Fix the Brain, Change the Mind: Root-Cause Psychiatry with Dr. Robert Hedaya

26:44And now you don't have certain skills, and you don't even know because you're just so used to it. You know what I mean? It could be that. It could be toxins. It could be certain infections have a tendency to go to different parts of the brain. Mycoplasma goes to the basal ganglia, for example. I've seen it. And then you treat the mycoplasma and you actually see the QEG change over time. It's slow. If you have an infection that affects your brain function, it won't really normalize for three months. It's gradual, but it will normalize, but it takes a while. Different infections go to different places.

27:18It's strange, but that's what they do. We know pandas, you know, strep infection with some kids, you know, goes into the, yeah, OCD in the basal ganglia and the chordate nucleus, et cetera. So, you know, we're seeing deep into the brain in a way that we could never see. And, you know, there's so much information in these scans. So I can say, oh, this network, you know, you have six networks that are out of balance, let's say. But which one of these is bothering you the most? That's where we're going to start. Yeah. Right. And that will help reduce your stress, enable you to function better, you know, and oh, now I can start to cope with my life.

27:56I can organize things now, you know, that kind of thing. So you're basically seeing the abnormalities, but then you have to trace back what the causes are. Yes. We're always doing the root cause medicine thing. Is it a gut thing? Always doing root cause. Yep. Right. So you kind of can see the pattern in the brain, which gives you a more targeted therapy. So you do the root cause analysis and the treatments. Right. But you also then do other modalities that are kind of insulary, like neurofeedback, hyperbaric oxygen, laser therapy, which is something you've kind of innovated. I'd love you to kind of talk about this hammock moment.

28:30What is this chat about? And like, how did you kind of get all these pieces to come together? It was from God or the universe or whatever you want to call it. So I was actually forced to take a vacation because we had paid for this place somewhere in the Midwest. and they wouldn't give us our money back. So I was like, all right, we got to go. So we took a week off and very sparse, very sparse. It's like nothing to do, right? So just hanging out there and my daughter was with us and we went into a sweat lodge and it was unbelievable. It was great. And then the next day I'm in a hammock for six hours.

29:07Like, and I'm actually at the time retired because I had retired in 2014. You had. Yeah. I missed medicine a lot, but I was retired. And I'm in the hammock for six hours, and I'm reading a book, Doidge, I think, How to Heal the Brain. Or I think that's the name of the book. Anyway, so I'm reading about Russia. In Russia, they're using lasers for the brain. They snake it into the body, up into the brain. And they laser it. Maybe through an engeagram? Yeah, like through the arteries, through the veins. Not the arteries, but the veins, right? Into the brain. And then they're talking about how it works.

29:44And I'm like, oh my God, this could really help the brain. This is amazing because it's giving ATP. It's doing a lot of different things we could talk about, but I was blown away. Then I'm like, well, I don't know. How would I even know where to point this thing anyway? And the next chapter is QEGs. And I'm like, oh my God, this is how I would know. And so I studied QEGs and lasers. laser I should define is just focused light. It can be very low potency or high potency, but it's very target, very focused. So we could control the wavelength, how the frequency of the pulses and a lot of parameters about it.

30:27So I'm, oh, I could learn QEG and then I could probably know looking at symptoms where I need to apply the light to heal the brain. And so I studied for three years and I started to do it in 2017. So you weren't doing QEGs, you just read about them, and then you started learning about how to do it. And I hired a mentor. I studied for three years. What do they use for now in medicine? There's a difference between EEG, electroencephalogram, that neurologists do all the time. For seizures and things like that. Yeah, to see if you have a seizure or something like that. And then there's a quantitative EEG, which is AI.

31:04It takes all this data that you can never analyze yourself. All those squiggly lines that you see. Correct. 19 lines of this? You can't put that all together. So the AI actually puts it together and gives you visual patterns and network analyses and analysis of the electrical patterns and different surface areas, the whole brain, really. And that's the quantitative. It's quantity, EEG, and it's all AI-driven. Wow. And you were telling me that you could basically just send out a helmet. It's not a helmet. It's not a helmet. Or some kind of a box. It's a computer and various things. You have to hook it up to your own brain?

31:47You don't hook it up to your brain. You put the cap on. Put the cap on. I wouldn't want people to think they're hooking up to your brain. Okay, so you just put the cap on. You put this cap on with gel, and we have the tech who shows up on the screen and tells you what to do and makes sure the connections are good, and then you just basically look at the screen for about 15, 20 minutes, estimate, depending how much time we want. And then you close your eyes 15, 20 minutes, take it off, wash your hair, pack it up, send it back to us. That's amazing. Yeah. So really anybody can get this. Anybody can get this.

32:19And then you get the report and then you identify the patterns and then you design a program. But you also have to do the sort of. What we do, that's part of what we do. But then I want to, I got to get clinical data, right? Know what's bothering you. And then I want a neuroquant MRI so I can correlate it. There's a strong. Explain that because you're talking about waves, legs of the brain, and then you're talking about structural changes to a quantitative analysis of a brain or MRI. So the neuroquant is telling us about the structure of the brain, right? Is it big? Is it small? Is it inflamed?

32:53Is it atrophied? Has a trunk? And then the QEG, the quantitative EEG that we do, that we put that cap on you, that tells us about function. We have structure and we have function. Yeah. And then we correlate them and look at your symptoms. And then we can say, okay, this is where we need to focus. Are you the only one doing this? To my knowledge, yeah. No one else using laser? There are people, there's a lot of, they call it photobiomodulation, right? So there are people making these helmets now, right? The red light therapy and different things. Yeah, there's 1064, 810 or whatever. And the helmets that they put on for neurodegenerative disease and that kind of thing.

33:32But the thing is, I think that that is not specific. Like we're very targeted. We're very specific and we're very personalized. That's kind of a nonspecific. So, and I don't know, I think it's definitely debatable whether that penetrates the brain. It's highly unlikely that it penetrates because. The laser? No, the laser penetrates. About 2.6 % of the light gets through. That we know. Some people say 4.2%, about 2.6, let's say. But the LEDs, which are basically these lights that are very weak, you're not going to get much going into the brain. But you may still get some general benefits because, you know, you have all the blood flow and the mitochondria and the cells and everything.

34:13So this is really key. You just said a big word, mitochondria. And I think, you know, there's a lot of work in this field around mitochondrial health and the brain, whether it's Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or autism. Suzanne Goh has been on the podcast, has done tremendous work in understanding mitochondrial dysfunction, autism as a way of both understanding the disease and also treating it. And Chris Palmer at Harvard wrote a book called Brain Energy about the brain energy system and how that's so dysfunctional as a driver. And it's basically an energy deficit in the brain that leads to mental illness.

34:45And by restoring healthy brain energy through ketogenic diets and metabolic health, you can correct a lot of psychiatric problems. So you kind of come at this the same way. And one of the treatments that you use, the laser, actually works by increasing mitochondrial function and ATP. Right. That's one of the main things that it does. So when you basically put the laser pointed to a certain area, the photons that light particles or waves or whatever they are go into the brain and they actually go to the mitochondria or like little batteries, right? And we have hundreds or thousands in every cell.

35:19And they have, you know, four points where they function and the electrons like floating down there like a wire, right? And the mitochondria do so many things. But one of the things they do is produce energy. Without that ATP molecule, we're dead, right? So the photon from the light actually knocks off a nitric oxide molecule, and then the ATP flows through. It's more complicated than that, but the ATP now instantly flows through. Now you have more energy. Now the brain says, oh, now I have energy. I can do some repair work. Fix the potholes, you know, do the work that needs to be done. And then you have the nitric oxide bringing more blood flow.

36:00And then you have changes, Mark, that are amazing, like misfolded proteins and proteins in the brain that don't fold right. And they cause problems. And they're like viruses they spread. And it actually reduces that and reverses alpha-synuclein misfolding. That's a dementia protein. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And tau protein, you know, all these things, beta-amyloid, you know. And so there's the acute effects of the light, the laser, which we're directing to specific places. And then there's effects that occur over time. Basically, you do like the QEG, the brain imaging, the functional medicine assessment and work up for causes.

36:40Right. Then you design a comprehensive plan and then you use various modalities. Laser therapy is one of the key ones. It's kind of new and novel. Right. There's a lot of research on this. A lot of research. A lot of research. Laser in the brain? Yeah. Or just in general. Laser in tissues, laser in the body, laser in the brain. I haven't seen anything about it used, like I've seen the transcranial magnetic stimulation. Yeah, that's different, yeah. Which is also used for depression and mental issues. Right. But this is really different than that, right? I personally think it's better because the TMS, the transcranial magnetic stimulation, is basically like a shock.

37:13You know, it's a magnet that's shifting everything in one direction, then it shifts back to the other direction. So it's a little bit of a shock, the cells and the outcomes, although now they're modifying a little bit, but the outcomes, they're not durable, really. After six months, there's a high relapse rate. And it's a lot of money and expense and time. In a laser, you don't see the relapse rate? It depends on the person. So now if you're treating a young person, well, as an example, this woman, the first patient I ever treated with the laser, she had facial blindness. and I didn't even know she had faith.

37:51I didn't even know what faith, I didn't even know it existed, okay? And I'm treating her because she has a little early dementia and some memory problems and she has a little bit of a temporal lobe seizure. And anyway, I treat her with the laser based on the QEG and where I'm going to treat her because she's having trouble finding words. And she tells me after the first visit, like five minutes after the first visit, She says, oh, my God, I can remember the—I still hear her voice. I can remember the face of the person I worked with this morning. Now, she had built up a whole structure, but she was going to people's homes to do environmental consults.

38:32So she'd take pictures of their faces in the house, everything. Everything was documented because she couldn't count on her memory of her face. She'd come to the door and see someone. She would, like, I never saw you before in my life. And then with the laser, five minutes later, she's, oh my God, I remember the face of the woman I treated this woman. That's pretty amazing. The woman and her husband, and he had this mole on his face. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, what are you talking about? This doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I couldn't figure it out. But what I figured out eventually is that the brain has a lot of cells that are kind of alive.

39:11They have a heartbeat, but they're not doing their job. I say they're in a liminal state, kind of on the border between alive and dead. And if you give them the energy, they wake up. And so her cells woke up. She was cured. That was it. That's amazing. So I published it. It was the first ever cured, acquired prosopagnosia, facial blindness. And how long do you have to apply the laser to this head? It's a matter of how much energy you want to deliver. So we kind of measure the area we're treating, the square, how many centimeters squared. We calculate how much energy we want to deliver. And then I decide on the other parameters, you know, pulse frequency, et cetera.

39:50There's a lot of different parameters. And then we start slow. We always get certain imaging before to make sure there's no reason not to do it. You have to make sure they don't have an aneurysm or that there's no tumor or there's no, you know what I mean. And then we apply it. And in some people, it actually really, boom, they're on the road, they're done. Is it five minutes? Is it an hour? No, no, no. It's maybe, it depends. It could be 10 minutes to 20 to 25 minutes. It's a short treatment. Oh, it's short. And you're just needing one treatment or do you need multiple? For most things, you're going to need multiple treatments.

40:22Like how many? So, for example, for the visual thing, the guy needed three. I just did it on a guy who's 80 with Parkinson's. I did the visual thing and he needed three and that was cured. It was cured. Not the Parkinson's. He was treating the Parkinson's, but this was a different visual trick that was causing trouble. But if you have someone with a chronic condition, then, for example, one guy with Parkinson's we were doing twice a week, and now we're down to twice a month. And you combine that with other stuff like hyperbaric oxygen therapy and neurofeedback, speech therapy. In other words, it's like going to the gym.

41:00The brain gym. You go to the brain gym. Before you go to the gym, if you want to work out your biceps, you have to eat the food, and then you got to work them out, right? This is a real revolution. Are there any other colleagues doing this? No, no. That's why I want to do these educational consults. I want to train people who need this. I have people coming from all over. So people listening and are curious about this, they can ask their doctor to work with you? Yeah. You can go to my website. It's wholepsychiatry.com. And we have an educational consult model that we've been doing for about a year.

41:32And basically, you go to your doctor and you say, because people feel weird asking their doctor, you know. So they go to the doctor and say, you know, you've helped me a lot, but we're kind of stuck here. I'm on too many meds or have these side effects, or I want to see if I can get to the root causes of my problem. And there's this guy, Dr. Hedaya, who's doing this method. Here's his website, and he does these educational consults. So your doctor stays in charge and I, I, you come and visit me and physically in person and we'll spend probably four or five hours together. And, uh, I'll do physical and go over all the records and we'll have the QEG and we'll have the, uh, the imaging for the structure.

42:16Have all that when you come. And then I process all that. I say, okay, here's what I think is going on. The root causes, here's what's going on in your brain. I'll show you and I'll show the doctor. I'll share the screen and they'll say, okay, this is the workup. I want to confirm my hypotheses about your immune system or, you know, this or the other thing, right? So you'll do these tests. And when we get all these tests back, I'll sit down for about typically four to six hours, go through all the data, which probably I won't have to do in the future when your company is in my office. I'll go through all the data and I'll come out with a plan, which I will make a sequential plan for the patient, turn paper, present it to the patient.

42:59They come back to my office for the presentation. The doctor's on Zoom. And then the doctor will consult with me as needed going forward. And the point of this is to help a lot of people around the country and to train the doctors in this kind of methodology. That's my goal. That's my goal. I want to train people this can't stay with me and just to be clear it's all basic clinical the basic science it's all there just go do an AI search on photobiomodulation of the brain you'll see there's hundreds if not thousands Yeah it sort of speaks to an interesting thing which is that there's a lot of advances in medicine and science but they kind of languish outside of medicine because doctors don't adopt them Right It can take decades Decades Decades So similar wise Right I was going to mention Right, right.

43:50If people don't know, this guy, he actually learned in the late 1800s, I think, that hand washing prevented corporal fever. A lot of women were dying. Well, all the midwives were washing their hands. And the doctors weren't. And the doctors weren't, right. But the doctors didn't want to learn. And they were like, when he said, you know, maybe we should wash our hands, guys. They were like, oh, you're a heretic. How could you imply that doctors would cause their patients to become sick and you're banished from medicine? And he died in disgrace. You know what he did? he sent out a letter to 100 hospitals about hand-washing, and they were incensed with him.

44:24Yeah. And they didn't start washing their hands for a while. For 50 years. 50 years. It was tragic. And one of our presidents died because the doctor didn't wash his hands. Really? McKinley was shot in the stomach. And you remember McBurney, the McBurney's point from medical school with the appendix, the appendix point where you push on the stomach? Yes. It was named after the surgeon, McBurney, who got called to see McKinley after he got shot and he stuck his finger in the wound and he got infection and he died from the infection. It wasn't from the gunshot. You know, that's how Theodore Roosevelt became president.

45:00And yeah, it does take a long time. I mean, you know, we've been doing this for 30 plus years, emotional medicine around for 40 years. Now only now we're seeing it in Medicare language on the website after decades, right? It's sad because so many people are suffering. And I think that, you know, the work you're doing to understand the biological mechanisms are really important. And the kind of, there's a lot of ways into repairing the brain. And what the modalities you use are actually different than using a drug because drugs typically interrupt or suppress or block something in the body. These actually enhance the body's own repair systems like hyperbaric oxygen and neurofeedback and laser.

45:40Can you talk about these as sort of therapeutic levers that you use in psychiatry and a little bit more about each one and how they work? Can you talk about the laser? But I think, you know, it's about energy, right? Release and improvement. Yeah. So hyperbaric oxygen, in a general sense, you could think of it as a general tonic for the body, right? Because, you know, you're treating actually the whole body. It's not targeted necessarily to a part of the body, right? And in hyperbaric oxygen, you're doing so many things. You're increasing delivery of nutrients, right? You're increasing delivery of oxygen.

46:13You're actually increasing nerve growth factors, your stem cell growth, right? Capillary perfusion, right? So it's really helpful unless you happen to have Babesia as an infection, then it's maybe not the best idea because they love oxygen. Babesia. Babesia loves oxygen, right? It lives in red blood cells and they love oxygen. So we don't do it if you have Babesia, but we'll do it for lots of causes. And we don't use it in everybody, but we'll use it for people with tremendous... And you have it in your office or you just send it? We have it in our own. We have a couple of chambers in our office.

46:46And we... People have to live there near you to do it. Some people move for a few months or a few weeks, six weeks to three months or even six months to get the treatments. And some people will buy a HBOT and put it in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, put it in their house, for example. And then, you know, with the laser treatment, it has to be done in my office. But as I train people in this, which takes time to train them, then I'm hopeful that people will actually be able to do it with their patients in that city where they are, you know. But right now, I'm the guy who's doing that. And are you seeing results using this sort of extra combination of things in addition to functional medicine that you weren't seeing before?

47:24Am I seeing results in situations? In other words, you've been doing functional medicine psychology for decades, right? So with the advent of these new technologies that you're applying or these old technologies apply to new ways, what are you seeing as the improvement over what you were doing before? First of all, I can reach conditions that I can never reach. So, for example, schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Yeah. What, you know, depends on the resources the patient has, the willingness for treatment, for example. A lot of times these are infection-based. You know, you can actually normalize things.

48:05You can treat this particular area, the supramarginal gyrus, with the light, you know, which is helpful. I'm seeing people with Parkinson's disease now, which I never bothered treating before. Now I can treat it with the neurofeedback, the hyperbaric, and with the targeted laser. And you find, this is fascinating, that Parkinson's, like everything else, is kind of a waste paper basket diagnosis. There's multiple types of Parkinson's. I have a guy who came to me with Parkinson's, and by looking at his QEG and then taking his history, his QEG was the tip-off. It turned out he fell off his bicycle twice in the same place, and you could see it on the QEG.

48:47So all I had to do was laser that, and he's been stable now for six, seven years without any laser, without anything. Thank you.

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50:53Now, and are you seeing the same thing working like psychiatric conditions, like bipolar, things like that? So with bipolar disorder, you have to be careful using the laser. They have to be stabilized before you do it because they can respond with too much activity and you could actually precipitate a mania. So you have to actually make sure they're on a stabilizer. If it's bipolar one, the severe type, you have to have the medicine to stabilize them for sure. Bipolar two, you can stabilize most of the time with lifestyle and, you know, treat the infections and the hormones and all that sleep and, you know, all of those things.

51:27And then there are things like severe depression, treatment resistant depression. I mean, which nothing touches. And then I have a guy who's now 45 who depressed since he's 12 and started treating with laser. And he's been doing great for a couple of years. Hadn't done that well for a long time. Now, the laser has to be recalibrated now, so he's not doing as well. But, you know, that's, you know, there's amazing things that we can do. And neurological things, that's the other thing, you know, for Alzheimer's. So one of the nice things about this is like people will come to me and they're like not ready for the whole million tests and, you know, the four and a half hours and the whole thing.

52:14So I could just say, you know what, I'm just going to jump in with these non-invasive things. I'm going to do my quantitative EG. I'm going to look at the volumes in the brain. I'm going to take your history and, you know, see what's going on. Do some objective testing with a computer. See where your cognitive abilities are, et cetera. and then I could just jump in and treat you don't have to do anything the neurofeedback you watch a movie just watch a movie that's all don't you have to like actively engage with it no you can't control it your brain I've done neurofeedback before and I had to play a video game where I basically had to use my brainwaves right and I had to calm myself when I can get a certain relaxed brainwave then the video game would work right stressed it wouldn't work no this is different This is different.

52:56Your brain, you say, I want to watch this video. Your brain tags it as a reward. And now you're watching the video and we control the settings, right? So let's say the default mode network, we want it to function in this frequency. We want to down-regulate it or up-regulate it, right? So we set the bar and we say, okay, when your brain default mode network goes here, you get to watch the movie. And when it doesn't, the movie gets gray or goes black where the sound goes down. So we start easy. You're getting reward, reward, reward. And then gradually make it a little harder and a little harder.

53:36And it takes about six or seven sessions. And then brain says, okay, I know how to do this. You cannot control it. This is all automatic. Automatic. Your brain is like, I want the reward. I want the movie. It's going to be a good movie. Wow. And you also mentioned in some of your work about a case of a dental infection and schizophrenia. So this is very interesting. There's a woman I've been treating her since late 90s, actually.

54:10And she has severe dental problems, and she's just not going to go for anything. So I put her on. Didn't go to dental? She will not go. To the dentist. She has so much infection in her mouth. And as you know, the infection causes changes in the brain chemistry. Of course. Right? Increases glutamate, excitotoxicity. So she was going in and out of the hospital periodically for decades. And I put her on two antibiotics to at least control the infection, you know? And she hasn't been in the hospital. She's doing great. Better than she's done. And I've known her now for 26 years, something like that.

54:47Doing great. I understand the box. If you look at the genetic studies on psychiatric illness, they're called genome-wide association studies, right? Where they look at millions of people and look what genes show up in psychiatric disorders. You know this. It's like the immune system and it's the hormones. Those are the big drivers of psychiatric. Yeah, inflammation. Yeah. So we're treating the neurotransmitters, right? But, you know, we're kind of missing the boat. Again, not that these meds are not useful. But you got this woman to eventually treat her dental infections? No, she won't go. But she's stable and doing artwork, and she's amazing.

55:34So there are really severe psychiatric problems, whether it's schizophrenia, bipolar, you know, severe treatment-resistant depression. Yeah, you can treat these things. There's only different things. So the neurologist, yes, we treat like 40 different conditions. I mean, you know, as you do, you know, these things all travel together, right? So what do you think the most common things that are now today causing these problems of sort of anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, like what? I hate that question. Well, I mean, there's common things that are common, right? So like, you know, there's so many.

56:07There's always the outlier case, but like, what are the things that really are driving this? And I think. There's food. right there's mental set your mindset right there's hormones there's infection there's sleep there's a social breakdown is a big factor right anti-social media you know uh you know it's really a big problem so that there are problems at many levels now we have long code so i would say if he said to me like look what are four things that you could tell a person to do right to help themselves right i would say diet okay so assimilation really be careful of what you eat right as you say your your fork is your best medicine right right and also be careful what comes into your mind what are you exposing yourself to what are you listening to what's on the social media who are your friends what movies are you watching what's wrong brain pollution right it's all information and it damages you what you know we're we're floating in a cesspool of bad information i don't really try not to pay too much attention to the news and i just opened a you know a newspaper app and i was rob briner like stabbed by his son and the jews killed in sydney and the people at brown i'm like what is going on i just it's so depressing i try not to pay attention yeah you can't pay attention to it it's not it's not good i mean so i think you have to work on this i strongly believe this and i think your previous uh podcast guests uh talked about this um you need to really communicate with god or the universe whatever you think this greater thing is uh and be develop a relationship because the universe works with you.

58:01You work with it, it works with you. You ask for help, you get help. Not always the way you want or when you think you should get it, but the universe has got you back. Yeah, I think I have to be more specific because I was like, I really want to slow down some more time at home, but then I didn't say how. And I got in a bike accident and busted up my feet. Be very careful. I'm like, wait, I can't go anywhere, but it wasn't what I had in mind. Like, be specific. I want to be healthy at home. Right, right. yeah so that so that's very important assimilation the food you take in the information the people that's that's one thing then uh because then you have exercise activity and it doesn't have to be crazy exercise i mean you're a biker i'm a biker right but i've moderated and i wish i had moderated earlier even though i love it uh but exercise some kind of exercise whatever's appropriate for you is really critical.

58:57And I would say relationships are essential. I think community, you know, they say, you know, social media and the community and social media, it's not a community. People don't even know what a community means anymore. I myself recently moved from Maryland. I was at Georgetown, Maryland, and I recently moved about almost four years ago to New Jersey. Oh. And I'm on the beach, right? And I have a whole community because I grew up with this community. I know people. People, I'm walking down the street and this - The Jersey Shore. Jersey Shore, yeah. Yeah, Bruce Springsteen, right? That's where he grew up.

59:41And people say, hey, Doc, I don't even know who he is. Hey, Doc, can I give you a lift? It's like, and I stop and I'm, I'm, I'm doing something with my car. And now the guys, there's the guy who looks homeless. He's near my car. Somebody else stops and says, Hey doc, this guy bother you? I said, no, no, no, he's fine. He's fine. He hangs around for a while. Or I go to synagogue, you know, and I have friends, I have people. I, I didn't realize how lonely I was actually in Maryland. I was pretty, you know, I had friends and I had my practice, my wife, my kids and everything, but I didn't realize that I didn't have a community.

1:00:18you know and so the i think people need to develop community it's important it's definitely one of the best investments you can make yeah i would say community is medicine yeah it really is it really is from a functional medicine perspective there's a lot a lot of things that are really going on now that are driving mental health issues like the microbiome changes mitochondrial injury toxins you know nutritional factors deficiencies i mean it's just so widespread the whole list You know, I've been thinking a lot about the biomarkers of mental health, you know. And in Function Health, you know, the company I co-founded, we do a lot of labs, and we can see a lot of things that relate to mental health that people typically don't pick up on.

1:00:57Whether it's marginal thyroid dysfunction, like you were talking about, or whether it's, you know, B12 deficiency, or whether it's... You know what's a big one? A big one is genetic glucocorticoid resistance. So corticosteroids, which we make, those are stress hormones, right? So there are a set of genes, five genes, NR3C1, FKBP5, CRH receptor 1 and 2, CRH binding. There's going to be a test on that, guys. You know, whatever. It's these genes that basically when you make your stress hormones, when you're under stress, whatever is causing it, the stress hormone goes to the cell and then it goes into the cell and knocks on the door of the nucleus, the center of the cell where your genes are hiding, knocks on the door.

1:01:45Hey, let me in. I got a message for the genes. Nobody answers the door or it takes a lot of knocks. So you have the stress hormone, but it's like insulin resistance. You're not really reading the signal. So now you're more vulnerable to PTSD, to depression, you know, even suicide. Because you can't, the cortisol doesn't hit the receptor properly? Yeah, it doesn't translate to the genes, to tell the genes that you're under stress, so you don't make enough proteins to help you cope with the stress. So it sort of breaks down some of the pathways that are hard to keep your body healthy. Your body can't respond to the stress.

1:02:21How do you, you know, now you have PTSD much more easily, right? One of the things you talked about was you had like 23 treatment-resistant depression patients, and you had 100 % of a recovery rate. Like, when you look at psychiatric meds, like if it's 30 % remission, that's like a fucking, excuse my French, like a miracle. That's right. And you're talking about 100%, that almost seems like, you know, too good to be true. So tell us about that. With my second book, which was the Antidepressant Survival Guide or Program, which was really functional medicine. I had a four-page spread in the Washington Post Health magazine, and we had thousands of phone calls.

1:03:01I mean, thousands. You couldn't put the phone down without someone calling. So I couldn't really, obviously, treat everyone. So we screened people looking for people with treatment-resistant depression. Yeah. And basically people who had the resources, meaning the support, to do what I was going to ask them to do, functional medicine. and I'm treating people. And I was doing a lot of psychopharm. You know, I hadn't dropped that too much. I was still doing a lot of psychopharm. So three years into this, after the book, I'm like, wait a second. Everyone's getting better. The diabetes is going away.

1:03:42The osteoporosis is going away. The MS lesion is going away. Like, maybe I'm lying to myself. Maybe it's selective attention to the positive. Maybe I'm forgetting the failures. So I hired a statistician. And, you know, we're collecting data on everybody. And I said, you've got to go over the data and tell me, you know, here are all the patients. I've got the log. And he came back to me and says, no, you're not lying to yourself. Everyone, the mean depression score at start, it was in the severe range, the low severe range. They all were better by 10 months. And you can see when doing just those combination of things and functional medicine.

1:04:23Yeah, just doing the functional medicine. By four months when they're implementing the program, three months, four months, they sought to get better and they steadily improved. And their overall health, all the other things are getting better too. Right. Well, that's the thing. You treat one thing, you treat everything, right? Right. That's the thing. It's like we have such a siloed form of medicine where each specialty focuses on their particular organ or their particular body part and their disease categories. But there's so much cross among all these diseases. Like they're all inflammatory, most of these chronic illnesses.

1:04:51Right. And mitochondrial. It's, we're really in a revolution in medicine and revolution in psychiatry. You know, I can't believe you're still going at it this hard. I, you know, I can't stop. I love it. Yeah. It's amazing. And there's no end to what we can learn, right? No. And we were just like at the beginning, we were the OG kind of, we thought we like, I remember when I took that, I was like, oh, this is an established field. And I'm like, we were kind of the few guys who kind of started to poke our nose around. Yeah. and we've been doing this for so long and the reason we keep doing it is because it works like you just see miracles I always say every day I get to be witness to miracles things that I never thought would possible to cure or treat in medical school and things that people suffer from that they don't need to and that we have answers for they're just not getting them and then there's prevention right you know you have a problem in your family history there's vulnerability you know correct your diet exercise you talk get rid of the toxic influences in your life you know and uh prevent i think about prevention uh is treatment in other words we kind of define treatment and prevention sort of separately but i think if you do the same things you would do for prevention you're also going to treat the problem like if you eat healthy you exercise you sleep well you get yeah your diabetes is going to go away right right you know right your autoimmune disease can go away if you do all the right things if you do the things to get healthy right then automatically i always say if when you when you create health disease goes away as a side effect and it's think of it this way also if you have say you're you're uh working with someone in functional medicine and you know you're correcting your diet well guess what your kids are going to see yeah and you're going to be helping generations right right so it is it's uh i think really we are it's it's a revolutionary time.

1:06:38People are taking control of their health more now. They see the system is broken. It's not totally broken. There's a lot of good stuff going on, but it's very limited with this chronic disease model. And what are you seeing among your colleagues in psychiatry? Are they friendly to these ideas? Are they resistant? Are they like, you're a quack for get out of my space? I think, you know, I get this thing from the New Jersey board, right? And there are no ideas in medicine. and let's talk about B vitamins. And I'm like, all right, well, that's a start, you know? But like, I might at this rate, at this rate, we're looking at 100 years.

1:07:19I'm like, I want it, you know. You want it now. I want it now. And the other thing is not everyone has the bandwidth, Mark. You have the bandwidth. I have the bandwidth. You have the curiosity. You know, you want to get to the truth of it. You get to the root of it, and you're just going to follow the science. You're going to follow what the truth is. You're not wedded to a model. I'm not wedded to functional medicine. If something else comes out that's better, great. Wedded to the truth. Yes, exactly. But a lot of people, they're too algorithmic in their thing. They're too rigid. They're afraid.

1:07:50They don't have the bandwidth. They can't handle the anxiety of not knowing, right? But we live in uncertainty, you know? That's life. Mom, thank you for all you've done for the last decades to advance this field. You were kind of the OG functional medicine psychiatrist when there wasn't any. And it was Abraham Hoffer who was, we both got to know, who was a sort of pioneer, really, of functional medicine. You know, he told me with my second book, I'm very, I was very honored. He told me, he said, I had lunch with him at a functional medicine conference, actually. Yes, I think I might have been there.

1:08:19Yeah, I think you were there. And he said to me, he says, Bob, you wrote the book I wanted to write. Yeah. He saw this. well he just for those listening to kind of close up he was you know a psychiatrist in canada back in the 50s and was a kind of a colleague of linus pauling and was sort of experimenting with schizophrenia by giving them high doses of certain vitamins and believe that there were certain pathways that were stuck that he could unlock and that led to the development of sort of this field and in in general functional medicine in fact linus pauling went on to write in 1969 a key paper in science magazine called orthomolecular psychiatry which was sort of in a sense the original paper describing how we use nutrition to optimize your biochemistry to change your brain and your mood and your cognitive function it was sort of so far ahead of its time that was like 1969 but uh i remember abram hoffer he was quite a guy yeah uh and i'm so glad i got to meet him and i actually got to meet linus pauling too back in the day yeah he was uh he was um yeah he won the Nobel Prize for for folding of proteins but also for for the Peace Prize for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in the 60s yeah so he prevented the above ground testing of nuclear weapons and nah he was part of the whole movement that I was a part of which was in medical school called the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and and I got to kind of hear him speak it was pretty inspiring wow wow what a journey huh Yeah.

1:09:55Amazing. What a journey. Yeah. So thanks Bob for being on this journey with me. It's been great. And, uh, anybody wants to know more about your work, find out more, where can they find you? Oh, they can go to like, it's like whole foods, you know, only it's whole psychiatry. Okay. Uh, and, and we have, there's a lot of information on there. The videos is all kinds of information. And then there's a contact form. And, uh, if you want to educational consult, you know, look for a functional medicine doc in your area. And, uh, and, uh, you know, contact us and we'll help you find someone. If you can't find somebody, we have a network that we're building and, uh, and then we'll meet, typically we'll meet on zoom for 15, 30 minutes, make sure this is right for you.

1:10:39Uh, that's, uh, the right fit. And then I think I can be helpful. And then we go from there. Well, I know I'm going to get my QEEG. I want to see what's going on in my brain. That's what's happening. I, you know, I do it, I do it regularly. and I don't know if it's, because I do the laser on myself, by the way, and I don't know if it's that or 25 years of mountain biking, but my doctor told me my brain looks like a 55-year-old. Amazing. Which is, thank God. I can only hope. I can only hope. Thanks for being here and thanks for coming all the way, Austin. It was a pleasure seeing you, Mark. It's been too long.

1:11:12If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate review and subscribe to the dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts And don't forget to check out my youtube channel at dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the dr. Hyman show This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the ultra wellness center My work at Cleveland Clinic and function health where I am chief medical officer This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic the ultra wellness center