and she was told she was in bed 90% of the time. That’s and she moved back to Switzerland two years, two months ago. She’s her levels of mold are gone up five times. So this test showed me at the level of a mitochondrial DNA. She had mold lymphocyte sensitivity, and she clinically confirmed it. She said, I know I’ve tried to clean it. I said you try to clean it, don’t go near it. So get out of that house right away. I can’t say very well. And then we had a big discussion about what to do because many of these people are chronically ill for prolonged periods. The innate immune systems go round and round around in circles and they stand exposed and they often it’s the home that’s causing them to be sick, or it’s the quality They took from the home or is the couch they took from the home or something that they took from a home.
And they just go around in circles and never get better until the cycle is broken. This test also allows us to measure ATP production to see how blocked it is. And here’s the beauty of the test. It also measures mitochondrial numbers so you can see if mitochondria undergoing destruction and is less numbers than they should be. It also can tell us whether it’s the mitochondria, mitochondria are expressing abnormal proteins and lipids, very long chain fats. And it can tell us about some of the mineral deficiencies that are contributing towards the cell membrane voltage being affected. Here’s the ATP blocking active sites 21% You don’t want that block more than 14%. And here you can see that the DNA which gets released when the mitochondria undergoing destruction is at a level of 17. It shouldn’t be more than nine. So they their DNA is outside the cell triggering micelle and further oxidative damage. And here you can see after a toxin you can see one of the mycotoxins from Aspergillus is sitting on cardio lipid and actually the the enzyme that makes the inner membrane of of your, of your cell in your mitochondria.
There’s a toxin sitting on on that enzyme affecting cardio lipid. And there’s your phospho title fo Alameen, which is found in the body by PC, low, the inner membrane along which the electron transport chain occurs. And there’s your plasma title choline, which is the external membrane. And this Melange, the height you can see that the fats, the lipids in the body are oxidized, deficient, and the cellular machinery that making the lipids is impaired. That enzyme also requires manganese to work that the manganese deficient. That’s why you use the body by minerals and electrolytes. So mineral sessions. And here on the DNA you’ve got sitting on the DNA, formaldehyde, and there’s aflatoxin, there is a micro toxin from mold affecting translation of messenger RNA sitting on the DNA. This is huge, you know, this is serious business. This is not lightweight testing.
This is serious. And when people it’s going to affect the metabolic machinery of the cell, and it’s going to put people into chronic ill health that gets a stain unless it’s dealt with. This person also had zinc deficiency was incorporations. Zinc is the largest role to play. Regulating DNA destruction, and immune function. And then you can also see here, I can’t see the slides so small that’s the same same one sorry. Keep repeating this. Here, you can also look at your antioxidant states glutathione. You can see that it’s low in the bloodstream, here superoxide dismutase, the good guy that is sis glutathione and putting up peroxy nitrate. Here you can see conatins low so shuttling your fat into the cell to active cellular energy is low. Here’s the mast cell membrane, the cell membrane of 159, the voltage of your cell is low. This is dramatic because the electron transport chain depends on the cell voltage being normal, and that’s low. This gets affected by mineral deficiency, intracellular calcium, intracellular calcium triggering the NMDA receptors and causing the excited toxicity and magnesium there, which is found in your minerals. Magnesium is a calcium channel blocker.
This person was highly exposed to electromagnetic fields, which induce high levels of intracellular calcium and mast cell activation, the cell membrane was depleted that phospholipids were depleted this this cell is in a lot of trouble. He has a heavy metal test, you can see the telephoning, which binds to heavy metals is high because it’s working overtime, binding to barium. And when the telethon is running around mopping of metals, it drops off zinc and you become zinc depleted. And here NID vitamin d3 which is central for the electron transport chain is depleted. That’s why everybody is now on to nitrogen and other NADH or energy supplements. And then another beauty of this testing is we can look at the cell membranes and we can see the deficiencies and excesses, we can tell what the saturated fats are doing this is not now the AGL test. This is the the test we do the Kennedy Krieger looking at lipid membranes, we call it the body by a red soul lipid membrane test. We can look at saturated fats and Omega sixes, look at total lipid content.
Now look at this total lipid content. The total lipid content of this person is completely negative. And I can’t tell you how many people come in. And they get put on colas, tyramine and crash. Because Patricia Kane, who initiated this therapy many years ago, made the statement I don’t know where she got it from. But she said that if your lipid content is less than minus 25, and you use curl to stymie, you’re going to crash that person’s lipid membranes and create tremendous damage to the mitochondria. And I believe that statement is true, because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen I’m treating a patient right now with an ALS condition and that that’s his total lipid profile. And he did have mold and he was put on polystyrene, and he’s much worse right now. So we had to repeat this lipid content. It is omega sixes up to scratch, saturated fats structural bets, we can also test by the myelinating, making making white matter. And we can also see how many abnormal oxidized bad renegade fats are being made. Here’s where your butyrate and your tadka come into play, because those help get rid of these very long chain fats. And as you get healthier and healthier, these go down and down. So this, this IGR test in the body via red cell membrane tests are extremely helpful. And this is where the whole membrane medicine comes into place. And we start to repeat cell membranes, sweep toxins off the DNA and repair as much as we can.
With various therapies, of which body via products take a central role, I can’t say enough about how I’ve benefited and how the patients have benefited by repeating outer inner membranes using peterites and tadka. Replacing minerals, just you know, I’ve developed a shake, which I’m sure tastes awful, but very competent is very beneficial. And to sell membranes, Justin has the job of making it taste pleasant by using the only thing that we use is coconut milk and, and blueberries because everything else most of our patients have my cell activation behind us much else that we put into the shake, you know, PC and body bio balance and electrolytes and minerals and glutathione and superoxide, dismutase and resveratrol. So we make a shake of it. And we use blueberries and chopped vegetables for poly phenols. And most people find this very nourishing if if they can get past the medicinal quality of it. So here’s another pitfall we’re nearing the end, so we’ll be done pretty soon. pitfall is using color styling, inappropriately, not only the synthetic color styling, which is full of aspartame. But if your lipid membranes are very low, using polystyrene will rarely crash a patient very quickly, so it’s not appropriate to use color stymie right out of the gate.
Just very quickly. Other pitfalls using the wrong test as sampling is absolute. No, no. The settle plates are worthless. tapeless, okay. But the real test is the Urmi test, which I’ll show you in a second. Another big mistake people make is I have a new home it doesn’t have mold. I live in Arizona, it’s not wet and damn. new constructions are often the worst. I had a new condo, which was put up in the boom they didn’t put events in a flat roof and I had mold in three floors, condensing down the sides. No visible mold does not mean the building is safe. No musty smell does not mean it does not have mold, or crawl spaces and basements usually have mold. ductwork is often contaminated. And this is the Urmi test where you measure dust spores by either swip upright or vacuum cleaner and you quantify that according to specific algorithms. People call in mold inspectors and they don’t do a thorough visual inspection. You’ve got to go from the attic to the basement and outside and have a look. And he has some of the questions you want to ask. If somebody comes in waves a sample meter and walks out and says you don’t have mold, run for the hills.
Look at baseboards, pull out dishwashers go up into the attic. Do you have a front end loader washing machine? Is there condensation? Did they use a water moisture meter, you know the day to do thermal imaging looking for wetness behind dry walls. Here’s some fabulous references for people who do good work, shall see acres with a whole bunch of web videos on YouTube about how she’s an architect you have mold on us. She’s very thorough, and patients report doing her series is very helpful. So, in summary, mold illness is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. It involves genomics. transcriptomics. Proteomics involves abnormal regulation of micelles hormones, mitochondria, autonomic nervous system. These conditions are everywhere. Look around, you’ll find them. They’re ubiquitous. There’s just a summary of some of the pitfalls. Here’s some papers and links to articles I’ve written on mold. Things you can find. And that’s my details. And that’s it for me. Am I doing 68 minutes? I’m sorry.
Thank you so much. Dr. Ruffin, can you just click on can you make me the host again, so that I can go over some of these questions. I’m trying to turn on my video, but it doesn’t look like I’m able to unless you give me permission. What do I do you go to the top of your video, there’s three little circles. If you just click on that those three little circles it should show up to make me the host. If not, it’s okay. I’m I can say off camera as well.
Doesn’t say it says pause recording stop recording raise hand.
Okay, okay. We’ll just leave it as is I’ll go over there’s quite a few questions. So do you have a few more minutes to answer your question? Okay. So the first question is from Christy. And she just was asking what the German test costs? You can answer that one or I can choose?
No, it depends on how many panels you choose. So they range in price. If you just go to the Igel website, and you ask them for to send the cost the the extensive panel that I do, it’s 1000 or two euros. But you could do subsets of it to get what you want to look at. And then you go
in there they are. That lab is expensive. I mean, I think I just ran it in last year. And I think it was close to $2,000. Canadian for whatever panel I did. So it’s not an inexpensive lab, that’s for sure.
But remember that is many in when that’s not one panel that’s like 10 panels. So you can if you want to just know your first blood lipids, you can just do that little panel. But if you want to do a complex mitochondrial workup, then it’s going to cost a lot more.
So the question is what is the next question is what is the difference between ErmI and Emma testing?
The Emma testing measures mycotoxins and spores, whereas the Ermias just pause. I don’t do any testing because I just historically have stayed with micro metrics. I do use other lab for actinomyces. I haven’t run many Emma tests. I don’t think the tests been validated. And so I just stick with what’s been validated by the think by the FDA. Let me test
Okay, thank you. And then Shelley. Shelley Wilson, who we love. Thanks Dr. Hoffman to Justine excellent presentation. We adore you, Shelly. Um, okay. And then Chris, you had another question is Well, what is the extensive
sorry, surely didn’t ask me a bone crushing question.
So, if you have a question I’m Christy I will find out if you can. So she just asked what is the extensive one called the IG L so if you email me I will find out from the girls at the front desk and and I’ll let you know I don’t think I don’t know that. I’m right now and I don’t think Dr. would know that offense either. Okay, um, now in the chat there was lots of questions I’m going to have to go back. Um, do you have an MRI and the neuro quant software at the clinic?
No, you’ve got to get me the neuro quant is quite complicated because you’ve got to, you’ve got to get the MRI company to do specific settings on the MRI to read the neuro quant the neuro con software, but that requires certain settings on the MRI. So you’ve got to buy the software from neuro quant, you’ve got to get your MRI company to be willing to use the settings on the different Siemens devices. And once they change the settings you can read neuro quant but it’s two parts to it. So it took us two years to get neuro quant in Calgary. I tried to get it through healthcare, but they wouldn’t do it. So a private company doesn’t. Because they wouldn’t do it because it requires changing settings and they don’t want to do that.
Okay, Allison just asked where she can find the recipe to the shakes, or recipe for the shake. So Allison, you can send me an email as well. I’m happy to send you Dr. Hoffman’s template, if you can just make sure that you give him credit
for our upcoming book. No, we’ll give it
Yeah, that’s true. We’re doing a cookbook that should be out in a few months. And the recipe will be there’ll be plenty of recipes in there. When working on cell membrane, what daily oral PC dose Do you work patients up to?
It’s a It’s depends on so many things. If you’ve got a very high micelle population, they can’t tolerate much of anything. If you’ve got a robust population, they are often much more able to tolerate higher doses, but they often need assistance with lipase and bile Oxbo. That’s a tadka. And we use a product called Beta plus. And it had Kali cystectomy is that’s another whole puppy sub population of people who can’t tolerate high fats. But it say all those confounding variables are taken out, we always start them slow, like half a teaspoon. And then we work up to you know, I don’t really go more than two tablespoons a day of both of them. The body by a balance we use a lot on food, not in the shake, because it’s pleasant, you know after you’ve cooked it and cook it up. But put it on stir fries and salads. And the PC goes into the shake because some people just eat it off the spoon, but it goes on the shake quite nicely. But I don’t usually use more than two tablespoons. But keep in mind, I tracked labs, I tracked the red cell membrane tests and attract the AGL test. And also there’s another variable there. I’ll think of it in a second. I forget what it was, but there’s another variable to it.
Okay, in addition to body bio products, would you recommend adding an all encompassing Mito booster supplement like mitochondria and RG from designs for health? You can
well, so a lot of the supplements that boost mitochondrial function oh, here’s what I wanted to say before I get back to the question. Our OPC helps strip the cell membrane, or helps repair the cell membrane because it’s got the three phospholipids versatile ever elevate hospitality knows at all. Whereas IVP PC which I use a lot of help strip the DNA of the acts of the toxins. And that’s a general rule. So I do IV password title choline with phosphine or butyrate and glutathione. And I do aro PC and body by a balance for different purposes. There is some crossover, but there is a different therapeutic reason for each of them. Just I just wanted to emphasize that point. And then sorry, what was the question
is so there’s so many questions there. Oh, the other one was on mitochondrial support?
Yes. So much. So using the micronutrients that support the mitochondria, I find is false thinking. You can do it. But you want to sit back and look at that cell and see what state it’s in. Look at the state of the individual look at the state of the food gut brain axis. And you can’t just start stimulating enzyme pathways without first repairing cell membranes and look Looking at the toxicology of cell membranes and the viability of the electron, the voltage of the cell membrane, whether there’s deficient numbers on line. So I don’t go use a lot of mitochondrial traditional support, until I’ve helped repair the cell membrane. improvement in the AGL. And lipid testing, I tend to, I do use carnitine and 210. And nada, I do use them. But if you go use those without preparing the cellular toxicology and the soul structure, it’s a it’s a, it’s a losing battle. You won’t get anywhere.
Yeah, and that’s something that I’ve seen too, which was what really what drew me to membrane medicine because without, I mean, you’re really just throwing things that people do first don’t repair the self.
Find remove as many incoming stresses, and then balance the cell by much and modulating the homeostatic mechanisms, the allostatic load, you know, you’ve got to sort of work this whole system.
But there are specific nutrients like B one, b two and B three will support that front end of the mitochondria and carnitine. And then the electron transport chain is supported by Coenzyme Q 10. NAC. Creatine is helpful.
Nitrogen.
Okay, let’s see here. I think I’ve covered all of them. Is anybody? Did I miss a question? Oh, if someone has recovered from mold toxicity, is it helpful to use the LPC long term? I will say? I will say yes. But now let you answer.
You know, I’ve measured igvault, postmitotic, choline and fllo mean, I’ve never seen levels outside of the range. So people stay on it. We’ve constantly under salt. So as a lipid bilayer is are very much susceptible to oxidative damage. So I think a daily intake of phospholipids is crucial to maintain cellular health.
And then I think it was a question about cosmologists in here too. We do use cosmologists have you? So yeah, we have definitely heard of plasma halogens? Um, regard? Have you heard of plasma ologists with regard to membrane lipids? If so, can you comment on any overlap between plasma telogen deficiency and sirs?
So I’m assuming of Doctor good enough. I’m learning his plasminogen I take them. But as you know, a doctor good enough. He’s a biochemist with a lot of knowledge and where players margins fit in. That’s another whole level of complexity. I’m just starting to get my head around. Justine actually knows a lot more about origins than I do, because she has studied with him recently. But it is definitely appears very exciting. And I think plasma legends will be playing a huge role. In the future, just like peptides came up and exosomes. These things have the, you know, the waves of fashion, but I think plasma origins are going to be a big deal.
Well, and I’ll just quickly comment to that too. So with plasma halogens are a subtype of phospho lipids, so about 20 to 30% of the brain is made up of plasma halogens, so it’s third so they’re made by the ProxySG. They’re endogenous, and you can’t consume anything that’s going to help to support plasma telogen levels. And with SIRs with that chronic inflammatory condition you burn through a lot of those plasma halogens because they’re a very potent antioxidant. So you’re, you’re gonna want to support with plasma halogens likely if you have sirs, the other issue too is with that chronic inflammation you are going to have compromised paroxysmal functioning. So your proxy isms are not going to be making adequate amounts of plasma halogens and then what they are making is getting used up as antioxidants.
Good enough as a test now to measure all of those which we’ve just started to use.
Okay, um What would you recommend to move a patient into dorsal Oh, when we have it an H bot? I don’t know if you talks about H button the lecture by H bot recommended after stabled with mast cell. Do you recommend hyperbaric oxygen?
I think hyperbaric oxygen has a very definite role to play. But I never use it in the front of any protocol. I often use it as a cleanup down the line. Particular In traumatic brain injured patients, so I never use it in the front end, I usually wait one or one one and a half years before I start recommending age parts.
And I think we have all the questions. Let me just go through one more time. If anybody has something like pressing that I did not ask, you can raise your hand. Oh, sorry. Okay, the dorsal are your questions about please see the q&a. Okay. Oh, my gosh, there’s lots.
You don’t want person in the dorsal vagal shutdown response. That’s when they are compromised. The withdrawn they depress the stack. So everything we spoke about today is attempting to shift the dorsal vagal structure into more window of tolerance, self regulation between sympathetic, parasympathetic. And there’s a complexity to it. I did, there was a slide that says what to do. If you go back to that slide, I listed about 20 different therapies vagal tone exercises Somatic Experiencing safe and sound protocols. resi Max, there’s a whole list of them. But if a patient has undergone trauma, and they’re in PTSD type response that requires sophisticated therapeutic encounters, referred to professionals who work with trauma, because that’s very hard to shift if there’s an underlying traumatic etiology to the dorsal vagal shutdown.
Okay, and then we have a few questions about Oh, where did it go? Snowy? You had two questions. One was, okay, how to get patients to tolerate oral PC when they have resistant? dysbiosis?
Chris? You, resistant dysbiosis? I, I just keep working with the dysbiosis until something ships? This that’s a very big discussion. But yes, you’re right. People can’t handle anything coming into the GI tract when it’s severely dysregulated. So you have to go through the whole gut fiber or whatever methodologies you use treats CBOs and levers and CFOs. And there’s a complexity to it. So those people who are in sympathetic dominance with poor vagal tone will have massive dysbiosis. I work around the issue and try and find out what’s what is the problem? Do they have lower last days with low lipase? Are they not making bile? I get gallbladder motility studies. So there’s a lot of complexity to it. It’s difficult to answer that.
And then this question, I laughed when I read this, I shouldn’t I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did. Because I’m excited to hear your answer. The initial part of your discussion, what is the best way to build the patience and love for patients with limbic disorders, especially when you’re seeing many of them and they drain you and your staff tremendously?
This is the million dollar question. How do you stay regulated when your whole world around you is dysregulated? Well, here’s my answer to that. I’m in my I’m in my 60s, I mean 65. So the longer you live, the more resilient you become. So that’s that’s to my advantage. You also learn to know your defenses and as soon as your palms start sweating, you know you’re in trouble and your defenses are up and you’re in a complex. You delegate you delegate low priority items to other people and hopefully you find good people to help you manage the complexity of managing complex patients. And then I find having policies and procedures and systems that hopefully get followed with lots of sort of patient education helps somewhat dampen the chaos get again shoo, which you can never fight, you know, get rid of because any patient any clinic with treating complex patients has a one or two borderlines there At least five or six severely traumatized people with PTSD, myself everywhere you look. And so you will get complexity. And if you love what you do if you just get up every morning enjoying and loving what you do that itself is a buffer against some of the, the stresses that hit you on a daily basis. So there were other things you can do as you can read about in the self help books, but that’s been my experience. It’s just my age has helped me become more resilient, great stuff. Most of the times when you lose a good staff member, chaos ensues and then just loving what you do. If you love in what you do is a high priority. You You can withstand some of the slings and arrows that come your way.
Okay, who do you have run the neuro quant for you? I’m looking to access the test software here in Calgary in Canada.
The only neuro quant in Canada is in Calgary, you have to fly here or you have to go to the neuro quant company and ask them to find the nearest neuro quant in your vicinity. Have you in the US? There is one in Seattle as well I believe so my patients go to Seattle or come to Calgary? I don’t know if there’s anyone close. They may have they may have one in Toronto or Vancouver by now but I much I don’t know that.
Okay, I think we have finished all the questions. Um, let me just double check one more time. There was a comment about oral PVC is worse because it can cause translocation of LPs into the blood and then raise inflammation significantly. I was curious to hear your comment on that because I have never seen that.
I think theoretically that’s true. And I’ve been I haven’t seen I haven’t seen LPs. Well the only test I have for LPS is the Dunwoody one. And I haven’t seen any of the LPS IgG IgM. IGA is getting worse in ever since I’ve run the test, which is the last 10 years. So I can’t vouch for that it probably from an academic perspective, we know how high fat low carb diets increase oxidative damage for LPS, but I haven’t seen it clinically.
Okay, thank you. Thank you all for joining us, right or I’m staying with us right to the end. And thank you again so much for the really really informative, lovely presentation. We’re really grateful that you were able to do this for us today.
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 this podcast with Dr. Trevor Campbell, we discuss how an added comprehensive, holistic approach using social, psycho-spiritual, family dynamics and generational issues can be used to treat complex and chronic disease. Early childhood trauma of any kind as well as neglect can enormously impact the pathogenesis of disease as well as the course of recovery. This approach is foundational to my 7 Stages to Health and Transformation Model (TM), a fundamental approach to integrative medicine. Please scroll down to listen to the podcast.
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.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Hi, everybody. Welcome to New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, where we are interviewing the best minds in functional medicine, and today is no exception. I am delighted to be with a very longtime colleague, Dr. Bruce Hoffman. We’ve got an exciting sort of depth conversation planned for you today. Let me actually spell out why it’s going to be a deep conversation just listening to his extensive training will suggest where we’re going.
So Dr. Hoffman is a Calgary, Canada-based integrative and functional medicine doctor. He is the director of the Hoffman Centre for Integrative Medicine, also The Brain Center 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’s got a master’s in nutrition. He’s a certified functional medicine practitioner through the Institute for Functional Medicine.
He’s board certified with a fellowship in anti-aging and regenerative medicine. He’s trained in the Shoemaker Mold protocol. He’s a certified Ayurvedic practitioner. He’s trained in Bredesen ReCODE brain treatment, in the MAPS autism training. He’s a certified family constellation therapy specialist. He’s trained in ILADS for Lyme and co-infections.
He’s also a contributing author to the recent paper, which is available. In fact, we’ll link to it on our show notes, from Dr. Afrin’s group titled Diagnosis of Mast Cell Activation Syndrome: a Global Consensus-2. So mast cell activation is something that he’s also focused on. I actually also want to bring to your attention more, just kind of the rich depth. I mean, clearly, Bruce, you’re a lifelong learner, but I think you’ve really kind of taken these things in. I just want to give you a little more of his background.
He’s trained in Chinese medicine, and homeopathy, and German biological medicine. You almost went to get board certified in psychiatry. You wanted to be a Jungian analyst. I found that really interesting, Dr. Hoffman, in your history. And so you bring that to your work now with patients. So you did some of that training, even though you didn’t move into psychiatry, but you did some of that training. You worked with Jon Kabat-Zinn, with Deepak Chopra, with Dr. Klinghardt, with Ken Wilber.
I mean, first of all, welcome to New Frontiers.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Thank you, Kara.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And what haven’t you done?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: It sounds like I don’t have a life.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s extraordinary, I want to spell it out. I know that you’re just doing this amazing work with your patients, and you’re fusing this intense training that you’ve undergone, and that you continue to experience into what you described as the Seven Stages of Health and Transformation. So it’s not like you do a weekend course and then the books go away, or the PDFs are put away.
I mean, you’re actually working with these tools and making them into something your own. And it’s called the Seven Stages of Health and Transformation. And I know that you’re working with very complex patients in Canada, and actually beyond Canada. I know people are drawn to your work from all over the place. And so, I want you to talk about the seven stages, and what your approach is to these complex patients that are coming to see you.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Yeah, sure. When I was a young teenager, I was exposed to a schoolteacher in South Africa who was very different. And he took us out of our sort of South African apartheid, white, privileged background and sort of threw us into … threw me in particular into an alternative universe whereby I was exposed to the world of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and eastern thought.
And I had, at a very young age, an experience which they call satori, which is this sense of seeing space-time as a continuous whole and not seeing cause and effect as being linear. And it was a sort of … Many people have these. They are sort of called awakening experiences or high experiences. And that just sort of catapulted me into a different way of looking at things, and then initiated in me a curiosity about all aspects of the human psyche and human development and human potential.
And originally, I sort of got interested in Jungian psychoanalysis and wanted to become an analyst and went to med school only to become an analyst. And I was actually accepted into the psychiatric residency, but actually didn’t go through with it. I worked for two years in psychiatry in the military. I had to go to compulsory military training. But I didn’t actually do my residency.
And I do feel quite privileged in the sense that by not taking that particular route, I was able to keep expanding across all layers and levels of experience. And what I found was when I ended up just being a family doctor in rural Saskatchewan, and seeing the limitations of drug-based, which Majid Ali beautifully named it N2D2 medicine, name of disease, name of drug.
Once you start to see the limitations, and then you start to look at the potential of human achievement and what they can aspire to, one sort of moves out of just treating disease to trying to get your patients to look at optimal potential of their entire existence. And so, what I do now through the seven stage model is view pathology, or the so-called disease states or complex symptomatology, as this entry point into a dialogue with a patient.
But I’m also looking at other aspects of the psyche and the experiences to see what it is that their soul, if you will, is asking to come through. What is it that they’re trying to achieve? Symptoms to me are etiological. They’re sort of pointing towards hidden subjects that need to be brought to the surface. I never see symptoms as linear. I always think of them as what is the body attempting to do by throwing out these particular imbalances?
And with that approach, and using my early exposure to Ayurveda and Advaita, which is a system of Hindu philosophy that I was exposed to by the schoolteacher, and I was able to build a model called the Seven Stages of Health and Transformation, which looks at the human experience as being divided, which is a silly term, because there is no division. But it’s conceptually divided into these layers and levels of experience.
The first level being the outer world, the external environment. And that’s sort of level one in this conceptual field. And from that, we draw everything to do with what’s going on in the chemosphere, outside of ourselves, the toxicology and the infectious load. And we look at that from etiological point of view. That’s level one.
Level two is the physical structure, which is made up of biochemistry and structural aspects. And that is what we do in both traditional medicine and in functional medicine, and in all the structural modalities like chiropractic, and bodywork, et cetera. And then level three is to do with the brain, the peripheral, and the autonomic nervous system, and its electrical effects on physiology and biochemistry. And then what are the manmade EMFs effects on that.
And then level four is to do with the emotional body. And as we know, that many people have these adverse childhood experiences, which then get laid down neurologically in the brain as specific defects particularly in right frontal lobe development, and activation of the amygdala, and the fight-flight response with down regulation of the vagal nerve. And because I have this brain treatment center, you can diagnostically look at this and treat it accordingly.
And then level five is to do with ego development, how people negotiate the slings and arrows of this … The world is a tough place. We’re sort of always somewhat vigilant against the next thing that’s going to arise. And so, we develop in the first half of life a very different set of strategies from in the second half of life in terms of how we develop our ego, which is our sense of how we negotiate the world and our belief systems, our values and our defenses.
People grow up with a way of orientating themselves, but they also remain highly defended to those things which are most traumatic. And depending on early childhood experiences, defenses can be highly helpful or healthy, you could say. But they can also be highly pathological when people suppress anything that comes close to an early experience of trauma, and the so-called PTSD response.
So level five is everything to do with the ego and how it negotiates its way in the world. And the first 30 years are all about ego development and they’re characterized by certain drives, drives of the libido, drives of full power, drives to know oneself. And all the great psychoanalysts of the 19th century were very … They had great insight into these mechanisms.
But they’re now used therapeutically in a system called ISTDP, where psychologists look at different structures that people bring to the therapeutic encounter and work one on one with them in transference and countertransference to try and get behind that which they’re defending against and which is asking to be brought forward. So that level is very important.
And then level six is that what we call the soul. This is the most authentic part of who you are, the most instinctual part of who you are, which never really comes to any sort of conscious assertion until the second half of life, I would say. Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst wouldn’t look at patients before the age of 40. He said they’ve taken up two drives. There’s no conscious awareness of their deepest self to work with. And so he wouldn’t work with anybody under the age of 40, which is rather strange, but it’s true.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s very interesting in this anti-aging obsession that we have, isn’t it? I mean, clearly, there’s some wisdom, but keep going.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Yeah. So, in our personal, when we’re born and we’re born into our experiences, very often when you’re not seen by your parents adequately, and being seen by parent, you don’t have to be perfectly seen but a good parent who will always support and challenge a child accordingly. But if there’s any neglect or abuse and neglect-trauma appears to be even more traumatic to a child, an abuse trauma.
The child will develop a provisional self, an adaptive self to go out into the world in order to achieve what it’s meant to achieve. But the authentic self, the instinctual self will often go underground and then be hidden by these defenses and this comes up. I can’t tell you how many people present to me in sort of midlife … Midlife being anywhere from 35 to 55. It starts at somewhat of a younger age when entropy starts to set in.
And they are being driven to ask deeper questions of themselves and to reclaim those parts of themselves, which they know instinctively, they left behind in their pursuit of safety and being seen. So their provisional selves go out, achieve something in the outer world, but there’s something crippled and something quite damaged, or well preserved. Some innocence, well preserved, but it’s hidden from sight.
And people in midlife generally kind of know that. And they want to often go back and retrieve those hidden parts of themselves that they know are manifesting as symptoms, but they have no conscious connection with them. So part of the work I do is trying to find out what … I don’t ask this question out loud, but I’m asking it while I’m interfacing with a patient is, what are these symptoms telling me, and what does the soul want?
What is the innate wisdom and innate creativity of this patient that needs to be brought to the forefront? And that’s the fundamental question that sits there while I’m looking at all the functional medicine, toxicology, biochemistry, hormones, mitochondria. I’m always having these conversations in my head, what does the soul want? What is being asked of this person? What do they need to manifest in order to bring parts of themselves back home?
And that is the second half of life quest really, how do you gain your creative, instinctual self. And not only that, but there’s also another hidden part and that’s a hidden part of your family system. Family systems carry secrets and carry hidden entanglements that often manifest themselves epigenetically and get expressed through biochemistry as symptoms.
And I’ve done some marvelous work with, or I haven’t. But I’ve partnered with Mark Wolynn, who is an exceptionally gifted functional family constellation practitioner. And we looked at, once a year, we used to do a workshop where we looked at the symptoms of patients who came to my clinic and try to link them to any inner entanglements or the family system two to three generations before the patient is even born.
And it’s extraordinary what entanglements you find and what dynamics you find, which can manifest as symptomatology in the patient. And this research is very well established now to all the major universities, that there’s an epigenetic chapter of trauma through the generations. And then lastly, is spirit. The level seven is the spiritual body. And that’s the part of ourselves that’s transcendent to any ego-based space-time demands. And that’s where you surrender to some intelligence greater than yourself and just sort of stay open to that potential. And that’s sort of the whole realm of what we call the one mind beyond space-time.
So I use that model. So when patients present, I’m just trying to sense, they come … One of the great tragedies that I find, or one of the great challenges, not tragedies so much as challenges, is that when you become well versed in functional medicine, people will present and they’ll write in their entry forms. You ask them, “Why are you here?” And they’ll say, “Well, I’ve got mast cell,” Lyme or mold, and whatever.
And they will sort of have reduced their entire symptomatology to what they believe to be a lab test or a symptom that they’re experiencing. And it’s never the case. It’s never the case. Those are just inquiries as an entry points into a much deeper dialogue, in my experience. And so, I’m always curious. Yes, you may have a trigger called Lyme or a trigger mold and mast cells have gone awry. Yes, that’s true.
But really, what’s the deeper reality that we need to sort of work with? And sometimes I get to it, and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I just treat mast cell, and Lyme, and mold and be done with it. But other times, not. Yeah, sorry?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I mean, what an extraordinary entry into our conversation, thanks for all of that. I mean, it’s amazing. And I can just tell that you are sitting with all of these levels. And I think that, in functional medicine, they talk about gathering before the patient encounter.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Yes, that’s right.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And I can hear that you’re gathering at all of those levels, which creates a possibility in the encounter. It’s been extraordinary. So is this written? Have you written about this? Have you-
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Yeah, I’ve written. I’ve got podcasts with transcripts, and I’ve written a book, which unfortunately, sits on my laptop.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You can link to it on our show notes then. I’m kidding. But it’s powerful. And, well, we’ll bug you about it so that we can link to what you’ve got available in our show notes. It’s an expansion on functional medicine principles in a very important way. So that was one question. And then the other thought that I was having and you started to touch on is, so the presentation, this phenotypic presentation of mast cell activation, or Lyme, and it’s true that our patients will come to us with pretty rigid ideas on this, and what it means.
And as you said, either you move beyond it or you don’t, and you address it and life goes on. But you alluded to in the beginning of your unpacking the seven stages, you alluded to sort of these as having information in and of themselves, like what kind of a … Is there kind of a personality type or somebody who comes with a certain type of a family constellation structure that might be more vulnerable to Lyme and co-infection or might be more vulnerable to autism or MCAS? And can you speak to that?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Well, the interplay is complex as you know, from genetics to diet, to sleep, to rest, to toxicology. And to ever increasingly, obviously, to early developmental experiences. I can’t emphasize how profound those experiences play on auto-expression of biochemistry. It’s unbelievable.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I want to just say as an aside that I am with you on that. I mean, we’ve just published a study in looking at DNA methylation, so looking at the epigenome. And one of the things that’s just stopped me in my tracks is this idea of biological embedding, which is exactly what you’re talking about, where the signatures of the psychic experience are laid down on the genome.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: It’s quite extraordinary. And if people come and they see me, say for mast cell, and then they find themselves doing acute EEG, and the NeuroQuant MRI, and doing neuropsych questionnaires and they go, “Why are you doing all this? I’ve got mast cell.” Well, mast cell is the expression of your, mitochondria undergo the cell danger response. They released ATP, ATP caused the granulation of the mast cell, and the release of a thousand mediators.
So yes, you had mast cell activation syndrome, but what’s underlying, what are all the triggers in functional medicine, the antecedents, mediators and triggers that provoked this mast cell to go crazy? The brain is the interface between one’s epigenetic and early developmental experiences, and one’s outer experiences. The brain is the interface, and if you look at acute EEG, and even a NeuroQuant MRI, you can read biographies of those. They’re so alarmingly informative.
And so, I look at a body-based stress assessment. I look at heart rate variability, as we all do. But then I look at acute EEG, and I look at this sort of juxtaposition of the delta-theta-beta-alpha brainwaves, and you can really see imprints of early developmental trauma. And you can see people who are stuck in fight/flight responses, people who stuck in Porges’ polyvagal, dorsal vagal responses.
You can see it right there in the biochemistry and the physiology. And you know that that person, say, who’s stuck in Porges’ dorsal vagal shutdown response, that’s a whole different patient and somebody who just got a few allergies. You’re dealing with a whole different kettle of fish there. And you can’t just jump right in and just do your normal functional medicine and try a few supplements … It’s a whole another experience, which you have to be sensitized as a practitioner to those layers and levels of complexity. And I use these tools to interpret it.
If you look at it and do a NeuroQuant MRI, you can see the amygdala hypertrophy at like 97 percentile. It’s like twice the size of the standard, the paired match group. You can see amygdala hypertrophy. You can see the thalamus hypertrophy, and the thalamus is rich in mast cells. You can see white matter being decreased, and so forth and so on. You can see all sorts of fingerprints of these complex triggers that can create symptomatology in these complex patients.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Absolutely. It’s just extraordinary. So somebody comes in a typical allergy, seasonal allergy, maybe they’re bad, and so you’ll just treat them accordingly and get them balanced, but it’s relatively straightforward. But you’ve got somebody else also coming in and sneezy, allergic, et cetera, et cetera, but you diagnose this amygdala imbalance. I mean, you go down this whole different direction. Just roughly describe your entry into treatment with these two, with similar phenotypic but very different underlying causes.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Well, first of all, I don’t see patients anymore with just simple allergies. I wish I did. But those, I would just treat with H1 or H2 blockers, and Quercetin and vitamin C like all of us know how to do. But people with complex illness who have these multiple layers and levels of imbalances, I throw quite a large diagnostic net. I mean, I do a lot of tests. I’m criticized for it because of costs. But I also know myself well enough to know that without it, I’m going to be just another practitioner along the long chain of practitioners who took a little swipe at something and didn’t get much done, and didn’t look at the complex interface of all the different parameters.
So I do throw a large diagnostic net and do ask for the tests we know so well. Food sensitivities, gut microbiome, histamine levels, zonulin, DAO. I do all the mast cell mediator markers. I do all the ION panels and things like levels in methylation. I do all of that. I look at toxicology.
But I also do quite a lot with the brain, heart rate variability, autonomic nervous system functioning, and often refer for psychometric assessment to look for psychiatric diagnosis, whether they’d be cluster B personality disorders or whether they’d just be mood disorders. So I refer out for those. And I gather all this data. I also refer a lot to dentists and chiropractors particularly NUCCA chiropractors, visceral manipulation therapists.
We do a lot of diagnostics and trying to gather an insight into what hierarchically will be the entry point into this person’s therapeutic experience. I left out the most important, which is I look, apart from food and gut, which of course trumps most things. We look at the mitochondrial functioning and we look at the fatty acids because as you know, the mitochondria, the canaries in the coal mine, and they’re the first thing to sense any danger whether the danger is perceived or real, chemical or imagined.
And we have this credible capacity now through the IGL test in Germany to look at mitochondrial functioning and through BodyBio or the Kennedy Krieger fatty acid test to look at fatty acids. And those are the two tools that have trumped everything else in my practice.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow, what is that? Tell me just briefly what the IGL is and then we can link to the … And the Kennedy Krieger and we’ll link to both.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: So before this test came along, we in functional medicine would look at mitochondrial dysfunction, all we really had was a cheek swab. We had the organic acid test, but now we’ve got this ability to look into about 300 lab parameters that tell us the following: A, mitochondrial numbers, if they’re normal or if they are low in number. And mitochondrion, as you know, when they’re low in number, they must be undergoing some form of autophagy or cell death which ties into Naviaux’s cell danger response theory, that when we’re under threat, perceived or real, mitochondria start to self-destruct and release their ATP extracellularly, that then sends off a whole inflammatory cascade that oxidizes lipid peroxide, cell membranes and leads to this innate immune activation, mast cell activation, et cetera, et cetera.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What’s the specimen? What’s the specimen for that test, sorry?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Blood. It’s a blood test.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Both are blood tests, okay.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Yeah. So, it goes off and then they measure ATP production. They measure percentage of ATP that’s blocked. They measure cell free DNA. I mean, DNA that’s outside the cell shouldn’t be there.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Where it shouldn’t be here.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: They look at DNA adducts, toxins sitting on the DNA interfering with protein expression, interfering with the DNA expression of all the factors that go to make up messenger RNA and enzymes, et cetera, et cetera. It looks at phospholipid production. Phospholipids, phosphatidylcholine genome, most potent of all the cellular membrane ingredients.
It measures phosphatidylethanolamine, the phospholipid on the inner membrane which transfers electrons and the electron transport chain. It looks at outer phosphatidylcholine. It looks at cardiolipin synthase enzymes to see if they are making cardiolipin which is part of the inner membrane. It looks at whether you have what your amount of cardiolipin is so you’re looking at your phospholipids content.
It also looks at mold markers, markers for fungal metabolites. It looks at microtoxin metabolites. It looks at superoxide dismutase level. It looks at occupation of cell membranes. It looks at glutathione peroxidase, glutathione transferase. It looks at cell membrane voltage, incredibly helpful. When you’re looking at membrane voltage below 170 millivolts, it’s like 150.
And you’re looking at intracellular calcium excess or magnesium-potassium deficiencies. It looks at methylthionine levels. It’s incredible insight into toxicology and mitochondrial homeostasis. And from that, combined with the Kennedy Krieger fatty acid panel, which looks at your polyunsaturated omega 3, omega 6 levels, and it looks at renegade in very long chain fats and it looks to see if you’re myelinating adequately, et cetera, et cetera.
You can really transform a person’s biochemistry into something that ships them from this so-called cell-doubt, cell-danger response into a healthy response. And it takes an average four to six months of hard-work. But if you address the mental, the mind-body, the defense, the psyche and the biochemistry and toxicology in a hierarchical manner, and sometimes you got to stop biochemical work and you got to go work psychologically or even spiritually sometimes.
But if you start working with complex patients in this way, you’ll very soon know when to stop by a chemical work and to work at another level. If you’re sitting behind a desk and the patient is in front of you, and you’ve done beautiful biochemical work and you know that your work is impeccable and the patient is still sick, you know you’ve addressed the wrong level and it’s time to look at another level.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I would imagine that you’re not … I mean, you said hierarchical, and I think that is true. But you’re doing it concurrently as well. I mean, you must be.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: You always are. You always do it concurrently, but you learn to sense when it’s time to address, say, amygdala overactivity and vagal nerve shutdown as opposed to doing intravenous lipids and butyrate. Sometimes you’re doing all these beautiful biochemical interventions repeating the nutrition, food, gut and hormones and the patient stays resistant and/or hyperreactive.
And then you know they got an overactive amygdala and/or underactive vagal nerve. And so, you’ve got to shift focus and go down a different path. And just having done this for a long time, I’m sure you have experiences. You get to know when you probably are working at the wrong level.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes, it does. This is such a simple thing, but in my residency, we don’t do IV therapy in my clinic here in Connecticut. We mostly do telemedicine these days. But in my residency, back when you and I used to talk, that was also in a clinic setting as well. And just that IV experience, I thought about it because I know you’re doing IV. We set up the environment to bring the energy down and so, even for those individuals who don’t want to hear it, that there’s a psychological component to their presentation.
There’s sort of backdoor ways to enter into that healing relationship or that healing, meeting the needs for healing in that space even when patients don’t want it.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: It’s such a dance that goes on in this complex relationship between the so-called healer and the one who’s coming for your help. That if you’re not cognizant of the complexities that may arise, one can attempt to impose therapeutics onto a patient when the psyche is not intending to cooperate. It has no intent to allow that vulnerability.
And if you don’t know sort of the trauma of that person, the defenses, the fragility, the resistances, you can often rarely get into a difficult therapeutic encounter. And so it behooves us as healers, whatever the word may be, to stay very conscious of our own projections and our own inabilities and our own blind spots when we’re interfacing with patients.
And yes, they may have amygdala upregulation. They may be fragile and highly resistant. But does that mean that we get rid of them and say, I can’t help you anymore? Does that mean that we have to dig deeper into our consciousness to try and meet them where they are. And if we can unlock the door that’s previously been not open to them, we can assist in unlocking that door, there’s an incredible flood of therapeutic material and healing material that gets unleashed.
So I don’t like to do neuro biofeedback and amygdala training. If the psyche of that patient isn’t receptive to it, so it-
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Absolutely.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: … a lot of conversation and a lot of negotiation sometimes around some of these issues. And people can remain hyper reactive and highly fragile and resistant. And that behooves us to just stay with that patient if we can until something shifts in the psyche and so often it does. Often it does.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes, that been my experience as well that when they don’t achieve what they came to me to achieve or they get through some but not all, then perhaps they are open to a broader inquiry. I want to just ask, so I want to talk about, I want to get to your interventions. I know people will be very interested in how you’re addressing some of the mitochondrial issues that you’re seeing. But I just wanted to ask in your time and practice …
I mean, your practice now is self-selecting for challenging cases because you’ve been doing this for a long time and you’re just recognized as an expert, but are you also seeing sort of uptick in these kind of complex patient presentations?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: It’s all I see now and sometimes, I wish it wasn’t.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, I want to go back to insulin resistance case there.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Hormone replacement therapy, sure. But I am excited by the challenge. As you know, there’s no rest. I’m in my 60s and I don’t think I’ve studied more now. I mean, when I was a young medical student, that is nothing. This is boot camp all over again. You better stay ahead of all the research and all the latest series and all the latest issues that come across us.
But yes, am I seeing more complex cases? Absolutely.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And there’s a change though, would you just say there’s sort of a change in the challenge of cases? I mean again, just going back to when you and I talked a lot, SIBO might be a challenging case. But those days seem …
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: SIBO is like one of 24 things that need to be looked at. As we’ve expanded our diagnostic possibilities and as new researchers have come up, Afrin and his mast cell activation syndrome along with the other writers and the other researchers, that’s thrown a huge level of insight into a certain presentation that we didn’t have 10 years ago. So, we have that and Naviaux’s mitochondrial cell danger response, unbelievable what that’s done to our consciousness as practitioners.
It just opened up … Now, before when we did functional medicine training, we learned about food, gut, hormones and nutrition. But now, that’s a subset within a subset of complexity. And that stuff, we have to know backwards, otherwise, we can’t get to anywhere. But what else do you bring to the table? And now, we’ve got to bring in all these other things, all these other factors into the healing relationship.
And it is far more complex. There are a lot more sicker people. And they are still looking for N2D2 solution. Even the ones who are educated, they will come and say, “I’ve got mold, Lyme, as I said in the beginning, and can you treat it?” I say, “Sure. But is that what you really have, or is that just what’s showing up as a presenting feature?” People come with false positive antibodies on Lyme test, and they say, “I got Lyme.” “Oh, it’s three on the Armin Lyme EliSpot. Is that really Lyme disease? Is that a false positive?”
And so you got to know all these subtleties. You got to constantly be in touch with the researchers and the lab directors and you got to listen to all the experts in our fields. You got to shine the light of the single aspect. And you got to know how to incorporate that clinically in patient because patients are smart now. They come with all their research.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, they are.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: And they know stuff and sometimes, it’s misguided. Sometimes, it’s spot on and they intuitively can often sort of guide a path that is previously hidden from you. They were often uncovered and helped shine a light down a certain pathway. People are smart.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I want to talk a little bit about your approach. I mean we could look at mast cell activation or I mean, the mitochondria. The conversation I think is pretty provocative and one that’s interesting. I mean, are there core biochemical imbalances that you’re looking for?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Absolutely, yeah.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Can you just talk about some of these? Let’s pull together somebody with mitochondrial dysfunction, like I want to just kind of pull together how you’re going to address it and maybe what you’re looking for in laboratory and other tools of evidence and then how you’re actually addressing it clinically?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Yeah. When people present their history, two, three-hour history, you do your biochemical workup. Take a very extensive dietary history. Usually get dental workup, get sleep studies, NeuroQuant MRIs, brain studies, et cetera. And once you have those in front of you, what do you do first of all? The first thing I do is always look, I use my traditional medical insight and I look at straightforward pathology.
Free T3 is low and the TSH is high, B12 is low. I’d look at straight biochemistry and I never bypass it. I pay very close attention to traditional medicine’s biochemical imbalances, and look at nutrition in great detail. And it behooves us now with all these complex illnesses to know all those approaches to nutrition that are out there whether it’d be GAPS or paleo autoimmune low histamine, et cetera, et cetera.
So, I look at traditional biochemistry. I look at nutrition and then I use nutritionist chef health coach, Justine Stenger, on our staff to take a dietary history and start to introduce a dietary approach which is commensurate with their presentation. And most of the time, it’s a paleo autoimmune low histamine diet, sometimes low FODMAPs, sometimes low oxalate. But generally, I find getting people off some of those major foods that are inflammatory and getting onto paleo autoimmune low histamine diet quietens the microbiome to an extent that we can begin to repair.
So, traditional biochemistry, nutrition, dietary approaches and then start to look at all the things that most functional medicine doctors look at. The food sensitivities, status of a gut, nutritional levels, macro and micronutrients, antioxidants, toxicology, heavy metals, chemicals, mold, fungi, mast cell activation in great detail, and look at hormone levels.
And I look at hormones in three distinct compartments. I don’t just look blood levels. I look at blood, saliva and urine all on the same day to look at the different compartments of how hormones are attached to transport proteins, how they show up at the cell surface and how they get metabolized through the methylation pathways. I’ll look at all three to start with.
And then I look at infectious agents, and I tend to do quite extensive infectious disease workups, both B cell and T cell assessments. I find if you just do T cell, do ELISpots, it’s not enough. And if you don’t do B cell, you often get very confused and go down the wrong pathways.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What tests are you using? Tell me what tests are you using?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: I’m using the ArminLabs. I do the ELISpot, and I use IGeneX. I do the IGeneX ImmunoBlots and I do the co-infection panels. I use Galaxy labs for the Bartonella. And I do also use MDL labs for some of the other infections, Garth Nicholson’s lab. Those labs are usually used to look at infectious load. And then, so once I had that diagnostic roadmap, and then therapeutically as I said, I’d correct any traditional metabolic imbalances, thyroid, hormone, whatever.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So, you’ll start … So, you’ve got diet. And then you’re going to start them on some thyroid if they need it, some magnesium, some B12, et cetera. So, you’ll do those foundational first step?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Yes. And often if there’s great dysregulation in the qEEGs and/or in the stress assessments, and/or in the MoCA cognitive assessment or the CNS vital signs or TOVA, I’ll often start them in neurobiofeedback. I’ll start them on biofeedback programs and start them on neuromodulation techniques using different devices that we use from traditional feedback to Vielight to photomodulation. We’ll use different techniques.
So I often start those concurrent with food and traditional interventions whether it’d be hormones or nutrition. And if the toxic burden is extremely high, I never go ahead and start to detoxify them day one. And I never treat infections in the beginning. Even though Naviaux is very clear that unless you get rid of the threat, you’re not going to change the cell danger response.
So, I usually start out by using oral and intravenous lipid therapy or membrane therapy to try and provoke a mitochondria backing to more of a healing response. And I found that profoundly influential and help in patient outcomes.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What is that?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: I do a power drink or a membrane stabilizing shake, if you will, where we put into a blender phosphatidylcholine from BodyBio. BodyBio is the only phospholipid I use because of its very high phosphatidylcholine content, which doesn’t break down in the gut. And it contains the phosphatidylethanolamine. It contains all the subfractionations of phospholipids.
So, I use BodyBio phospholipids and BodyBio balanced oils, usually the 6:3 ratio and 4:1 ratio. You put that in the shake along with minerals and electrolytes and then any other ingredient that has shown up in the test that could be instrumental at restoring some homeostatic imbalance. So for instance, if they have low aminos on the ION panel, we use amino acids. If they have low glutathione, we use liquid glutathione as well as oral glutathione as well as oral NAC, all the standard things we learn as functional medicine doctors.
We put in tons of Resveratrol if we can. People tolerate it. And we use usually half a cup or quarter cup of blueberries. We found most people don’t seem to react adversely to blueberries. And then learning from Dr. Kharrazian, we chop up … On a Sunday, I advise patients to go and get every vegetable they like provided it’s not histaminic or oxalates or something on their testing shows they shouldn’t. Organic, chop it up, put it into the freezer. Every day in your shake, you take a couple of tablespoons or half a cup and you put that into the shake with the phospholipids.
And then that becomes a liposomal polyphenolic compound that then crosses the blood brain barrier and exhibits this antioxidant effect intracellularly. So, that’s been a gamechanger for my practice along with intravenous therapies. I start with very, very low dose phospholipids, sometimes vitamins and minerals just to provide the micronutrients for the enzyme systems, sometimes with intravenous amino acids.
But generally, I move over slowly but surely into phosphatidylcholine and glutathione intravenously, not to provoke a massive detoxification response but to try and repair cell membranes. Cell membrane repair is better done with oral phosphatidylcholine, but the IV phosphatidylcholine conjointly with the oral not only helps the cell membrane repair but it also starts to gently sweep adducts off the toxins that are sitting on the DNA of the mitochondria.
But it’s not aggressive. It’s very gentle. Later on, we start to use butyrate and other short-chain fatty acids to further the removal of adducts in toxins.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: How are you introducing those?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Intravenously and orally. I use them quite a lot. I use oral butyrate and IV butyrate quite a lot.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What’s the oral butyrate? I mean, it’s kind of smelly, but in a capsule like in an enteric-coated capsule? What do you-
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: You can get different kinds. There’s the cal-mag butyrate. There’s the sodium butyrate. There’s sodium potassium butyrate. So, you got to look at the electrolyte balance of the patient and then introduce the specific butyrate formulation that is going to be most helpful for that person’s biochemistry.
So, if they’ve got intracellular calcium deficiency, you’re going to use the calcium one. If they have POTS syndrome … By the way, that’s one of the greatest. One thing I learned 10, 15 years ago was to make sure every patient does the 10-minute, cheap, lying standing test. If you misdiagnosed POTS, that patient is never going to get better.
And I know you’re familiar with it but I do suggest that any young or new practitioner, just get yourself an Omron blood pressure cuff. Every patient that comes in your door, lie them down, do their blood pressure and their pulse after they’ve laid down for a minute or two. Stand them up one minute, three minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, look at their blood pressure and pulse and look for drops in systolic blood pressures and look at rises in pulse rates.
And those patients don’t perfuse the mitochondria or the brain and they won’t improve until you get increased perfusion to their cellular structures into their brains. They just won’t. You have to treat that first.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And are you addressing it with this protocol?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: I address that with the standard POTS approaches with increased fluids with salt, a lot of salt, two to three teaspoons of salt. Salt sticks compression stockings and I liberally use Florinef and Midodrin and other medications. And it’s a gamechanger. It’s absolutely a gamechanger in certain patients.
And many people are misdiagnosed. There’s a combination of sort of different … You can get orthostatic hypertension. You can get postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, and you can just get pure tachycardias. And they’re different and if I need to differentiate, I send them to cardiologists.
And we have one particular one in our city who does tilt table testing. He’s written lots of papers, very experienced. And so we refer to him to sort of introduce further medications if need be. And patients always know about the triad of dysautonomia and mast cell and gastric motility issues. Many patients present with mast cell activation, POTS, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome with dysautonomias and gastric motility issues. And they’re called triad or pentad patients as per Afrin’s group.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Why are we seeing more of these people?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: I think the stresses imposed upon our modern society are overwhelming our defenses. We just become extremely vulnerable to this incoming toxic load. We’re not genetically resilient enough to withstand this onslaught, whether it’d be electromagnetic fields or chemicals or foods. Even the fact that we could open the fridge five times a day, eat what we want, I mean that’s a stressor on our system, it’s unbelievable.
We’ve got out of sync with our innate biorhythms and there’s been a huge movement in the functional medicine community through biodiversity and regenerative agriculture. And we’re paying lip service to this need, but I don’t know. I think our DNA and I think microbiomes will eventually adjust to these incoming onslaughts. I don’t think we’ll be extinguished. It always appears that stresses on the system create greater resilience down the line and barring a sort of huge six apocalypse. I think we will become more resilient as we sort of evolve through this toxic phase that we’re going through.
But right now, I think we’re very vulnerable and we are under a lot of stress, under a lot of toxic load.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, we’re kind of heading towards the end of the podcast. This is to clinicians, and so this is going to create a lot of interests in your approach to care. I guess I have two questions. One is, where do people learn more about this model that you’re working from? This sounds so powerful, and I certainly appreciate you’re casting a very wide net and people are coming to you because of that and so forth.
But as you described such a careful start to the journey … By the way, we’re going to try to piece together that shake recipe. That was so awesome. We’ll put it on the show notes, people. It’s just the most sophisticated shake yet, so I want to see if we can pull that together and put something on the show notes.
But I mean you must be seeing some pretty good outcome just after this evaluation and you’re pushing the ship from the shore. I mean you must be seeing some good change. And if not, I’m sure you’re just really going back to rethinking.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: I don’t have a research assistant in my office, so it’s hard to know outcomes. One believes that one’s practice is achieving remarkable outcomes, but I think unless you have a statistician in there, a hardcore research, we’ll never really know. But what I’ve noticed … By the way, a lecture I did is on my website. I lectured to the ICI Conference and it’s on my website. We are doing one and a half hour synopsis of the seven stages.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, perfect.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: I think it’s the most insightful sort of snapshot of the levels and layers and complexity that’s possible. So, the outcomes we have from what I can tell, because one never really knows the drop-off rate. I don’t think it’s very large. When patients present with complex illness and you do your due diligence and you throw the net far and wide and the patients can keep up with it, and many patients can because they’re so educated and so driven, they’re so sick and tired of seeing hundreds of people and not getting any better.
And you’re looking at your data and you’re looking at mitochondrial function and fatty acids function and ION panels and things and you do repeat them from time to time. It has been my experience that within six months on average, on average, the test itself reverts from highly problematic to restored function, the IGL test. You will see mitochondrial numbers go from low to normal. You will see phosphatidylcholine go from extremely low to normal. You will see glutathione levels come back. You will see microbial toxins disappear. You will see mercury, lead, cadmium, glyphosate levels disappear.
But concurrent with that, the patient will tell you, “I feel completely different.” And we keep objective, we do different score systems. But I use the old MSQ from IFM. And patient’s levels drop from 180 to 20 once you start working from the mitochondria outwards into the whole complexity of the mind-body and familial inherited system. If you start using a broad map and you just don’t run down too many rabbit holes, and you keep your head above you and you just work it through. And if you hit the blank wall, you just ask more questions. You don’t give up.
Somewhere along in that experience, the patients, they feel better, their symptoms improve and they move through that cell danger 1, 2, 3, into the cell danger 3 response, the healing response. And they feel amazing. We have a large amount of patients who do experience that once they’d gone through their process, but we always preface it with, “Look, this is only as successful as the amount of effort you put in. If you stay passive, there’s nothing we can do. You have to be a cooperative partner in this experience. If you have side effects, you don’t throw baby out with the bathwater. You come to the table. We find out what happened, and you work through this process. And if you can’t, you get yourself somebody, an advocate, who can help you.”
In that sort of dynamic and with the staff, the great staff I have and the support systems and the ability to rerun lab tests from time to time, I would hazard a guess that the majority of our patients get better, the majority. I wish I had the statistic to tell you, but I don’t.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Maybe now is the time to get a PhD student in your practice. It would be really nice to gather. I know you’ve been at this for a long time. It’d be nice to maybe get some data.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: I think I should, yeah.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, get a student, that good PhD work. Well, Dr. Hoffman. It was just really lovely to connect with you and talk about this. Folks, we will gather as much as we can for the show notes and link over to the site to some of the content that he’s referencing. And if you think of anything else, just let us know. Thanks for joining me today, for this really nice dive into what you’re doing.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Thanks, Kara, and nice to speak to you again after all these years.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, absolutely. And hopefully, I’ll see you in person at AIC, not this year but next year.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman: Yeah, maybe, who knows? I quite enjoyed this sort of remote telemedicine, teleconference …
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Thank you kindly, for your time. Much appreciated.
The podcast was originally posted on Dr. Kara Fitzgerald’s website here.
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.
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the virtual summit. I’m your host, Mary Vallarta. As you know, we are here to talk about healing your chronic illness and taking back your life. Basically how to balance your mind, body, and spirit to restore your health and vitality.
Mary Vallarta:
Today I have Dr. Bruce Hoffman and I am super excited to chat with him. Before I get into the questions, let me tell you a bit about who he is. Dr. Hoffman is board certified in anti-aging medicine, has a master’s degree in clinical nutrition, and is a certified Functional Medicine practitioner. In addition to his clinical training, Dr. Hoffman has studied with many of the leading mind, body, and spiritual healers of our times, including Deepak Chopra, Osho, Ramesh Balsekar, and John Kabat-Zinn. He has shared the stage with Deepak Chopra and Dr. John Demartini, and he continues to spread his inspiring vision of healing and wellness with audiences and patients around the world. 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 fell short of restoring the patient’s health entirely. So Dr. Hoffman embarked on a journey to understand what constitutes the human experience and what the triggers and mediators are that perpetuate human suffering. He wanted to do this not only to help patients be free of disease but to realize their maximum potential. Dr. Hoffman welcome. That is quite a resume.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Nice to be here. I’m looking forward to this conversation and seeing what we can come up with.
Mary Vallarta:
Me too. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. I’m super energized to be speaking with you. Let’s get into it. Dr. Hoffman, I love how you’ve combined the strengths of Western medicine with the mindful and spirit-centered approach of Eastern medicine. As your bio states, you didn’t actually start out this way. You were practicing Family Medicine. What pushed you to go into the path of functional and integrative medicine that takes mind, body, and spirit into account?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, the part leading to where I am now is quite interesting in that when I was a young boy in my teenage years, I went to boarding school and I had a teacher there. My teacher was very interested in not only Western psychology, particularly the work of Carl Jung but also very interested in Eastern mythology and religions, particularly the work of a subset of the Vedantic Hindu medicine called Advaita. Advaita takes the point of view that there is no “there out there”. Everything springs from one source. So there is just one mind, one consciousness, and there is no separation. It’s a very specific way of looking at reality. Many of the quantum physicists who came onto the scene at the turn of the century had a very similar point of view. When they dissolved matter into light, they said, all light is continuous. There is no separation
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So this ancient, theological concept, was being married with Western physics. My teacher, Roger, I just hung out with him and we explored all these things and so I became very interested. When I was about 15 years of age, I had what they call a Satori experience, where I directly experienced this One Mind, One Reality. It descends upon you, and you just know that to be true. Before too long, you descend back into your dualistic past, present and future, gain and loss reality and the awareness is lost. I still remember that. Then I had a second experience like that in my thirties. So having had two experiences of One Mind, One Reality. It sort of cemented, in my body based understanding, that was behind all systems of appearance.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Nonetheless, I continued my high school education. My mother applied for me to go to med school. I had no idea. I find myself in med school. I wanted to be a poet, go hang out with all the beat poets in San Francisco, but my mother thought I should have a more formal education. So she applied for med school and I found myself in med school. Actually, after six years of medical training, I became a Family Physician and fell in love with it. I actually loved what I did. I ended up in Saskatchewan, Canada, practicing Family Medicine. When I got to Canada practicing Family Medicine, it was very apparent that that system of medicine is very limited in terms of what you can offer. We call it the N2 / D2 system of medicine. Name of disease, name of drug. That’s about it.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
But what happened was then I also came across a video by Dr. Larry Dossey, one of the great thinkers of the last 50 years in the field of integrative medicine. I watched Larry Dossey sort of draw out this long explanation as to how he combined East and West into his medical practice and his thought process. That triggered another huge explosion of interest and reignited my childhood experiences with my high school teacher and Advaita and psychology. All of a sudden this whole roadmap just opened up and I thought, this is a very interesting possibility. So I then just started learning as much as I could about the human experience. I became a student of as much as I could possibly absorb across all spectrums of human reality from toxicology to illumination. I started to develop a roadmap and with different teachers and different experiences and different ways of seeing and being exposed to different systems of information. I did Ayurvedic training and they talk about different bodies, different systems of the body. I spent time with a very well-known doctor from Germany who lives in Seattle by the name of Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt. I spent years studying with Deepak Chopra and David Simon, et cetera, et cetera. And I just started to develop a roadmap for looking at the human condition from traditional medicine, then expanding it a bit to Functional Medicine and then moving to the brain and then to the emotions, then to the mental field, then to the soul and then to the spirit, which is beyond all confines to space/time. So I developed this roadmap of experiences at each level, diagnosis at each level, potential treatments at each level, because many people will want to go to an acupuncturist, which is at level three in this energy model, but they really should be seeing an oncologist or they’ll go to an oncologist where they really should be doing trauma work.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
I tried to sort out all these different possibilities across all layers and levels and help teach/write a new curriculum, really for doctors or healers. Not really doctors. MDs should keep doing what they do. They do it well. Every patient that sits in front of me says well, why doesn’t my doctor know this. Well, because it wasn’t his interest and he didn’t train to know this. So give it up. Don’t even ask the question, don’t waste your time. We need a new curriculum for a new expansive model. That’s been my life calling, my life passion, and to which I’m still a student. I mean, I study more now than I did when I was young. I just keep expanding the knowledge base.
Mary Vallarta:
I think that’s what makes your work so fascinating to me. You have sort of like a 360-degree view since you’ve been on the MD side, the family medicine side, and then you’re now continuing to learn more about the Eastern methodologies. So you’re kind of taking everything and putting it all together to make these roadmaps that you’re talking about.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It’s not just Eastern, Mary, it’s all systems of knowledge, you know, from phenomenology to theology, to psychology East to West, to up and down, it’s all layers, all levels. It’s not only Eastern insights. Some of it is Eastern, but it’s not only Eastern insights.
Mary Vallarta:
I see. Interesting. So integrating all that together is very fascinating and it gives you more of a well-rounded perspective. As you mentioned, MDs aren’t trained to have that type of approach. That’s why there’s a time and place where that’s going to be appropriate. There’s also another time and place where something else might be more appropriate for a patient. So I think that’s important to note. There is a lot of research coming to light on the important role that food plays on one’s ability to prevent disease and sometimes also reverse or heal. As you pointed out, there are such things called trauma. You’ll recommend people see some trauma specialists or stress. What are your thoughts on having more emphasis or focus on things like mindset, changing internal narratives, and healing emotional trauma when it comes to healing?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
One of the great challenges of working with patients is when they present with complex multi-system illness, which is the only kind of patient I see these days, they are still very in that diagnostic mindset of “what do I have”? Usually singular, what one thing do I have? Is it mold or Lyme or Mast Cell or whatever? Then they start to think diagnostically and therapeutically in an allopathic way. When you start to have a broad spectrum of understanding the human condition, and you start to understand all the antecedents, mediators, and triggers that eventually ended up in biology and pathology/disease, you can’t stop yourself from taking a far more comprehensive history. So the healer of the future can commit both acts of commission, as well as acts of omission. It’s not what he knows, but it’s also what he doesn’t know.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So if you’re sitting in front of a patient and they are presenting with symptomatology at this moment in space-time, it behooves you to ask every single possible trigger that may have led up to that presentation. It’s our Western understanding and consensual reality that diseases kind of fall out of the sky. It’s like, Oh, I’ve got rheumatoid arthritis. Then you can go to the doctor and get an immune modulator, or you can go to a naturopath and get an herb, but it’s still that singular mindset. When we look at patients from a more complex model, we have to start looking at not only diagnosis from a Western perspective, because you need to know that, that it’s an inflammatory and immune system-based disease based on autoimmunity, which has its links in leaky gut, et cetera, et cetera, and the genetic predisposition.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You’ve got to know that, but you’ve also got to understand how people arrive at a point in time with a diagnosis. You know, people, they inherit epigenetically the traumas of their forefathers. So if you don’t ask a history of their forefathers and the ancestors you are missing out on a piece. Then they get born into a family system, and whether or not they were adequately seen by the mothers in the first 10 years and by their fathers in the second 10 years and peers, and by the loved ones in the third decade, they don’t adequately myelinate the three different brains that grow up, the reptilian, limbic and adult brains. So if they are not self-regulated by external parental figures, they don’t learn to self-regulate themselves and they have a fragile personality structure very often.
Mary Vallarta:
So how do you help them uncover all of this information?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You’ve got to take a very thorough history. I take a two and a half to three-hour history and ask all of these questions.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Then those experiences, your epigenetic transfer, ancestral trauma, early childhood experiences that all gets then translated into your perception of reality, your internal dialogue, your thoughts, your value systems, your beliefs, and your defenses. So many people stay highly defended from feelings that arose in the first 30 years of life because they are too painful. So they’re defended and they are traumatized. That then translates into electrical messages in the brain, which you can read on a qEEG. I have a brain treatment center, which reads qEEGs. You can see hallmarks of early trauma on the brain. You’ll see the one brainwave, the [1] beta brainwave highly red, highly amplified. That then gets turned into chemical signals. That then starts to interact with your phospholipid cell membranes, which you can measure, which then turn on receptors, which then turn on genes, which then turn on proteins, which then turn on all the biochemistry that runs your life.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So you have this whole cascade of possible antecedents that can set you up for what’s happening at this moment with so-called symptomatology or disease expression, but it’s not just rheumatoid arthritis. It’s way back in the ancestry, trickling all the way down to physiology. And then you have the environment coming in. That plays havoc with your, your detox pathways and sitting on DNA. Sitting as adducts on your DNA and mitochondria affecting their expression of lipids and proteins. So if you don’t ask all these questions, you’ve got a limited roadmap and you got a couple of tools in your toolbox. You’ve got to have a very broad toolbox, and that’s why education becomes important. We have to educate healthcare providers of the future to broaden their toolbox. Not only to broaden their toolbox but also to broaden their self-understanding as well.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
If a healer approaches a patient with a hero type approach, I’m all-knowing, and you’re all sick. They also perpetuate a very lopsided point of view. The patient’s well side doesn’t get activated. They don’t activate the healthy part of who they are. They identify with the disease, the doctor as the hero is going to fix them. That’s a very lopsided relationship. Often patients sort of, in order to survive that lopsidedness, they just don’t activate their intent to do what is required for them to activate the healer within. The healing archetype within. Without activating that there’s no outcome.
Mary Vallarta:
Right. So would you say your approach is also about giving power back to the patient? Like letting them realize that they have a big role to play in their healing?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
We try to. Some people are highly defended. People have value systems, a hierarchy of values. People will say that their health is a high value. They come to you to treat their health or help them treat their health. When you start to take a history, you’ll find out, particularly with men, by the way, this is like a big male thing. Their highest value is their career, making money, health is secondary. They often delegate their health to the loved ones, their spouses, or somebody else. They don’t really want to rob Peter, their career-making money, to pay Paul, to invest in their health. So they don’t raise health up as a value. Unless patients are prepared to raise health up as a value and become a participant in their own healing experience, they remain passive and they have what we call “projection of will”.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
They project their will to heal onto you. If you rise up in the healing archetype “I’m all-knowing, I’m going to fix you”, you start working harder than the patient. It’s a very lopsided relationship, almost doomed to fail. So you’ve got to try and enter into their system and sort of feel where they are in their own evolution. Is health a high-value? How healthy is their ego strength? Is it fragile? How much projection of will do they have? Do they have outer resources to assist them or are they without resources? Do they have personality disorders? Do they have what it takes to take on such an extensive journey? And, of course, finances. Most of this isn’t funded by healthcare systems and nor should it be because it would bankrupt most of them.
Mary Vallarta:
Right. Also, one of the most important questions for them to know the answer to is why do they want to heal? Why do they want to get better?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
On the first page of my 70-page questionnaire is “Why are you here, How can we help you, What is it you want to achieve?” and how committed are you to making the changes necessary? It’s interesting when it comes back 50% or 75% committed. Immediately I say we have to have this conversation first and find out what that’s about. Because if people haven’t been seen by their parents, if they haven’t been supported and challenged in a healthy, supportive, challenging way, which is how love evolves and how you develop a concept of self. You only develop a good concept of self, good ego strength if you are both supported and challenged by your parents, not just supported. If they don’t have a healthy sense of self, they can’t take on what is being required of them to sort of move through this experience. They just don’t have the resources to do so.
Mary Vallarta:
Right. That’s very true.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You have to find out where they are with that, you know, and where is health in their value system. You really have to ask that question before you launch into “tell me about your disease”. You have to find out who this person is sitting in front of you and where they are at in their hierarchy of values as to doing what it takes to get better. You know, there are many possibilities for healing. The first possibility is just treating disease. Get this symptom out of me. I want to do it quickly without money and without me being involved, just give me a pill. Mahatma Gandhi said the tragedy of modern medicine is that it works. There’s that possibility. Then the other possibility is they see symptoms as teleological. Those symptoms are actually asking them to enter into their own life, to try and find out why they are this way in space-time. Then they see mind, body connections. That the way that they construct reality may influence the systems they put in place to support them and the way they perceive things and what they eat, it all plays a role. So they become more conscious of their own advocacy. That’s the second possibility. The third possibility for healing are those people who do not only want to be free of disease, which is sometimes not possible, you’ve always got some symptomatology and, but they want to live at the highest maximum potential. To do that, they have to go through a lot of personal development and personal growth to know their value systems, to know how inspired they are. To find out what wakes them up every morning. Are they called from above by some spiritual purpose or do they just get out of bed and just sort of see what happens?
Mary Vallarta:
Right. So that brings us back to the why. Let’s talk more about maximum potential, because I know that’s a big part of your work. Can you describe what maximum potential is?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, when a person wakes up in the morning inspired by what they do, that’s living at your maximum potential. They are living at their maximum potential. It’s a vision of what they are here to do on this planet while they’re in a body. In psychology, it was called a daemonic calling. Your inner constellated self calls you from above to become who you’re meant to be. So you’re just inspired to do what you do, and you know what you are meant to do and you throw all your life force into that outcome.
Mary Vallarta:
Which is basically their higher purpose.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Their highest value, their highest purpose. They don’t need to be motivated to get out of bed. They get out of bed and just do what they do. They stay up very late at night trying to manifest it. Their life force is invested in it. There’s that old image that I love, if you will go to a university and you stand outside and you look at the different levels of a university, the undergraduate student’s lights go out at four o’clock, the postgraduate at six o’clock, the doctoral students at 10 o’clock and the Nobel prizewinner’s their lights get switched off at one o’clock in the morning. They are just called into the daemonic calling. They just know who they are and what they meant to do.
Mary Vallarta:
…and that’s what pushes them, yes.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
But that’s only the third possibility. The fourth possibility of healing is when you know that you are part of a connected whole. You don’t identify with your body, your emotions, your mind. You identify with that aspect of you that is beyond all of that. Your deepest self, your soul, which is sort of linked to this one mind, this eternal consciousness. You know you’re not your body, you’re not your mind, you’re not your thoughts, but instead, you’re part of this continuous oneness and you stay connected to that in that field of consciousness that is that. I’ve had patients die, fully healed, connected to that aspect of themselves. They just know who they are. They know they are not their bodies, they’re not their minds, they’re not their thoughts, they’re not their actions. They are beyond that.
Mary Vallarta:
That reminds me of the concept of Satva in Ayurveda.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It’s called Brahmi in the Vedantic model.
Mary Vallarta:
Oh, nice. I’m just getting into more Vedic studies. I’m in Ayurveda right now, which I’m really loving. That’s really what inspired my own healing journey.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
I took my model from Ayurveda because I studied it for years and went to India and did an internship there.
Mary Vallarta:
That’s my dream. I want to go to India and study it one day.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
But they have these koshas, these bodies. I took that model and added a few and I made the seven stages to health and transformation model based on Ayurvedic and Vedantic scriptures.
Mary Vallarta:
Oh, got it. So what are those seven stages? Can you share them with us?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yes. Spirit, soul, mind, emotion, energy, physiology and structure, environment.
Mary Vallarta:
Okay. Interesting.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. They are based on the five koshas from the Vedantic philosophy, the five bodies, the five layers.
Mary Vallarta:
So obviously when your patients are working with you, I can only imagine some of them get challenged. Right? Some of them might get frustrated during this whole process. So how do you go about helping them and supporting them push through or be comfortable with feeling this discomfort? Cause a lot of times people run away from discomfort.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Again, it’s incumbent upon me if I’m doing a reasonable job, not to impose my model on them, but just ask what they want.
Mary Vallarta:
Ok, going back to that.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Some people just want to not have asthma. They’re not interested in seven levels of healing. I respect that. Then I pull out all my functional medicine, toxicology tricks, and just treat asthma. Treat triggers of asthma such as mold and food sensitivities and Mast Cell blockade and mitochondrial resuscitation. I do all my functional medicine things. Other people come to me and say, I’ve been sick my whole life and they give you 50 symptoms. And you know, immediately that that person probably has not had the most advantageous experience from either ancestrally or from birth. Almost definitely you can tell that. The adverse childhood experiences studies show that people who’ve had adverse childhood experiences had three to four times increased health disadvantages as they mature.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So you know when people tell you they’ve been sick for as long as they remember. You immediately go into early childhood trauma history and it’s always there. You can always tell. Interrupted bonds with their mothers. They have merged with mothers. They were sent off to boarding schools at young ages. They go to intensive care units and incubators and the mother has problems with the father so the mother takes her eyes off the child and doesn’t myelinate the child’s sense of self. Then mother’s offline. Then they have stillbirths and miscarriages and they’re all there in the history almost every time in a complex illness patient.
Mary Vallarta:
Hmm. So basically you meet them where they’re at.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yes, I tend to meet them where they’re at. You try and work out each level. At level one what’s going on? Is it food? Is it mold? You do your normal medicine. Then you ask deeper questions. Are some of these symptoms teleological? Are these symptoms bringing patients to you because they have to heal a part of themselves that they never integrated in their evolution? For instance, I had a patient with MS whose father was a very famous sports coach and she never felt seen by her father, always neglected. She had a superego that is highly punitive, and she didn’t feel ever seen. So she was constantly beating herself up and attempting/strivinh to become more than she could possibly be. She tried and tried and tried, but dad was always coaching the team.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Then the dad, when she was 18 or 19 I believe, her father got fired from the team. The next day she developed MS. The next day. That symptom was saying, dad, you were never there to take care of me. Now, look at me, I’m sick. He rose to the occasion. When he was fired, he was at home and he could be with his daughter. It was set up that way, that the symptoms drew that complexity together for it to be resolved. When she got that installed that she used that to use that in healing. It was very powerful. I have many, many cases and stories like that, where symptoms guide people to heal a part of themselves they’ve left behind.
Mary Vallarta:
Right. That is fascinating.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Symptoms don’t fall out of the sky. They have intent. In my experience.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. I think that the more I speak to all of the experts that I’ve talked to so far, the more I’m realizing that symptoms are really an opportunity for people to get to know themselves on a deeper level.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
I did a workshop with Mark Wolynn who is one of the great family constellations authors and workshop leaders out there. Once a year, we’ll do a workshop on illness and your family system and early developmental trauma. Almost to the person, we can link the rising of symptoms to events in the lifespan that needed to be resolved and healed. Once we linked them and made them conscious and gave them the homework to do, there was a vast new release of healing potential because you don’t heal until you have a new internal dialogue, a new story, a new narrative. If you have the old narrative, you create the same biochemistry. People with a new narrative, they have a new insight. It releases a potent internal life force that then constellates the biochemical pathways downstream to advocate healing.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So we would do this workshop. Mark was a master at family constellations. Patients would sit next to him, and we would ask what their problem is and they’d say thyroiditis or leaky gut or Mast Cell, mold, whatever. Then you’d say, well, tell me about your mother. Tell me about your father. Tell me about your grandparents and your siblings. Then he’d put up people in this constellation and worked with them energetically as to what was going on in the system and how their symptoms correlated with the dynamics of the system, the entanglements of the system. They could see how their symptoms didn’t just arise from nowhere. They were contingent upon some of these entanglements that needed to be healed. Once they saw what they hadn’t perceived before because children will often tell themselves a story that’s not true.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
They’ll say their mother was mean and angry, but their mother lost two children before they were born. The mother got very little from her mother. The mother was always bothered about the father who is out doing something or other. So the mother just had a little bit to give and unless the child sees that, and sees the mother through new eyes, the judgment of the mother will be there. A person is half their mother, half their father. If they start judging half of themselves, guess what? They’re not open to the healing force, which is their whole self. So everybody ultimately has to realign with their parental mothers and fathers. If you don’t say yes to your mother and father, your healing is going to be limited, no matter what you’ve experienced.
Mary Vallarta:
Because it’s pushing yourself away. They’re half of you like you mentioned.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
That’s the setup for auto-immunity by the way.
Mary Vallarta:
Oh yeah, because you’re rejecting yourself and autoimmune, right? Oh my God, that is powerful. I don’t even know what to say right now, but it shows how important it is to really understand yourself, but also understand your parents. Also understanding your grandparents because your grandparents affected your parents’ psyche. It affected how your parents treated you.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
No question. 100%. There’s a one-to-one correlation.
Mary Vallarta:
So Dr. Hoffman, switching gears here a little bit because I’m also quite interested in anti-aging medicine, but I don’t know too much about it. Could you tell us a little bit about what that is?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It’s a myth. I’ve trained in it but there is no anti-aging medicine. It’s a nice sort of slogan for slowing down the process of aging. Okay. We all age. You’ve got the hormones of youth and you’ve got these drives. In the first 30 years, you can do no wrong. You just push yourself through everything. Then entropy sets in and you start to sort of come apart slowly but surely.
Mary Vallarta:
You’re noticing it now.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
No question. The wrinkles and the skin sags.
Mary Vallarta:
The low back pain
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Then you get the inflammatory diseases of aging. Then you get separated into either heart disease or cancer or one of those things. They are all driven by genetics and environment and lifestyle and mind/ body. The more inflamed you are by your lifestyle, the more unresolved you are with multiple triggers, the more interleukin six and tumor necrosis factor and all the inflammatory signalings are flying around, destroying your mitochondria, which then reduce your ATP, which then reduce your life force. So what we do in anti-aging medicine is try and slow down that trajectory before all is lost.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. There’s no way that you can stop yourself from aging. It’s just really about how to stop those symptoms of aging or delay them, right?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Modify it so that your entropy isn’t like this. Then you drop dead one day because your gene pools run out, it’s time.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. It reminds me of my grandmother. She died, but she didn’t really die of any disease or illness. I think it was just because she was older and her body was just tired.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
The genes give up. Everything ends.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. So share some of the most important things you’ve learned from your spiritual teachers. You’ve named a lot of big names, in your bio, like Deepak Chopra and Osho.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So, here’s the answer. You probably won’t want this one.
Mary Vallarta:
Give us the real answer, not what you think we want to hear.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
People who’ve had difficult upbringings, who’ve had some complexity in their early developmental years, will often go to find spiritual teachers to take the part of the good parent that they feel they didn’t get. So whenever I have patients come in who have spiritual teachers and gurus, I’m very suspicious. Having had very many spiritual teachers and gurus myself. Having been to India three times and sat on many mountain tops meditating. So that’s the first insight that I really want to emphasize. It’s not wrong. It’s just when people don’t heal with their individual mothers and fathers, they’ll find a great mother and father that will look upon them benignly.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You’ll find a lot of the great spiritual teachers who went to Burma and Thailand and India in the seventies, all of the Western students of spirituality. There are a lot of them. Jon Kabat-Zinn is one of them, Jack Kornfield is another. They all went and meditated for 15, 20 years, put on red robes and then came out of the forest, went back into cities of America, started to see people and all of a sudden realized, hold on a second, we are just performing spiritual bypass. These people have got messed up lives and they all went and became psychologists. They all needed to heal the early traumas that people were trying to bypass to develop spiritual awakening. So that’s one of the greatest insights I’ve seen over the years. It’s not that spiritual teachers can’t provide some insight, but I always get a little uneasy when I see a guru sitting on a big white pedestal. Then there are all of these devotees. And I’ve done that for decades. I’m judging myself.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Then I just always ask, what is it about this experience that was being bypassed? What is it that they are trying to gain? What, what layer and level is still unfulfilled in their evolution? That’s what my curiosity is because an awakening experience into Satori is a sort of a brief exposure where you go beyond mind/ body and you actually know that everything is unified. There is no past/present/future. There’s nothing to fear and you’re sort of eternal, immortal and you’re never born and you never die. That is what happens when you awaken. But to sit in front of a guru to try and get that experience, I’m not sure that’s the best use of your time.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. I think it’s just an illustration of how you’re still searching for answers outside of you.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
That’s what Advaita says. The essence of Advaita, which I learned at 15 was the very act of seeking prevents you from being who you are because you are that. So what are you seeking? You are already that thing.
Mary Vallarta:
What are you seeking? Exactly. I get that. That is really good advice when you think about it. The answers are not out there. They are in here.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Carl Jung said the urge to be whole is evolutionary. You can’t avoid it. Dianne Connelly said all sickness is homesickness. You try to come home to the most integrated aspect of who you are. You can’t just go and sit with a guru.
Mary Vallarta:
That won’t give you the answers.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It’s fun, and it’s very pleasant for a time. And I’ve done it for a long time, but you still got to go down the chakras and work your way through them. Early developmental trauma. All of that stuff. You’ve got to heal that stuff.
Mary Vallarta:
If anything, it’s sort of a way where someone could continue resisting actually looking at themselves, getting to know themselves by sitting with a guru, and not ever advancing to internal examination.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Perfect, perfect example you just gave. It really does, in many cases, exemplify and exaggerate, the very pathology that’s brought them to the guru in the first place, which is resistance and projection. By sitting in front of the guru they are refusing to face the very thing that they need to face, which is themselves and their defenses.
Mary Vallarta:
Yes. Fascinating. So aside from sitting or seeing your patients, one-on-one Dr. Hoffman, you also actually have online programs and courses that people can take. Can you tell us a bit about what those are?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Well, it’s funny, I used to do weekend workshops and all sorts of things. Then I condensed it all into a Friday afternoon lecture, a one-hour lecture for my new patients. Then the one-hour lecture became seven hours. I felt sorry for my patients. So then I took that lecture and made it into a book. So that book and those videos are available.
Mary Vallarta:
Nice.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. So if you want to learn Seven Stages to Health and Transformation, I have a video and I have a PowerPoint explanation of it all, but I no longer lecture to that degree. I’m going back and starting to do lectures on different topics like Alzheimer’s disease and Mast Cell Activation and mold exposure and various aspects of mind-body healing. Those are in development. Most of the time now I’m helping other practitioners. Guiding them through this new curriculum of Seven Stages to Health and Transformation where not only do they learn new skills, but they learn about themselves.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
They have to stay congruent, they have to be present in that experience. I forgot to mention as part of my explanation, I went off at a tangent, that patients who don’t have good relationships with their parents have low trust. If they have medical PTSD or trauma from the medical system, that gets projected on you as a healer because all medical systems are very patriarchal and you are a parental figure. So if you’re sitting in front of a patient and there’s no trust established, there’s nothing you can do. So you have to ask that question first. You know I’m trying to teach people, other practitioners, how to be present with patients before they get more tools in their toolbox and go into courses and learn things.
Mary Vallarta:
That is so important.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
How to develop trust with a patient. Sometimes you can’t, they’re too traumatized and you try your best, but it’s just not possible.
Mary Vallarta:
But that just shows the role that each person plays. The role that the practitioner plays and also the role that the patient plays. If either one of them is not invested, it’s not going to yield the highest potential outcome.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
It won’t. Some people are too traumatized with too much mental health illness that they just can’t do what it takes to show up in that experience. Then you just have to admit that it’s not going to work out. You have to learn who is sitting in front of you. Also, know yourself through your own Myers – Briggs typology, through your own Ayurvedic typology, you have to know if you’re Vata, Pitta, Kapha. Is that patient Vata, Pitta, Kapha because the Vata patient is not going to do what the Kapha patient does. They are an entirely different person.
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. And then honoring and accepting that type of person and not projecting another type of person in that chair.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
If I’m a Pitta practitioner in my hero archetype and I know everything, I’m going to tell you what to do. And the Vatta patient walks in and is very sort of inspired for like three days and then they lose interest. If you impose your value system and your Ayurvedic typology or dosha onto them, and you don’t resonate and know how to treat Vata patients, you will lose them and you’ll feel frustrated. Like a Kapha patient, they always show up, they never do what you asked them to do, or they do very little, but they’re always very loyal.
Mary Vallarta:
Very loyal. And we’re talking about Kapha, Vatta, Pitta. Those are the different dosha constitutions, that we talk about in Ayurveda.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Then the Pitta patient, if you’re not the best in the city, they’ll leave you and go find the best.
Mary Vallarta:
They are looking for the facts. They’re like the fact-finder.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
You’re not sharp enough and don’t have the best office and are always on time….
Mary Vallarta:
You gotta check all the boxes for the Pitta patients.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
But as a practitioner, you’ve got to know who’s coming in the door because you’ve got to adjust the way you interact with them. Knowing your Myers-Briggs typology as well, thinking people are not the same as feeling people. You’ve got to know that.
Mary Vallarta:
That’s very true. It’s sort of like detective work that you have to do when you work with your patients. Well, Dr. Hoffman, I can talk to you for hours. There are so many different questions that I can keep asking you, but for the sake of this particular interview, I’d like to ask if there’s anything else, one thing that you can leave us with here today that you didn’t get a chance to cover.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
In regards to talking to well people? Or people with complex illnesses? Or could you give you more direction?
Mary Vallarta:
Yeah. Well, the title of the summit is Healing Your Chronic Illness and Taking Your Life Back, meaning taking control of your health, right? Being the person and seeing the power that you have to own your life, to own your health. And so what would be the last thing that you’d want to leave us with here today?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
I think what’s most important is that people have to understand that if they present with chronic ill health or chronic complex illness, they have to try and find a practitioner who has a broad range of experience with multiple tools in their toolbox. They can’t just do one stool test and hope to heal. That’s number one.
Number two, they have to become their own patient advocates. If they are not invested in advocacy, there is very little that you can do.
Number three, they can’t project all the will to heal on the practitioner. They have to take some of that responsibility themselves.
Number four, they have to raise health up as a value. If the health isn’t one of the first or second values, it will default to number four or five, wherever you have your highest value, you will have your most order. Wherever you have your lowest value you will have your most chaos. If health truly isn’t your highest value, be honest with yourself. Then look at it and say in the future, I will make it my high-value but right now I want to keep working and eating poorly and making money because that’s where my highest value is. Not wrong or right. Just be honest and truthful and know your value system.
Mary Vallarta:
Wow. That is a great way to end the discussion. I feel like you beautifully summarized our conversation and added new thoughts to it. So I appreciate that. I will go ahead and make sure that I link Dr. Hoffman’s website, where some of his writings and programs are, so you all can take a look. I’ll also include that in the post-summit email. Dr. Hoffman, you’re also on social media. So what is your handle where people can find you and possibly connect with you there?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
So Instagram. My staff said, “make sure you say this at the end”.
Yeah. I mean, there are more. Do you have a Tik Tok? Do you have a Twitter?
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Yeah. Yeah. Yesterday my Twitter account was activated by an assistant. I have no clue.
Mary Vallarta:
There you go. Well, Dr. Hoffman is on Instagram, so you can catch him there. I think that everyone’s on Instagram. So find him on IG. You should see the links in the handles below. Look at his website. There are a lot of resources there where you can get started if you are interested in everything that we’ve talked about. As Dr. Hoffman said, be truthful to yourself and meet yourself where you are. Stop, resisting, and meet yourself where you are, because that is an integral part of starting and continuing the healing journey.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman:
Also, the outer aspects of healing often in complex illness have to be congruent with inner healing too. You can’t just take a potion or herb. It’s much more complex than that. You’ve got to take a full system approach. There is a lecture being posted on my website soon on YouTube, where I give a 1 ½ hour lecture on the Seven Stages of Healing which will summarize some of the things we’ve mentioned.
Mary Vallarta:
Ooh, yes. I’m gonna watch that for sure. Okay. Thank you so much for joining us today. Hope you got a lot out of this. Dr. Hoffman, you are amazing. Thank you for speaking with me.
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.
Contrary to mainstream rhetoric, the treatment and prevention of cancer in patients is much more layered than a simple diagnosis and chemo, for example. Things such as past trauma, mold exposure, allergies, and metal toxicity exposure can truly impact how one recovers and even how one reacts to chemo.
Watch the full video as Dr. Hoffman dives into some of the complexities of a multi-level approach to treatment of cancer in patients.
Watch the Video
How a Multi-Level Approach to Medicine Can Augment a Cancer Patient’s Treatment
Hi everybody. I received an email today from a colleague who is posting his case history on a cancer patient. He detailed the specific oncology issues that had arisen, his approach, and what he believed to be the correct treatment. I was thinking as I was reading this report from an integrative medicine physician about how far integrated medicine, medicine that incorporates many different layers and levels and dimensions of a personal experience, has come. This patient was managed impeccably by her oncologists. Insights were derived from post oncology or peri oncology type issues. When I read through the presentation of my colleague, I was struck by how we can bring so many more diagnostic and therapeutic features to the patient’s experience. When we consider the layers and levels that any individual person brings to the consultation, the history given by my colleague on this patient just touched on a few issues and could have been further expanded upon. I’d like to expand upon the history to provide a road map of how the seven levels, or the seven stages, to health and transformation can be incorporated when thinking of strictly biologically-based medicine.
In his history, he mentioned that this patient had breast cancer. She was treated with chemo and radiation and developed side effects. He went on to mention a few things, such as that she was sensitive, that she had experienced early developmental trauma, that she was a poet and artist, and that she had post chemo fatigue. He also happened to mention that she had a supportive framework, a loving husband, and was very involved in her own patient advocacy. In addition to everything else that he was bringing to the table, he wanted to treat her mast cell activation syndrome. He was looking for further triggers as to why she was still fatigued and anxious, things such as mold exposures or possible Lyme disease.
In looking through this history, things came to my mind. Whenever there’s a history of early trauma, you have to look upstream to ancestral Inheritance. We know now that individuals carry the experiences of their forefathers. This is well researched and well studied and is now being incorporated into clinical medicine. Whatever the ancestors, particularly the mother, father, and grandparents had emotionally experienced gets epigenetically transferred into the proteomics and metabolomics. This is the cellular expression of that patient’s life that can’t be ignored. Secondly, when a person is born into a dramatic scenario, when they have interrupted bonds between them and their mothers, particularly their mothers in the first ten, twenty even thirty years, there’s a price that’s paid. Particularly if the patient isn’t entrained with the mother’s right prefrontal cortex in an empathic entrainment, one sense of self that inhibits early anxiety and stress or fear doesn’t develop a robust mechanism or the ability to inhibit should anxiety and stressful events arise in the future. So in early developmental trauma, when the child’s developing brain doesn’t entrain with the mother’s development, the mother’s external prefrontal cortex and just a side note, the mother may not have a very robust right prefrontal cortex either, but the child pays a price. They pay a price of potentially a fragile sense of self or even a very undeveloped sense of self and an inability to self regulate.
This is very obviously seen when you do NeuroQuant MRIs or qEEGs. You can see these fingerprints on the qEEG and on the NeuroQuant MRI in the form of increased amygdala size and increased thalamus size. The evidence is there. On a qEEG you can see heightened amplitude of the beta brainwaves, what’s called the anterior cingulate area, and you can see diminished alpha brain waves. You can see these fingerprints of biographical data on biomedical equipment. It’s important to know that. So if somebody has cancer and he’s had a very bad chemo experience with many symptoms post chemo, one does look upstream to any possible inherited trauma from the ancestral realm. One looks at early developmental trauma because all of these get affected through what’s called the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, in the form of a heightened stress response. The height and stress response can create permeability of gut membranes, mitochondrial membranes, and blood-brain barrier membranes, leading to a flood of potential autoimmune disease and/or inflammatorycompounds. So it’s important to take that particular history to look at the brain through a NeuroQuant MRI and to look at the qEEG to see if there are any fingerprints and then therapeutically to assist that individual in self-regulation through various techniques, whether they be inside therapy, m-wave training, vehicle tone stimulators. I always recommend that people get an insight into the underlying dynamics, not just downregulate the biochemical or physiological pathway.
When there’s early trauma and when there’s early developmental trauma we usually suggest family constellation therapy insight or family constellation workshop to look at the unconscious dynamics of that inheritance. For early developmental trauma, again we use family constellation therapy but sometimes we have to be more advanced. In those cases instead of doing a technique like DNRS, which just downregulates the expression of the anxiety that’s being felt, you need to do more advanced psychological techniques like ISDP. This looks at the defenses the individual developed as a child who wasn’t safe in their environment. They’ve developed the provisional self in order to cope with the slings and arrows of modern life, or just their early life. So you’ve got to look at the family system that’s inherited, look at early developmental trauma, and the defenses that were developed by that person. Then you’ve got to look at the ego strength and structure of that individual to see if they have a robust sense of self. This determines if they can cope with sometimes what’s required of them to get their physiology and their health back online.
So with oncology and cancer, yes we can give chemo, we do radiation. We do those plus all the natural therapies but if you don’t look further upstream to all these potential mediators that keep a person somewhat off kilter, you don’t complete your healing interrogation and your diagnostic interrogation. So it’s very important to shine your light upstream to look at these potential inherited issues. We know from clinical experience that when you heal at a deeper level, the downstream metabolites and the downstream effects are profound. The body tends to express those consequences of the new images and the new insights and the new narratives in a more cohesive fashion. We say in this work that nobody truly heals until they have a new image or a new narrative or a new story to tell about their past and their present. This is vitally true to understand people who present with extreme complex multi-system illness. It’s never only at level two,which is the physical level. You can do all the most sophisticated functional medicine workups, you can give them every supplement in the book, you can send them to wherever you want to detoxify, or you can do bioidentical hormone therapy. But it doesn’t land in a robust place if that sense of self is fragile, if the ability to self-regulate is poor, if the defenses of the individual are too fortified and won’t allow you in. If a child has had an early experience that keeps them from trusting parental figures, do you think they’re going to trust medical authorities? Unlikely since we’re just external representations of parental figures. No healing occurs without a deep sense of trust. This is deeply profound. I’ve been called out over the years for not taking this seriously and developing an empathic trusting relationship with the patient because if that’s not established you might as well give up the rest of it. It’s not going to occur. Patients will resist your efforts to help them if there’s not an empathic relatedness between you and them whereby you understand their dynamics, you understand the fortifications of the psyche that prevent healing from occurring, and you relate subtly to what they’re asking you to do. Sometimes it takes time to establish a therapeutic alliance and a trusting relationship. If you bulldoze your way in and try to tell somebody what to do who has high resistance, something called projection of will, which means they’re asking you to fix them without any advocacy of their own, you’re in a precarious position and success is very limited.
So in this particular case I was struck by the fact that:
A) she had early trauma
B) she had heightened anxiety
C) she had post chemo fatigue
And the whole world of post chemo fatigue of course has lots to do with mitochondrial dysfunction. In traditional medicine we’re not taught anything about mitochondrial dysfunction unless it’s a genetically inherited mitochondrial disease. Even in functional medicine you know mitochondrial dysfunction is paid lip service and people are given you know coenzyme q10, carnitine, lipoic acid, vitamin C, magnesium, and so on. But through the work of Robert Naviaux and the cell danger response we know that the mitochondria also need to be approached with a certain elegance, a certain sophistication, a certain patience because you can’t coax a mitochondria back to health by just throwing everything in the kitchen sink at it, hoping it’s going to recover. You have to understand the timelines and the movement through what they call the cell danger response, where there’s an inflammatory response and the mitochondria shut down
to protect the host. Then there’s moving through a healing response, which takes time. Our bone marrow turns over every four months and the mitochondria too have their own timeline, their own seasons so to speak. If you’re interested in the subject I’d suggest you read anything by Robert Naviaux.
So this patient needed chemo, she had post radiation, post chemo fatigue, she was highly anxious, and wasn’t sleeping but she also had resources and she had some insight into her case. With these issues in mind it’s always important to expand our diagnostic and therapeutic base and try and bring everything to the table, to assist that person moving through their present symptomatology of anxiety fatigue and gut issues. This particular individual had gut issues. You have to do a full functional medicine workup with food sensitivities, gut permeability, hormonal HPA axis assessment, and methylation micelle detoxification. That’s just a given, a basement workup. I was struck by how far we’ve come in the understanding of illness and the fact that illness isn’t something that just requires a therapeutic drug. That concept of n squared, d squared, name of disease, name of drug, is so far advanced. We’ve come so far over the last thirty years in this understanding. Unfortunately the healthcare systems that exist are still very mechanistically based, disease based, which is fine. But when it comes to a true transformative healing experience, all layers, all levels, and interpersonal relatedness with trust are now available to us. It behooves us as therapists and medical personnel and healers if you wish to use that word. We have to do our own work and we have to know how to navigate the nuances and subtleties and levels and layers of a person’s experience and how to read the hidden signs. How to access unconscious dynamics and how to make conscious that which is being asked to be made conscious. Symptoms are often in a person’s life in order to bring to consciousness that which is hidden. It’s been said before that all sickness is homesickness. Even though this could be considered a sort of glib metaphor, especially when somebody’s suffering severely. It’s been my experience that if you really lean into that possibility, the full potential of the person’s self-expression can be realized through a sensitive, insightful and broad palette of diagnostic and therapeutic insights. So these were my musings on a Sunday afternoon and I just wanted to share those with you. 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.
We discuss how mold and mold exposure can be a trigger for Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS). We discuss ways to investigate and determine if you have been exposed to mold and what you should do if you suspect mold exposure is affecting your overall health.
To learn more about mold treatment, prevention, and recommendations, visit the Mold Illness section of our Hoffman Centre website.
Watch the Video
A Discussion About Mold and Mold Exposure with Dr. Bruce Hoffman
I wanted to talk a bit about mold and mold exposure as a potential cause for chronic ill health. Mold is ubiquitous and, without question, many people are suffering from the effects of mold. Mold triggers Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), and many people are suffering from that, which is why I feel that it has to be part of a differential diagnosis for chronic ill health.
It’s shocking how many people have mold exposure as a trigger and as an ongoing mediator, keeping them in an inflamed state resulting in Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome or CIRS. There is a 34-page article on my website describing the diagnosis and treatment of mold illness or CIRS.
I would recommend the following steps to people who feel they have mold exposure.
Do the CIRS questionnaire found on page 9 of the aforementioned article. You can see if you fulfill the criteria for the potential diagnosis of mold illness. Some of those symptoms are not just for mold illness. Some are more psychiatric based questions that can arise from mold. So, the questionnaire itself isn’t enough but it’s a good start. If you have more than eight symptoms in more than six of the subtypes on the questionnaire, consider mold as a potential differential diagnosis.
The second thing you can do is a visual contrast test. This too can be googled. Dr. Shoemaker’s website has access to a computerized VCS test. Take the test and if you fail it, consider mold as a potential illness or reason for feeling unwell.
Then, of course, the most important consideration is exposure. If you know that you’ve got a basement full of mold or your bathroom or your bedroom has mold on the windows from condensation, you have to consider that in your differential.
Not everybody gets sick from mold. Some people simply get allergy type symptoms, but some people get true inflammatory response illness (CIRS). It’s been estimated that only 25% of people will have significant illness from mold. However, in my experience it’s more than that. People often downplay how important mold and the mycotoxins produced by mold are in influencing your health.
So, what is important? Your exposure and your history. Is what you are exposed to visible mold? If it’s not visible, it could be hidden and so you often have to do your own homework and call in a mold inspector to look for the potential sources of mold. So, what can you do to potentially identify a problem? Look up at your pot lights. Is there a brown ring around your pot lights? Do you have buckled baseboards? Do you have black mold on your window frames? Is there mold in the grout in your shower? Do you have a front-end loading washing machine that smells musty? Does your house smell musty? Is there any potential mold in your air-conditioning system? Do you have a food composter in your kitchen? Because a lot of mold grows there. If you aren’t sure, it’s important that you call in a mold inspector, someone who will do a visual inspection and is armed with specific tools such as an infrared camera. Someone who is able to actually measure the dryness or wetness of drywall and put a small hole through drywall if you suspect mold or moisture behind the wall. The inspector will begin the examination of your home in the attic, looking at the insulation and at the condensation potential. Is your upstairs attic vented? A lot of the homes that we built in the Calgary building boom in 2009-2010, including my own by the way, didn’t have venting. Condensation and wetness were ubiquitous and many people didn’t discover the mold until many years later, so get a good visual inspection. Find somebody to come in and inspect from the attic to the basement, someone who goes inside and outside and looks in multiple areas. If you go online, you’ll see how to do a visual inspection and a lot of it you can do yourself.
Then you want somebody to do what’s called an ERMI test, which is a mold spore count. You want to do it either through a vacuum collecting dust from carpets or a swiffer cloth collecting dust off the floors. We recommend living rooms and bedrooms first. Some people do it in the basements although it’s not often recommended because a lot of basements are moldy. In my personal experience it’s important to know if your basement is moldy because through your furnace you’ll be pulling in mold through the furnace and pushing it throughout the house. Molds have also traveled from the basement through convection currents when your home heats up and so if the basement is a source, you want to know exactly how bad it is.
Once you’ve done the visual inspection, once you’ve done ERMI testing looking for mold spores, once you’ve found mold (or not), the next step in the diagnosis is to do what we call the cytokine testing. Those aren’t done in Canadian labs, so we have to send them out. We call them the Shoemaker panel and we measure things like C4a, TGF Beta-1, MMP-9, VEGF, MSH and we do a nasal swab for something called MARCoNS, a coagulase negative staph. Basically, it’s a staph that lives in your nasal passages. It doesn’t produce overt nasal symptoms but can have significant cognitive effects and mitochondrial effects on your symptoms. So, we do those inflammatory markers.
Recent advances have been very controversial regarding the use of urinary mycotoxin testing. In the original workup by Dr. Shoemaker didn’t believe that urea mycotoxin testing had any role to play in the diagnosis of mold illness. He has personally moved on to transcriptomic testing for definitive diagnosis but many other clinicians do urine mycotoxin testing to determine if there are any toxic mycotoxins of mold in the urine. This is used quite extensively by the breakaway group that doesn’t adhere strictly to the Shoemaker protocol. There are two schools, which are the Shoemaker purists and then the group that has broken away. Like any good movement, there are always two camps, we can’t get away from that. Support and challenge exists throughout nature, exists throughout medicine, exists throughout clinical diagnosis and treatment.
So, if you have a symptom profile that was suggested by the questionnaire, if you have a positive VCS test, if you have any signs of mold in your home, if the testing for mold spores in your home is positive, if your urine mycotoxin tests are positive and your Shoemaker labs are very positive, it’s highly likely that mold is playing a role in your illness. You need to find a practitioner who knows how to treat it. The treatment is extensive, requires lots of steps, and has to be followed in a specific sequence otherwise you can overload the detox pathways and get into increased symptom expression and feeling worse, not better.
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.