Inflammatory Bowel Disease: An Integrative Approach

hello everyone welcome back to our second episode in the webinar series about the gut today we are talking all about inflammatory conditions so for those of you that are new to the webinar we are going to be diving into a lot of really good quality information then obviously really being able to give you some tools to take those next steps to feel better but we will be doing the live Q&A at the end so definitely make sure that if you have questions as we go feel free to put them into the chat box and if you also want to add to the chat box just to let me know that you can hear me we actually have an event going on here at our office so hopefully there will not be any background noise but if you want to just give me a shout let me know if you can hear me okay so that I don't have any technical difficulties all right let's see let's see all right it looks like people can hear me which is great okay so again welcome to the webinar we are going to be talking about pretty much all things gut related but we're going to definitely be talking about inflammatory conditions and when it comes to inflammatory conditions we are really piggybacking off of last week's episode because last last week's episode was really about autoimmunity and when you're dealing with an autoimmune reaction and you're dealing with an I'm sorry an immune reaction in general that is actually what induces an inflammatory reaction so it's very synonymous when you're dealing with inflammation and autoimmunity but the difference is is that you can have an inflammatory condition without having autoimmunity so the inflammation can stem from different different reasons but overall the conditions can look very similar from a symptomatic standpoint so as we dive in I'm gonna pull up my powerpoint just so I don't lose track because I have a tendency to go off on tangents but I just want to give you the rundown of what we're gonna really be talking about today so number first and foremost is to really have you understand that you don't know what you don't know and that's really when it comes down to doing better testing because the testing is actually going to reveal the root cause which is actually going to allow you to start getting better because now you actually have the clarity that you need in addition to that when it comes to strategy and it comes to the healing process it's not about what you do it's actually about how you do it and this is something that I find is usually very eye-opening to people and I'm going to talk more about it but it's really just about how you use diet and supplements and all of these different modalities together that is customized for your body and what your body needs in addition to that we want to really break some of these false beliefs about your gut issues some of them is just thinking that all of your testing that you've done is a hundred percent reliable and also this concept that genetics are going to dictate if we're gonna get sick or not and also the fact that there's really no cure for things like autoimmune gut condition celiac etc so we're gonna be touching on all of these different things and again as questions come up feel free to put those into the chat box because I am going to be reviewing the questions at the end and then of course when it comes down to getting clarity understanding some of the the principles and understanding why your gut might be compromised in the first place usually the next question is is well how do I get better what do I need to do and we're definitely going to be covering that as well so just a little bit about I know this is a series and some of you might be tuning in for the second time so I will keep it brief but I just kind of want to have people understand a little bit about myself as well as the practice and one of the really big things about our practice is we really want against the grain with not always necessarily agreeing with how medicine was being done how integrative medicine was being done how alternative medicine was being done primarily because we found that there wasn't necessarily a lot looking at the whole person and we weren't necessarily looking beyond just these segregated systems we kind of assumed that the body all the systems of the body are working independently we assumed that the gut is working independent of the brain and that the brain is working independently in the lungs and when it really comes down to how the body works it is extremely extremely integrated and for myself kind of piggybacking off of this principle it really comes down to the reason why if I myself as an integrated physician and I also have this list of all of these conditions that I work with is not because you know I am this master expert of every single condition it's more so that I've seen success with these conditions because the type of testing and the way that I look at the body allows me to truly understand the root cause but more importantly than that it allows me to understand what is the person's foundational issue and what I mean by that is you may have a foundational problem that is creating a lot of different effects so as an example if you're detoxification pathways do not work because you've been exposed to things knowingly or unknowingly through your life you might have irritable bowel syndrome you might have brain fog you might have chronic fatigue you might have pot syndrome and be fainting and can't stand up but at the end of the day I could treat all of those things independently or I can fix your foundational problem and see a lot of those symptoms go away because I've actually fixed the the reason for those effects so when it comes to being an integrative physician it's looking at the big picture looking at the whole person and obviously having the type of tools and the testing that allow for the maximum specificity because that's the most important is being extremely specific and knowing that every single person is completely completely different so in addition to treating clients and and working in clinical practice I am a speaker hence why I love doing webinars but mainly because I know that to evolve healthcare it really starts with the physicians and it starts with the physicians thinking differently and that is one of my biggest passions is getting out there to educate other physicians on how to be integrative how to think outside of the box and how to dig deeper with their patients because when we're dealing with health things are getting more and more complicated they're not getting easier and I think a lot of you are on this webinar for that reason you know most of the time the people that you know we work with or are on the webinars this isn't your first rodeo your you've been to other functional physicians you've been to other types of Integrative facilities and you've kept hitting plateaus or not necessarily getting answers and we're really here to bridge that gap to look at you differently so a little bit about myself and how I got into this in the first place it's not because I was actually super sick I wasn't super sick and had you know my run-of-the-mill doctors that couldn't help me and then I ended up working with an integrative physician that did help me I was actually the quite opposite I ended up I ended up thinking that I was really really healthy to the capacity that you know I knew at that time and when I actually did my testing for the first time it came back that I had a lot of issues I actually had a lot of toxicity issues and I had a lot of infections gastrointestinal ewwww and part of that contribution was I was a pescetarian for ten years I actually only eat fish at the time unfortunately I did not know that all fish was not created equal and all sushi is not created equal so with that being said I was getting exposed to a lot of mercury I was getting exposed to a lot of different other types of chemicals that are in the oceans like parabens and PCBs and then on top of that I was actually getting exposed to a lot of bacteria and parasites because of eating fish especially that was raw so with that being said the biggest point of me telling you this is that you don't know what you don't know and when it comes down to really understanding why you may have that fatigue occasionally or why you might be dealing with the occasional stomachache when you eat the wrong thing or you eat out or you know you only have brain thoughts sometimes usually this is because you have underlying things that haven't been uncovered through your run-of-the-mill blood work so when you do more comprehensive testing you get clarity on a lot of the things that you just settled for being your normal and I think that that's really important for you to take away is that most of the things that we deal with on a big day to day basis we have now classified them as being our normal the fees the fatigue the brain fog the not sleeping well the occasional you know gas bloating we have just classified that as normal and unfortunately most of our friends and family that we talked to are also dealing with the same things which normalizes it even further so I'm here to tell you that it's not normal and you can do something about it get the clarity and also be able to not be in fear of your health future because I think that's a lot of us right now is we're scared of getting cancer dementia Alzheimer's and it's about you know being proactive getting the right testing and you don't have to fear that so I know that it is around you know 7:15 there is a lot of things going on in our house there are kids that want to eat there are dogs probably running around you know we're preparing for the next day so I just want to give you guys the opportunity to shut down your email slide the cell phone away tell your kids to be quiet just because we're going to be covering some really amazing topics and I'm really the reason why I do these webinars is because I have these amazing aha moments every day in my practice and I literally see people's jaws drop when I'm able to create clarity on what's going on with them and I'm going to be sharing a lot of those mind-blowing moments and it allows you to really just be present and take this information and utilize it and understand that you know there is a reason for why you feel the way you do and there is something that you can actually do about it so first and foremost I just want you to know that if you have tried to get better you have tried to seek out help you have tried to change your diet you have tried to take supplements you have tried to take medications and you have not gotten better it is not your fault there is a lot of information out there nowadays especially with the internet and what I call Google University and WebMD so when it comes to really trying to understand you know what is best for you what should you be eating what should you not be eating should you be keto should you be paleo should you be a vegan it is very very difficult for you to know what is right for you without having testing and also just to navigate this massive sea of information and everybody claims to be the expert everybody claims to you know have the best remedy for the inflammatory condition and at the end of the day no two people are the same no two people need the same protocol no two people need the same diet everybody is extremely extremely different and if you have hit those plateaus it's because you potentially have not had the right testing and second to that you maybe have had great testing but you haven't had the right strategy when it comes to the healing process I'm gonna explain that a little bit further well as we move along but it's not about what you do is about how you do it okay so for those of you here this is probably one of the most important slides of the entire presentation and the reason being is because this sets the foundation for really understanding some of the limitations of why we're not getting answers and some of the limitations of why not every doctor is able to give you answers number one but number two get you better and there's just foundational things that I know that I was taught in school let alone many other physicians it doesn't matter if you're a chiropractor if you're in MD if you're a natural path so one of the biggest things that I personally feel is a detriment to health care is the fact that we are always seeking out the specialists and we're always seeking out the experts we want to know that the person that we're going to work with has clinical experience with our condition which I totally get that but when it comes to working with the specialists we are working with a specialist that is only looking at an isolated system and this kind of brings me to the second point is when we are looking at the gut and we're also dealing with maybe something going on with our mood maybe we feel depressed maybe we're bipolar maybe we have anxiety and we're working with a gastroenterologist and then separately we're working with a psychiatrist or a psychologist those experts or those specialists are not communicating with each other and basic physiology is that 90 to 95 percent of your serotonin which is your fergan hormone is actually made in your gut so if we think that our brain health and our mood is completely separate from never going to get our mood stable we're never going to be able to feel good we're not going to be able to get rid of that anxiety because there's a foundational problem and it goes by first up as well if you have a massive brain problem one of the things that that does is it creates a lot of constipation because if your brain is not signalling to your gut via your vagus nerve then you're gonna have a lot of slow motility you can have something called gastroparesis which is slow motility or you can have cost patient which those pretty much go hand in hand with each other so we need to start thinking bigger and we need to understand that all of these systems are intertwined and they interact with each other but we need to do testing that actually figures out which one is the biggest problem which one is the foundational issue so one of the common things that I hear often in this is why doesn't everybody do what you do why doesn't everybody use this type of technology why doesn't everybody set up treatment plans like this and one of the things that is is something that took me a long time to figure out and then when I kind of had this aha moment I was like wow that really makes a lot of sense but it's the emphasis on chemistry and medicine so what I mean by that is some of the most common tasks that we get routinely is blood work and then some of the other more common tasks are like urine analysis if you go to an integrative functional doctor you might be doing stool samples you may be doing saliva tests but all of these tests are chemistry based so if you do blood work and your chemistry is off then we are going to manipulate that by using chemistry altering drugs so you have to understand that the way that we do testing routinely is to look at chemistry because if chemistry is compromised then we default on to pharmacology which is medication so we're not necessarily looking beyond that we're not looking at what's the special diet what is the special supplementation what does this person need to detox is this emotional is this energetic like does this person need acupuncture we're not looking beyond that because we're looking at the person strictly from a chemistry standpoint so because of the limitation and testing this is what creates a huge hurdle when we want to figure out what is the root cause because if the root cause is that all of your symptoms set in after you lost your job or you lost your loved one yeah you probably had biochemical things going on maybe you had some infections maybe you had some toxicity but that emotional stress was the straw that broke the camel's back and that set everything into motion so if we want to look at that person superlinear and say oh we just need to you know treat the the infection or treat the toxicity and we're going to completely ignore the emotional piece you are going to hit a plateau so in addition to that when we come when we get into the treatment option so we're talking about you know this concept of if the chemistry is broken we're going to use chemistry to fix it aka drugs so when it comes to most of our avenues of treatment I feel like we are always focused on what is the one pill cure and this is partly because how I program think about it I watch TV and I cringed out every commercial is a is a pharmaceutical commercial and it's pretty much telling us to tell our doctor what we need and you know we're almost like ripping the knowledge and the clinical experience of these doctors away by these commercials you know empowering us to tell a doctor what we need but at the same time this concept of one pill is just gonna fix everything that's not how it works I wish that's how it works that would make my job so much easier but we're talking about complex people we're talking about complex emotional systems we're talking about complex energetic systems and when I say energy some of you may be like I don't know what that means that's bogus that's whoo whoo but like when you meet someone and you're like boom not into the don't want to hang out with them again that's an energy transfer so we're constantly exchanging energy with each other on a day-to-day basis we're constantly dealing with stress we're constantly having you know disagreements arguments we are feeling judged on social media so if we think that we're gonna pure all of those things by one pill it's not gonna happen and we need to start thinking bigger so secondary to that is one of the biggest things that I find is happening in medicine as well as functional integrative medicine is we want to find the bad stuff and we want to kill it oh you have a sore throat we're gonna take antibiotics oh you have a sinus infection we're gonna take antibiotics oh you have gut problems we're gonna put you on a bunch of herbs to kill stuff and I know that I did this in the beginning of my clinical practice and I was kind of assuming that that was priority and that was the most important and one of my mentors dr. Zach Busch he said something that comes opened my eyes up to the fact that I was doing it all wrong and what he said is bacteria fungus mold parasites all these organisms have been around for thousands probably millions of years we just don't know because we haven't been around that long he's like so if you think you're gonna kill him and win you're wrong and I was like wow that is so true so we got me thinking about the body differently and it started to get me thinking about well what are the systems that aren't working anymore that are not allowing us to be protected from these microbes and as I go through some of the case studies tonight you're gonna see what I need by that so I want to kind of just break down the gut and the reason I have this visual is because most people have no idea that the gut is very large and it's very complex but technically your mouth is part of your digestive system so if you're having an inflammatory bowel condition irritable bowel condition you might have a lot of dental issues and you might have a boatload of bacteria in your gums and you might have cavities and you might have that and that might be your foundational problem you might have problems in your stomach stomach is usually what causes indigestion and GERD you may have problems in your liver or your gallbladder your liver in your gallbladder or technically filtration systems they detox us so if they get overloaded with a bunch of chemicals that we've been exposed to over a lifetime that can impact your digestive system and one of the biggest things that does is cause constipation and then in addition to that we have our pancreas so your pancreas is what regulates your blood sugar but it's also what gives you all of your enzymes to break down your sugars and your carbs and your fats etc so when we're talking gut we're not just talking about the intestines we are talking about a super super intricate system that every aspect has to be evaluated some of my gut patients are dental patients they literally have massive amounts of dental problems and that is the cause to their gastro personal issues so again you have to be looked at as a whole this is not looking at you superlinear and again you go to a gastro a gastro isn't versed in dental and a dentist is not versed and gut unless you're going to maybe a holistic dentist so you have to have somebody kind of overseeing and looking at the broad scheme of things and looking at the big picture so I mentioned before that every day in practice I usually see at least one judge father and and one of the reasons for that is because we dig so deep when you come in and we ask a lot of questions and some people are looking at me completely baffled as I ask questions but you know these are just a couple of really really interesting factors so one of the things that I asked about especially when you come in to me when you have gastro issues is I asked about do you feel worse around a full moon most people don't always know because they're not tracking it but usually they kind of relate to that saying oh all the crazies are out it must be a full moon or everyone's driving crazy it must be a full moon so there is validity behind that stance and the validity is is that parasites parasites by the way are organisms that you can get exposed to through contaminated meat and raw fish you can get another places so I'll keep it simple but parasites have been known and proven to hijack our behaviors so under a full moon parasites are the most active so when you see people acting really off-the-wall including your children or spouse that could be because they have parasite infections and one in four people have parasite infections so when you read up on it and they say Oh parasites are not a real thing you have to go to Mexico to get them that's not true at all in addition a lifetime of constipation and gut issues so when you are talking about constipation and you have done all of these different gut protocols you've done alternative you've done colonics you medication you've done enemas you've done all of it and nothing has worked it's because it's your brain and it goes back to the brain communicates to your gut through your nerve called your vagus nerve so improperly and that could be because of a variety of reasons that can be the cause and the culprit behind your constipation so again if you've hit a million plateaus and you have not gotten better maybe it's not a gut problem maybe it's a brain problem so diabetes and gut issues so when we are talking about the gut I mentioned earlier that the pancreas is technically part of the gastrointestinal system so when you look at anatomy your stomach I'm gonna move my camera is on your left ribcage area and right below your sternum where a lot of people have pain and call it heartburn that is where your pancreas is but your pancreas is embedded in your stomach because your stomach is shaped like this and your pancreas comes in like this so if you have had indigestion heartburn GERD reflux burping and you've had discomfort in that area maybe you've had an ulcer maybe it's better maybe it comes it goes but if you had a foundational problem that caused those symptoms like bacteria or another type of infection that can eventually work its way into your pancreas and then all of a sudden you get blood work done and you're told you're a pre-diabetic or you're a diabetic and you're like I don't even eat that much sugar this doesn't make any sense the pancreas can dysfunction because of infections that get that start to affect the pancreas from the stomach this is very very very common the most common infection that I see in the pancreas - one of them is e.coli they're very there are many types of e.coli by the way they're not always the ones that you see in the news that kill people secondary to that is Giardia Giardia is a parasite infection that can you can easily get exposed to through cats and dogs so in addition respiratory issues and the diaphragm so we had a patient that we worked with that he had he came in for respiratory issues he was pretty much like I cannot breathe he had a constant nasal post nasal drip he was coughing things up like to the point that he had he had to sleep sitting up because the respiratory system was so stressed and he was constantly coughing coughing coughing so part of his issue that I kept finding in his his findings was that his gut was extremely extremely stressed and he was like doc it's not my gut it's my it's my respiratory system and I said yes your respiratory system is involved but the culprit behind it was that the gut was so inflamed it was pushing up on his diaphragm which pretty much separates the lungs from the gut and pushing up on the diaphragm and that was causing massive spasm in his lungs so yes he had respiratory involvement but the root cause was the gut affecting the diaphragm so again we have to look at the bigger picture we have to understand you know is there a foundational cause to this respiratory issue so the big thing about these autoimmune gut conditions and these inflammatory gut conditions so I personally think that this is an easy concept but unfortunately most of us have been told that we have no idea why autoimmune conditions exist we have no idea how they develop and there is nothing you can do about fixing it so when you think about the purpose or the the mechanism of the immune system the immune system is in charge of attacking bad stuff it is in charge of getting rid of infections it is in charge of getting rid of toxins or anything foreign that comes into the body but one of the biggest things is to protect us against infections and that could be everything from bacteria to parasites the fungus to mold any anything in that category or all of those categories so if your immune systems job is to get rid of bad stuff wouldn't it makes sense that if you had an infection or a toxin in a specific tissue like the stomach or like the small intestine or large intestine that if the immune system was doing its job and it was coming to the scene to fight it then you could potentially have damage and an inflammatory response in that tissue so like one easy one to explain because the gut is so complex but the autoimmune thyroid conditions like Hashimoto's so when they say oh you're your immune system is just attacking your thyroid so first of all you've your tonsils are right here your thyroid is right here and you have tons of lymph nodes so if you this is just a basic example because there's a lot more culprits behind this but if you had a lot of strep as a kid first of all just because you're not sick and you don't have swollen tonsils it doesn't mean the strap is gone so if you still have strep hanging out in those tonsils and then it gets into these lymph nodes and your immune system is coming to the scene to try to clean everything up and make it better then it's almost like your thyroid is in a bad neighborhood I took that from one of my patients by the way um but it should feel like it just it was able to tie it together for people that this is a new concept too because of all of the things happening around the thyroid the immune system is coming to the scene and an immune system attack is an inflammatory response just you understand so inflammation and an immune system reaction is the same thing so with that being said you are going to start have start having an autoimmune attack on the thyroid primarily just because the immune system is coming to the scene to take care of the strep in the surrounding area this happens all the time with the gut and this is because we can expose to bacteria especially bacteria but all different types of organisms every time we eat produce think about it it's grown outside with bugs on it in the dirt like there is bacteria on our food so to think that we are not getting exposed to these things we are but if we get exposed to bacterias and maybe we really stress or maybe you know we're overworked we're not sleeping our immune system is struggling then we're going to get exposed to that organism and it's gonna stay it's gonna hang out so it's not that you know we're constantly acquiring these microbes it's more so that if our immune defenses are down we can get exposed to something and it can stay within the body and start to cause stress so at the end of the day I'm here to tell you that you don't know what you don't know if you don't have the right testing you're not gonna know if you have an infection in your gut you're not gonna know if you have an autoimmune condition you're not gonna know if you have an inflammatory bowel condition you're not gonna know any of these things you're just going to start to adapt your lifestyle because you think it's your new norm so I want to use a really simple example um so many of us are dealing with indigestion and heartburn and a lot of my patients that come in with gut conditions they almost like a indigestion yeah I've had that my whole life because it's it's become so normal to them and we have so many over-the-counter antacids and medications that we can use to palliate the symptoms so we've kind of just like over or just gonna ignore the fact that we have indigestion or heartburn and do me wrong some people have it bad enough I had a patient actually told me that she bought this $200 pillow to prop her up so that she didn't choke in the middle of the night because of how bad her heartburn was so interesting enough when we think of heartburn we take something like an antacid tums of Rolaids etc and it makes us feel better so we assume that we have an overproduction of acid that our stomach for some reason is producing too much acid and that is the culprit but I will tell you that 95% of the people that have indigestion or heartburn actually have a lack of stomach acid so you might be thinking that doesn't make any sense so what happens is if you have a lack of stomach acid by the way if you have a bacterial infection in your stomach that will compromise your stomach acet and if you chew gum it will compromise your stomach acid and if you drink alkaline water which I know a lot of people think is super healthy and it is but if you're constantly consuming out line water it could start to compromise your stomach acidity so chewing gum bacterial alkaline water can be all culprits - why your stomach acid is now becoming lower so what happens is now you eat food and it goes into the stomach but there's not enough acid to break it down so it sits and it starts to almost decompose not to be gross it's just what happens and as it's decomposing it is creating rancid acids which are bad acids and these are the acids that make us feel sick make us have reflux make us have Harvard make us have indigestion so then you grab for your antacid your tongues or your roll aids and you feel better because it's buffering deep rancid acids so if you think about it now you're creating this you know cycle you already have low stomach acid you're taking in antacid which is lowering it even further so then it just gets to the point that you're taking more antacids or you eventually get on a prescription of nexium or prilosec or prevacid so just understanding this principle can help you resolve something that you potentially are dealing with every single time you eat and for those of you do that it gets bad enough that you're sleeping musician to deal with it that's no way to live and in my world of integrative medicine this is an easy easy fix it's just about knowing what is the root cause so stop accepting your new normal and blaming it on the aging process because I can't tell you how many people they come to me they're in their 30s and they're just like oh well you know I've indigestion but it's because I'm getting older oh yeah you know my stomach hurts when I eat out but that's cuz I'm getting older and we kind of just think that our health is going to decline with aging and it's not necessarily how it works and I'm gonna explain that a little bit more so in detail but we need to stop except all of these symptoms as are normal and we also need to stop playing the comparison game just because all of your friends also feel like crap doesn't mean that that's what it is it's just there's a lot of things working against us in our current food environment and also just in our current lifestyles you know we're high-stress we work a lot especially if you're from New Jersey New York you know we're dealing with tons of social pressures with social media so you know there's a lot of things that are working against the body and we need to have better tools to navigate them so some of the myths about the gut first of all gut conditions are genetic you're testing that you've had already is always accurate not true and gut issues an autoimmunity or irreversible so I'm gonna break these down more in detail and again if you have questions throw them into the chat box because I am gonna go through that at the end so number one when we were talking about genetics as a whole so we are doing a lot of genetic testing right now and I just wanna let you know that for those of you that think like genetics is the way of the future the reason why we're doing so much genetic testing right now is because they are trying to create vaccines for genes so there is a reason there is an agenda and in my opinion I think that when we do these gene tests especially for cancers we are just scaring the crap out of people and when you look at epigenetics which is a proven science it is not my opinion our genes will express differently based off of our lifestyle factors so that means you could have the gene for celiac but if you're pretty healthy you're low stress you eat pretty clean chances are you're never getting celiac and that goes for cancers and that goes for every other condition that they say that you are doomed based off of your genetics and don't be wrong when you're talking genetics that does help you to understand the systems that need more care so if you have the genetic predisposition to celiac take better care of your gut don't eat like crap don't drink a on a caffeine a ton of alcohol and eat the guns every day because if you do you're gonna get celiac but if you're pretty conscious and you try to make good decisions you're not gonna get celiac so it's just really really important to kind of understand that but more importantly when we're talking about genetic testing and I'm using celiac as an example here but this applies to a lot so the sealy out of gene is actually in the HLA family which is the human leukocyte antigen so human leukocyte antigen actually is associated with the immune system so specifically at the bottom the HLA complex helps the immune system distinguish the body's own proteins from proteins made by foreign invaders like viruses and bacteria so this goes back to this concept that I just said when we think about autoimmunity and we think about the fact that the immune system our immune system just turned on us one day it just was like now I'm gonna start attacking your gut there's a reason it is attacking an area and it is attacking an area because there is a foreign invader such as a virus or a bacteria and that is the foundation of the HLA gene family so when you're talking about celiac and you're talking about the development of celiac there is going to be a root reason yeah maybe there's the predisposition but if you have a boatload of infections in your gut you're going to then have that attack on the area which is gonna start to damage the gut and the villi and cause a massive inflammatory reaction so in the world of glue in there is celiac and then there is non-celiac gluten sensitivity just to be clear so I had a patient that I was working with he had gastrointestinal issues I think he honestly had them for most of his life but they were really bad within the five past five years and they got extremely bad within the past few months right before he came in it was to the point that it was taking him about four hours to get out of the door in the morning because he was just kind of having tons of bowel movements back to back to back so I did all of his testing one of the tests that I did is called the bio resident scan which I am going to show you and there was the bio residents just to clarify it's a very unique technology it is a Russian technology that analyzes down to the DNA level and it can pick up on pathology like celiac it could pick up on allergens like gluten allergies it could pick up on drug allergies and it can also pick up on infections so one of the things that came up for every aspect as he's got everything from his pancreas to his liver to his gallbladder his intestines was a drug reaction of a drug called as IDO Simon I'm an acetal Simon I and for those of you that don't know is a tuberculosis drug it's a really really really strong antibiotic it came up so many times in this test that I was almost like I need to ask him if he ever had tuberculosis at this point there was no conversation about respiratory problems tuberculosis or anything of the sort so when he came in for his appointment to review his results I was like okay this might sound like an odd question but I need to know did you ever you ever diagnosed with tuberculosis and he's like no absolutely not and I was like okay I always have to ask things in many ways so I said okay did you ever have a skin test that bubbled up and it didn't go away for a few days and the bubble stayed there and he looks at me he goes hold on and he texts his mom he's in his 50s by the way so his mom texts back and she goes I can't believe you remember that she was like when you were you know seven or eight years old we had you at camp and you actually tested positive for tuberculosis so we had to take you out camp and getting treatment and he's looking at me mouth dropped hence the things that I I see on a day to day basis but it was crazy because this drug reaction affected his body so much when he was young that it was still causing problems and an inflammatory reaction in his 50s so again he probably had gut issues his whole life but they were his normal and that it just got so bad because of other stressors work he was a finance working in the city there was these other factors that were like the straw that broke the camel's back and he was like practically non-functional so it's very very interesting again you you better testing you can uncover these things that you would never in a million years they have to do with anything so number two your testing is always accurate there are limitations on every test known to man and this is why when we do our testing we collaborate a variety of different tests together because you cannot rely on one test you can't just go get an endoscope and think oh I don't have celiac or I do have celiac you can't just get a colonoscopy and think oh that's you know everything's clear you can't just do you know a blood test and think that's going to give you all of your information there are limitations on all different tasks which I'm going to elaborate further on now so number one when it comes to inflammation of the gut when you're looking for inflammation of the gut surely through blood work you're not always going to get the right information because by the time your inflammatory markers get really high in the blood even if you're running a Crow's panel that means your condition is very advanced but this is actually a stool analysis so there is a stool analysis by doctors data that can run all of these different markers if you see the middle category it is called inflammation so everything from lactoferrin calprotectin lysozyme white blood cells mucosa or mucus I'm sorry these are all different markers that are going to give you information about inflammation early on so you're able to get an understanding of do I truly have Crohn's ulcerative colitis irritable bowel inflammatory bowel and what can I start doing about it now before it becomes a bigger problem so my next slide is a little disturbing but I really felt compelled to put it in here and the reason I did that is because it was very eye-opening to me we have a dog we've two dogs they're vicious to the best dogs ever but it was about two years ago that our older dog developed an autoimmune skin condition called pemphigoid is extremely extremely extremely rare it came from toxins that he will the trigger was toxins that he was exposed to it was a virus and toxins he was exposed to from a massive landscaping ordeal that was happening in our neighborhood and with his skin condition it made me realize that when you have an autumn you the to ignore it or just take the medication and and not change your diet and not do other things because you don't see what your insights look like and when I saw what he looked like I realized this is what people's insights look like when there's an autoimmune attack and there's an inflammatory reaction so I'm gonna go to the next slide but this is what he looked like it took him a really long time to heal we fortunately with our technology were able to help him tremendously but his skin you know it a lot of the lesions went away but the healing process took a good two months but just to those of you that know pemphigoid is something that has been told to be irreversible and there's no cure and there's nothing you can do about it and in humans pemphigoid does exist in humans and they say most humans will actually commit suicide because of how painful it is and he is perfectly healthy now so I wanted to give that visual because for those of you that you know have you know reasons why you haven't taken that step to get better and you haven't you know you're skeptical about integrative medicine or you're waiting for the the cure to come out or you're waiting for that next best pill or that next best injection just understand like that's happening inside of you and you need to take charge of your own health because no one else is gonna do it for you so when it comes to the biggest culprits behind the inflammation in our gastrointestinal system we're dealing with so many factors but one the some of the things that I see all the time but we don't think about them we don't think about you know this concept of organic versus not organic we are being exposed to 262 chemicals every time we eat produce and we're supposed to eating produce and vegetables because it's healthy so we're dealing with massive amounts of chemical exposures for our food we're dealing with glyphosate like phosphine is the chemical that is in our genetically modified foods by the way glyphosate is what you spray your weeds with it's roundup but it's in our food second to that we have chloroform chloroform is interesting I see this come up toxic for everyone and chloroform is when chlorine and ammonia turn into vapor so they clean our city water with chlorine and when you get in the shower and that you have the heated water that turns into vapor so you're breathing in chloroform by the way chloroform is like when they put it over your face and you pass out we're getting slow doses or low doses of that every time you shower unless you have a shower filter another one is manganese peroxide maybe these peroxide is partly in a lot of our personal products but secondary to that we have manganese prostatitis a byproduct of fungus in our food so this was actually really interesting when I was in France I was watching the news and there was this whole segment about Agrotech it was pretty much how they used technology in agriculture but one of the things they talked about was the wine everybody knows the French wine is the best but part of the reason is because they have cameras that hover over the vineyards it's artificial intelligence and it's snapshots photos to pick up on fungus on the crop so if they find fungus through the technology in the vineyards they go in and they rip it out so it doesn't spread so when we're talking about fungus and our food and mold it's everything from our stinky cheeses like blue cheese wine coffee peanut butter so this is something that actually in abundance can be extremely toxic to the system so we're not just talking about infections in our gut we're talk about massive toxicity in our gut which is leading us to all of these food allergies that we're dealing with so another thing when it comes to the limitations and testing if you have been wondering if you have celiac so on the Left what you're looking at where it's white by the way on the left this is the typical celiac panel from lab court and through quests it's virtually the same but on the right you're looking at the celiac panels from a more comprehensive independent lab called CR x labs so you're looking at six markers versus twenty-something markers so if you have had a lab cord blood test and it deemed you that you do not have celiac you potentially still can but it was being missed because the panel is not comprehensive so this really just allows you to understand that there is massive limitations with the testing and you might not be knowing this whole picture of who you truly have celiac and do you truly have to navigate away from gluten so the other thing with celiac so they say that the gold standard for celiac is actually doing an endoscope and the endoscope is the camera that goes down and primarily what they're gonna do is they're going to do a visual to see if there's damage and inflammation they're also going to biopsy some of the villi to see if they are flattened and damaged and that they are they're going to say that you have celiac the thing is is that when depending on where the biopsy was done if the biopsy was done in the stomach then you could easily be dealing with a different condition called autoimmune pernicious anemia autoimmune pernicious anemia is when the immune system is attacking the parietal cells of the stomach which does not allow you to absorb b12 so you become massively deficient in b12 plus have a lot of symptoms like celiac so these are two different conditions and they are treated differently and secondary to that you also need to consider the massive deficiencies you're going to get if you do have the pernicious anemia as well when you're dealing with the imaging if it's an endoscope or a colonoscopy you might not be understanding the full picture of why you feel the way you do also you will never see bacteria you will not see parasites you will not see viruses you will not see any type of infection on a colonoscopy or an endoscopy it is not possible you have to culture it so if you are saying oh I had those done and they told me I'm fine so I don't have infections that is not accurate so going back to this parasite conversation because when I tell people that they get crazy around a full moon they usually are like what the heck can we talk more about this but this woman specifically Kathleen wrote this book called this is your brain on parasites and for those of you interested interested it's actually very fascinating but she was a scientist she proved over and over and over again that parasites will hijack your behavior and primarily her first study that she did was on the insect ants and she infected a couple of the ants with a parasite and then she watched them she monitored them and the ants that were infected versus not they actually acted very normal during the day they went out they gathered and brought things back to the anthill and at night normally ants will all stay in their anthill what would happened was that the ants that were infected actually migrated out went into the field went onto the tippy tippy top of a blade of grass and sat there the reason is because the parasite that they were infected with it's most ideal environment to reproduce was a sheep's stomach so it hijacked the ants behavior to put it in the opportune environment to get eaten by a sheep whoa mind blowing that was the first study that I read in the book and she proved it over and over and over again for years so the interesting thing about parasites though is they are extremely hard to test the testing that's available in the u.s. at least is stool testing and when you're dealing with school testing 20 minutes after a bowel movement leaves your body the parasites that are in your sample will self-destruct so by the time you package it up and you send it out to the lab they're gonna deem you free of parasites so in other countries I know this isn't the most glamorous for people but you actually have to have a bowel movement in the office and they put it under a microscope immediately we have other ways that we test for parasites one of them is our bio resonance technology the other one is our autonomic response testing so we actually have non-invasive ways to test for parasites now opposed to relying on school samples which you will miss parasite infections so again for those of you that have been down the functional integrative route and you have not been able to resolve your gut issues it might be because the samples the school samples that you did completely missed the fact that you had a parasite issue so one of these case studies is really really fascinating this was a woman who presented with chronic migraines she also had irritable bowel she actually didn't really come to us for her irritable bowel she just kind of deemed in her normal and learned how to live with it but her migraines were her big big issue so during the consultation she we were talking and kind of you know doing her physical exam and she was talking about having a lot of pain in her right ribcage she also told me that she was lactose intolerant so the first place that my mind went is your right ribcage is where your liver and gall bladder is your gall bladder helps you break down fats so lactose-intolerant a lot of times people think they're lactose intolerant but they actually can't digest fast cuz their gall block optimally so I started to think going on with her gall bladder so then we did her testing she actually had mold exposure mold exposure is one of the things that tends to affect the gall bladder she also had some parasite in her gut as well so through the testing the gall bladder was definitely one of the most stressed organs in the gastrointestinal system so interesting enough we have a technology called bio scan which I call it like digital acupuncture what it does is it evaluates the meridians so when looking at the meridian of the gallbladder this is the pattern that it follows it literally comes up over the side of the head on the right that was exactly where her headaches were so we actually did some work on her gallbladder we did some detoxification we did some supplements we worked on the Meridian using the bioscan technology and literally her migraines went away and her gastrointestinal issues went away so she never had a head problem she never had a brain problem she never really had a migraine problem she'd have gall bladder problem so that's the fascinating thing about doing better testing so secret number three gut disease an autoimmune imme is irreversible so at the end of the day when you understand the route anything is possible and I put this little blurb in here because in Crohn's disease a rogue immune system attacks the digestive tract causing inflammation and tissue damage so again we're just settling for a rogue immune system attack oh we have no idea why the immune system is attacking the immune system attacks bad stuff establish this earlier it attacks infections it attacks viruses it attacks foreign particles it attacks toxins and it attacks all things bad so if there are things in your system that should not be there your immune system is going to attack them and it will create an inflammatory response in that area which can then lead you to Crohn's disease for other types of autoimmune or inflammatory gut conditions so it's just a matter of doing better testing to know what is in your gut what is in there or is your gut connected to something else and that's why you haven't been able to fix it so really the biggest thing to take away from this is rarely do things look like the textbook you know the woman coming in with the migraines she wasn't a migraine case so she didn't look like a textbook migraine patient so if she doesn't look like the textbook and other people don't look like the textbook how are we going to treat like the textbook how are we going to do the one pill cure how are we gonna do the one diet cure it doesn't work that way and we cannot let this fool us anymore we need to ask better questions we need to demand more we need to do better testing so when it comes down to this concept of the old model versus the new you know a lot of the things that I've been talking about with you today is really helping you to understand like some of the newer and advanced technologies that exist and when I say new versus or I'm talking about even this concept of functional to integrative medicine and what I mean by that is in the past I used to practice more traditional functional medicine so you would come in I would do a boatload of testing on you unfortunately that testing would usually cost a lot of money because we had to outsource to all these fancy private labs and then when I got your results back hopefully I could put the pieces of the puzzle together and then I would give you a diet and I would give you supplements that I thought were the best that were based off of my clinical experience from the past and one of my other mentors dr. Klink Hart he said to me once he goes if you just do died in supplements do not call yourself integrative and that's the name of our business integrative wellness group and it made me start really thinking about the complexity of the body and how people needed more and we needed to do more and that's why we kept growing and changing and evolving as a practice so we transitioned into not necessarily using all of these outsourced labs but doing a lot of labs internally that look at the body in so many different ways but then being able to test to know what supplements just your body need what therapies does your body need and we do that by one of our tests called autonomic response testing which I'm going to explain a little bit further so even just talking about you know money when it comes to money everybody has such a different relationship with money but one thing that is such a common theme is that we think that it is a luxury to take care of ourselves and we are being selfish if we take care of ourselves and then secondary to that probably what bothers me the most and also what caused me to change the my practice is that I didn't really feel comfortable having people come in for you know the low cost of a consultation and then I had to hand you you know kits to do stool samples and saliva samples and you know urine samples and then all of a sudden you were paying three to four grand just to get your tests done so I really tried to shift the dynamic of how we did things so that you could actually figure out what's wrong with you at a low cost and then spend your money on actually getting better but also we need to get out of this mindset that taking care of ourselves is he's a luxury and that everything is gonna be covered under health insurance because unfortunately the people that I work with they've been down that road already they already paid all the co-pays and they worked with all the specialists in their insurance plan and they still end up here because they didn't get better so I do these webinars partly so that you don't have to waste that time and don't have to waste the money and you're able to get answers fast so for us question always is do you take insurance we serve people we don't serve insurance companies and we do that because we know that you need time we need to dig deep we need to do better testing and we would not be able to do all of those things if we fail under in-network insurance what's great is you can use your out-of-network insurance you can use flex savings accounts or health savings accounts you can use all that great stuff but when it comes to the reason why most integrative physicians are not completely a network is because we would only be able to spend ten minutes with you we would not be able to talk about nutrition we would not be able to talk about lifestyle changes we would not be able to talk about your stress level we can't talk about any of those things because the insurance would never cover it and we would go out of business so just understand that when you're working in the integrative world it's not that physicians don't want to be a network it's just we can't we just can't so coming down to some of the big biggest obstacles for why we don't take action on our health is people feel guilty about investing in themselves and we're the biggest ones that was such a surprise to me is that we often feel judged by people around us but we don't wanna deal with it we don't want to deal with oh why do you eat that way we're gonna eat normal again oh why are you torturing yourself and one of the things that we really help people with in our practice is nicely being able to tell those people just girls no I'm kidding kind of but being able to empower you to be proud of what you're doing but also this is not about giving up your life this is not about like you can't go out with your friends this is not about you know you can have a social life you can't eat out you can't have a glass of wine like that's not what this is about when you truly know what's going on in your body and you know how what type of protocols you need and it's super in-depth and it's super customized to you you can have balance so I just want to clarify that because I know for me I was very overwhelmed when I kind of started my protocol eight years ago because I was trying to be super super strict with my diet and I eliminated a million things out and I was taking 45 supplements and I personally changed the way I practice because I found that I was stressed and this is something I love and breathe so I don't expect people to just massively transform their life and give up their life in order to be well because that just means you're just gonna be stressed and being stress is not equivalent to health either so at the end of the day health care is about answers and solutions and I think we forget this I think we forget what it's really all about or what it's supposed to be about we're supposed to be able to go to the doctor understand why we don't feel well and get a solution but instead we get a band-aid and potentially never actually get answers and this is why I love what I do and this is why I get up every day because I absolutely love being able to piece the puzzle together and figure out exactly why you feel the way you do and tell you exactly what you need to do to get better I can say this this confidently because I trust in the process that we do here and I trust in the testing and we have just such a ridiculously amazing team that has all taught with their own health journeys and just love what we do because it's transformed their lives so with all this talk about what the heck do we actually do here this is some of the tests that we do what's really cool about it is all of our tests can be accessed from wherever you are reason being is because a couple of the tests are DNA based and your DNA is in your hair so when you do your initial consultation we actually walk you through how to give us the proper hair sample to do a majority of your testing if you are working with us from a distance but we test everything these are some of the technologies but literally we test food allergies heavy metals we test if you have leaky gut we test your blood we test for toxicity viruses infections bacteria literally we test for all of it we've just from things we test really truly know what is going on in the body and one of the other tests that we do is called the autonomic response testing I know ever efference that a few times but this test for a lot of different things but one of the things that really personally I feel is what sets us apart from a lot of other practices is that if you have Crohn's or if you have an ejection I could easily just give you a cookie cutter protocol for Crohn's or for indigestion but instead we use the autonomic response testing to test for your body's response we test to see what supplements is your body gonna benefit from what therapies is your body gonna benefit from and we test this against your DNA so we are actually any supplements we recommend or herbs or remedies it's because your body said yes and the same thing goes for therapies like do you need to detox do you need to be on a specific diet we can test these things against the body so anything you do you're going to get faster results because it's what your body is going to benefit from and this comes down to even some of the limitations and treatment if you remember I said it's not about what you do it's about how you do it so when you're talking conventional we're talking about you know inflammatory and autoimmune conditions being treated by amino prescence although the immune systems too active shut it off oh you're sick again you have a fever you've been having diarrhea okay antibiotics what if a virus what if it's a parasite antibiotics only kill bacteria and then the other option is well it's bad enough none of these other things are working let's cut out a piece of your colon and even when it comes to natural again if we're just using the cookie cutter protocol or the cookie cutter diet we're going hit we're gonna hit obstacles and we're going to hit plateaus so when it comes to the value in our testing I don't really think you can put a cap on the value because we are literally screening you for so many different things but when it comes down to what is what is the biggest thing for you that makes this priceless so like as an example if you literally get bloated from everything you eat including drinking water then figuring out what the heck you're supposed to eat of what you're not supposed to eat is probably priceless to you if you literally feel sick every time you know you you go out and do something being able to know like how to navigate around that is going to be the absolute priceless to you to figure out like how to palliate your indigestion so you don't have to sleep in an upright position that could be priceless to you so at the end of the day depending on you and your goals and what you can achieve is priceless so for those of you that have been waiting this is the price of our onboarding so every single thing that was on that previous slide so everything from the bio residents can to the bio scan to your blood work to your heavy-metal scan to your autonomic response testing understanding your allergens understanding your infections understanding your what supplements you need what therapies you need all of those things are covered under this onboarding price in addition when you are bored with a family member it's a standing offer but the family member can come in for five ninety seven for the exact same onboarding which is pretty amazing so we really try to make it so that if you want to come in with your spouse or your children that it's feasible but you must apply we do not take every patient primarily because we have a waitlist number one and number two is we want to make sure that we're a good fit for you and that your expectations are something that we're gonna meet you usually do but but it's really just we do so much for you and help you in your healing process but at the end of the day you're the one executing a lot of the things so it's really a matter of making sure that we are a fit for you and you are a fit for us so with that being said I'm actually going to put a link here so that if you do want to check out how to apply you just fill out a couple questions and then you can actually hop on a call with our client services team and they'll walk you through the entire process of how it all works especially if you are a long-distance because we can do everything remote and then you might be thinking about like okay well what about treatment so there are certain things that we can help you with from afar but if you are a pretty severe case and you've been suffering for a long time we can do we set up things called an immersion week or weekend so you literally come and get immersed for a few days up to a week and then we're able to do a ton of treatment in that short time period okay so I want to take a look to see if there were any questions submitted as we went along there we go chat Oh No I hope this went smoothly because there's a couple people saying that they had some issues connecting so Valerie and Andrea I will make sure that you get the replay if you had some issues with getting on so we will make sure to get that over to you all right well we didn't have any questions but I just wanna let you guys know thank you so much for tuning in I hope this was really really helpful you know this is such an educational experience as I take you through and kind of how do you understand the bigger picture behind health care and why you might be dealing with symptoms that you haven't been able to get rid of but I will tell you is when you actually get your own testing done and you're able to figure out what your body needs like that is such a breakthrough experience and it's truly life-changing because you're able to walk away knowledgeable and empowered and then obviously be able to heal so this is just something that I love doing and helping to educate but you know being able to take this information and and run with it and do something with it so that you don't have to settle for the normal that you've been dealing with all right so for those of you that want to check out our website we have tons of podcasts we do live videos integrative Wellness Group comm is literally a wealth of knowledge if you want to also learn a little bit more about me a little bit more about our entire process it's all there on the website so check it out and then for those of you that really just want to hop on a call and know if we are a good fit for you just check out the website or use the link to apply so that you can get on one of those strategy calls they're completely free and I will see you guys next week to continue on the gut journey in January and then as we move into February we're going to be moving into the brain series as well we're gonna be talking all about degeneration brain fog memory loss Alzheimer's as well as dementia alright guys I hope you have an amazing night I hope you enjoyed and I will see you next week