Journey

“When a man goes through hormonal changes as he gets older, we now call that a disease, and we say we need to medicate that. Well, that’s a great idea if you want to make money. It’s a perfect idea if you want to make money. I think I use the word ‘diseaseifying.’ We’ve disease-ified normal processes, and we’ve justified that humans should be functioning at 100% all of the time, and if they’re not, we’re going to call whatever that is a disease and create some kind of treatment.

For example, depression. A person can have depression if they’re sad. There’s nothing wrong with the state of being sad and going through a period of depression; that’s part of life experience. But a lot of doctors, a person goes in and they’re depressed maybe because they lost a loved one. Maybe because they’re going through a really hard time. Depression is an important emotion that they need to go through and they need to work that out in their own mind. But the doctor is saying, ‘No, you have this depression here. Let’s cover it up. Let’s call it a disease instead of the state of being human.’

So we’ve dehumanized in medicine, and we’ve opened the door that anything abnormal at any time is going to be considered a disease that needs to be treated, and by the way, I have that treatment in my closet. And we’re going to give that to you, and that’s a horrible approach.”

“Medical school is not what I expected it to be. I thought we were going to study human physiology, and then we were going to study how people make decisions, and we’re going to put those two things together, and then I would be able to help people, and it really wasn’t about that. It was about a certain heuristic of you not evaluating a patient as a whole person. You evaluated a patient as a system of organs, and you asked questions to try to single down and focus down on which organ system was having the most trouble, and then you looked in the drug book to find out, or first you’ve made a diagnosis of what part of that organ system, what did it feel like in terms of a diagnosis, and then what drugs could be used. It was actually a paradigm that I wish it were that simple because it’s easy to do. And so I finished my education, then I went into practice, and it was really only about two years into practice that I sat at the end of the day looking at the list of patients, and I thought, you know, about half of these people had been better off if they hadn’t of come because they’re all on drugs that are causing all kinds of mischief in their life, I don’t even know anyone else who would have called and said, ‘I’m only going to do mischief in your life. Why don’t you not come?'”

“Well, I don’t think you can blame the physicians. I mean, maybe medical school and how doctors are trained. But I mean, I do think the vast majority of doctors go into medicine with the idea that they want to help people, and they’re taught how to help people in a certain kind of way, which for some people, it does work, but for many people, it doesn’t work. I mean, I was an emergency medicine physician before I became a functional medicine physician, and I do think that conventional medicine does a really great job at emergency care. I mean, I was a trauma ER physician, and if I got shot or was in a car accident, I would want to go to the trauma center, but if I had cancer or autoimmunity, I didn’t know about it at the time that I was going through my autoimmune condition. I didn’t know about functional medicine, but clearly, if something were to happen to me in the future, it’s what I would turn to. I mean, it’s how I live my life every day, and it’s what I hope others will turn to as well, because it does give you hope.”

“Chemotherapy is used in the case of autoimmunity, because of the very brutish premises you want to ‘destroy’ the immune system. So they’re using some of the very same agents. And then of course, cancer, you’re using, as we know, conventional warfare, you know, chemo and radiation. It’s like an insane model. Well, not only do you feel betrayed, you have this condition, your body is attacking itself. But now the conventional medical system is saying, we’ve got to blast this enemy within, and they literally, the collateral damage is like off the chain. The conventional medical system is supposed to help take care of its damaged population, and it’s feeding and profiting and amplifying the damage. So it’s almost like a reiteration of the very horror of betrayal. The betrayal theme from the condition, all the way up to the misguided treatment, is really powerful.”

“Hypothyroidism is an example because that’s when autoantibodies are formed against the thyroid, and so what does the conventional medical system do? They actually attempt to take the thyroid out. They even do this radioablation. They take radioactive iodine 131, which is released in nuclear disasters. It’s why everyone wants to stock up with potassium iodide when there’s like a nuclear threat because this element is what destroys the thyroid. So they find that the immune system is attacking the thyroid, and instead of trying to find the root cause and remove it, they decide they’re going to take the very thing that can kill your thyroid, blast it, and surgically remove it, and then replace the thyroid hormone with synthetic thyroxine or Synthroid, which has a completely different tertiary conformation, and actually, the primary sequence is different than human thyroxine, and they push it as if it is just as good if not better. So in other words, it’s like this cascade of betrayal. People’s thyroids are literally removed when all they had to do is remove gluten, for example, or address some type of toxic exposure.”

“I think any business that makes $100 billion annually that fails to lead their customers to some form of meaningful resolution needs to re-evaluate their business model. They have said, “Look at these examples of all these people that are better”. It’s really “Look at the people whose symptoms are reduced”. But what happens with their lifespan? The average autoimmune patient will have a lifespan on average about 26 years less than they’re counterpart without autoimmune disease. So you didn’t really serve them. You served them by being compassionate toward their pain or toward their symptom…and that’s where you made your money. You made your money to mask their body’s alarms. It is a betrayal. Any intelligent person could analyze this from the perspective that if we only mask symptoms, and in the process of masking symptoms, we create new disease with the drugs we use to treat those symptoms. The autoimmune is notorious for this. Look at the drugs used, the immune suppressing drugs that are used to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis. It costs cancer. It’s very clear on the warning label. Very clear. They cause cancer.”

“Why does it appear that our bodies are betraying us and we get sick? You’re about to discover the cause of autoimmune disease and its true solution. This is betrayal. The autoimmune solution they’re not telling you.”

“You’re going to learn from over 85 of the world’s foremost experts, including scientific researchers, who are considered the fathers and the Godfathers in the field of autoimmunity.”

“Lupus, colitis, Crohn’s, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, skin conditions like psoriasis, and also degenerative brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and dementia.”

“If you or a loved one is suffering from a specific autoimmune disease, you’re about to learn the specific protocols you can use to stop it in its tracks, reverse it, and totally take away your symptoms.”

“The brutal reality is for autoimmune disease, modern medicine doesn’t have the answers.”

“Industries bent on financial gain at the expense of lives have released harmful triggers into our environment and destructive substances have been added to our food, our water, and the products we use each day.”

“The truth is, autoimmune disease destroys lives. It takes us away from our loved ones, stops us from experiencing the most precious moments in life.”

“Here in episode one, you’re going to learn from the experts what is autoimmune disease. You’ll meet the Godfather of predictive autoimmunity from Israel, Professor Yehru Shonfeld. You’ll meet the Godfather of functional medicine, Dr. Jeffrey Blan.”

“Automunity is a whole spectrum of disorders that all have very common roots, even though they show up in different parts of the body.”

“If you look at autoimmune, it affects 80 million people in this country, and you lump them all together from Hashimoto’s thyroid disease to MS, to inflammatory bowel disease, to rheumatoid arthritis, to psoriatic arthritis.”

“But we now know that autoimmune has common roots, that it’s the body attacking itself, and that there’s a reason for it, and unfortunately most common therapies are designed to suppress or block the body’s own immune system instead of figuring out why it’s so pissed off in the first place.”

“Our body is actually looking at these native parts of our plumbing and our machinery and they’re saying, oh I’m sorry suddenly you’re a foreigner and I’m going to produce a destructive thing from part of my immune system called the B cells that is going to attack those tissues specifically.”

“Our body actually doesn’t respond to itself. It’s responding to something that happens to our body that makes it a non-cell.”

“We’re exposed to toxins. We eat foods that are unusual. We’re stressed out. We have molds. We have all kinds of unusual situations that are really different than even 150 years ago.”

“If you think of our defense system, it’s there to protect us from foreigners trying to get in or those that get in, and also to protect us from things that go wrong inside ourselves.”

“Have our immune systems betrayed us? The answer to that question will shock you. People are looking in the wrong direction when searching for the solutions of auto-immune diseases. We’re quite literally in the dark ages in thinking that this is all about genetics and medication.”

“Autoimmune disease is no longer a silent killer. I mean it’s everywhere. Some 70 to 80 million people in the US are currently diagnosed or ever diagnosed or have yet to be diagnosed at autoimmune disease.”

“If you take a classic autoimmune disease model like inflammatory bowel disease, ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s or something akin to that, the best estimates and what the incidence was in the Western world, like let’s say in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, 1900, it was about one in 10,000 individuals. And now it’s one in 250. So that’s an unbelievable change in a very remarkably short amount of time from an evolutionary perspective. This is why you called it a modern epidemic, and it’s really mostly acute in the last 30 years. And when you think about how much our environment has changed, how many new chemicals, how many new pesticides and herbicides and flame retardants, and a million chemicals that are response modifiers in the body.”

“As it’s almost always the case for doctors who go rogue, they do so because they have had an experience that has shown them a greater version of the truth.”

“So it was through simple changes, going gluten and dairy free, taking a number of antioxidants, vitamins and minerals, for example, and then beginning to recommit to exercise, that I watched my numbers go from, you know, the high 2000s and third antibodies to the normal range in a period of months.”

“I never learned that food had anything to do with medicine, and I never learned that you could put a chronic autoimmune disease into remission, but that was even possible.”

“I had a gentleman earlier this year, he’d been to 60 different dermatologists. He had such a rare form of autoimmune skin rash that one of the dermatologists invited him to a conference and asked him if he would sit in. And he sat in for four hours. And you know what he had? He had gluten sensitivity. And it was triggering an autoimmune response. It was coming out in his skin. And we were able to get rid of that rash that 60 doctors couldn’t figure out. That’s the power of food. That’s the power of diet change. That’s the power of nutrition. And that’s why I wish more doctors would study it. It’s possible that not a single one of them even assessed diet as being the cause for the skin reaction. Not even a thought. They were looking at his skin and they were trying to give it a name. And that’s the way it is in medicine. So many doctors are so hell-bent on trying to give things names and classifications that they forget to treat the patient.”

“Auto-immunity, auto-immune disease, this spectrum that we have that is around this reaction that we have towards ourselves and auto-inflammation where there is an inflammatory process that’s arising. Functional medicine makes a difference because it doesn’t focus on the disease. It focuses and says, why? What’s under that? What’s the root cause? And how do we begin to make changes in that?”

“I think there’s a fundamental lifestyle approach that everybody needs to look at whenever they have an autoimmune condition, whether that’s Hashimoto’s, whether that’s multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis, and that’s looking at the root causes.”

“There are only three main triggers for autoimmune disease, with a couple of add-ons, right? Diet and stress always influence every disease. But the main three triggers are allergens, microbes, and toxins.”

“A lot of people will say, oh, you know, my mother has Hashimoto, she’s on thyroid replacement, and my older sister is, and my aunts were, so I’m going to get it. Well, if you do what they did, you probably will, right?”

“We see patients in all problems and all walks of life. And we look at all the reasons why they may not be functioning properly. So, for example, nutritional efficiency, a toxin overload, musculoskeletal, neurological imbalance, things like this.”

“I have friends where I live who are naturopathic physicians. And when someone asks me, who should I see? I send them there first. Because my experience of naturopaths is that they look at the diet, they look at nutrient insufficiency, they look at musculoskeletal, and usually refer it out because that’s not a real strength for them, but they recognize it.”

“In many ways, we’re very similar to the family doctor of old. And as we have really strong relations with our patients and their families, and we spend more time with them because we want to understand why they’re sick, not just that they are sick.”

“So, yes, we diagnose disease, and we do physical exam, we do laboratory tests, and x-rays, all those things that diagnose what’s going on. But rather than say, okay, now let’s give them a drug, we say, well, no. Are there some natural approaches we can take to help the body heal itself?”

“We have become so toxic in our modern world that I am now lecturing literally all of the world that toxicity is now the primary driver of chronic disease in all the industrialized world.”

“Have you ever been to the doctor, and you list a couple of the symptoms you’re experiencing? Then you’re trying to make sure you don’t forget anything. You’re desperately trying to give the doctor all the information they’re needing, and maybe you feel rushed, and sometimes maybe even feel like you’re being herded into a generic solution.”

“Function medicine looks very comprehensively at the patient’s history. And so we have a, it’s rather a long questionnaire, but it’s very comprehensive. And it looks both across symptoms and diagnoses, but also at your lifestyle, your family history, your diet, and extremely detailed questions about everything.”

“As it turns out, there is a way. Yes. And that comes back to that great statement that was made by Peabody 100 years ago at Harvard, at a commencement, which that paper is just, it could be, have written today and be just as relevant. But at the end of it, he said, the secret to the care of the patient is to care for the patient. So if you care for the patient, you have to know the patient. And if you really want to care for the patient and you’re committed to the patient, you have to really know the patient.”

“We see that so many different conditions that come into our office when we look, the immune system’s gotten activated, and the way to address the immune system is not to quiet it down, but rather to reduce the need for its activation, and that’s the whole premise of functional medicine.”

“In the pharmaceutical realm for dealing with autoimmune disease are to either squash the inflammatory, the innate immune response, or to get into actual, obliteration of almost all immunity with response modifiers and biologics and things like that, and, they can be very effective from a symptom management standpoint. There’s no doubt. And some people, if they’re really in bad shape and sort of end stage, that may be exactly what they need as part of the overall treatment plan. Patients who get offered that as the only option, and particularly if it’s earlier on in their disease course, nowadays they go right to the internet and they start looking up, what are these medications? What are they all about? What are the side effects?”

“Here’s a drug. This is the answer that you’ve been looking for. We’re told, take it for the rest of your life. We’re not told where is the problem coming from. This is not the solution. This is just helping us function a little bit better. Where is it coming from?”

“The third leading cause of death was medical error. Now, what does that mean? Some people say, oh, well, they overdosed on the drug or they died in surgery. No, medical error means the proper use of prescription medication. So, what it tells me is, we’re doing the wrong thing. And maybe we’re not doing the wrong thing 100% of the time. I don’t think doctors are out there like mal-intentioned. The system promotes that drugs are the only thing that can treat cure disease. That’s what, if you look at, perfect example, look at a bottle of supplements. On the bottom of it, it’s going to say FDA disclaimer. “This product was not intended to treat cure or diagnose disease”. Why does it have to say that? Because medicine ensures that nobody else has the thought process that anything other than drugs can treat cure diagnosis disease.”

“Let’s take taxpayer dollars and give away this care that doesn’t work because the system is broken. And let’s give away this broken care in this broken system to people for free.”

“I just don’t think that taxpayer dollars should fund a system that doesn’t work, that’s proven itself to be ineffective.”

Medicine’s Exponential Growth: “But from a business perspective, medicine is the only business that continues to grow at an exponential rate, despite failing miserably its customer.”

Challenges with Medication: “A lot of the drugs are not actually addressing the root cause, they could be doing further damage.”

Challenging the “Aging = Disease” Myth: “One of the big myths and the big lies is that disease is a natural progression of aging…”

“They shut down the immune system. They’re non-chalant regions. Is that a solution? Is that something we want to give $100 billion a year to as the solution? When the outcomes are poor, I think we need to look at different outcomes.”

“We have an outdated clinical model. And it’s really based on, you have a disease, here’s a pill. Yes. You have a cold, take an antibiotic. And it has not served us well.”

“It’s very easy for us to mask autoimmune problems with medications or with natural supplements.”

“So I really emphasize this: the diet, sleep, exercise, and meditation as the initial round of treatment while we’re running labs and while we’re analyzing what’s actually going on as an underlying cause.”

“I think it’s particularly problematic and traumatic for younger people who are all of a sudden facing a chronic disease diagnosis. I’m young, why do I have to deal with this kind of problem? Isn’t this a problem for old people? Why me?”

• The integrative and functional medicine movement is characterized by curiosity and a commitment to finding long-term solutions beyond drugs.
• The community and experts are available to guide individuals on the path to vibrant health.
• Autoimmune disease is described as a significant public health issue that requires lifestyle, diet, environmental, and systemic changes, driven by grassroots efforts.
• The integrative and functional medicine movement aims to empower individuals to take responsibility for their health.