#413: Mold, Toxins, and the Cell Danger Response: How to Reclaim Energy and Resilience With Dr. Clement Lee, NMD

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Nidham. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all from new technology and ancestral health practices to personalized interventions and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bioregulators. Enjoy the show. Hi, I'm Natalie Needham, your host. Welcome back. Chronic illness isn't usually loud. It's subtle, persistent, and incredibly frustrating. In this episode, Dr. Clement Lee explains why people can feel deeply unwell long before anything shows up on standard labs, and how factors like limbic system stress, environmental toxins, and unresolved inflammation quietly derail healing. We dig into regenerative medicine, prolotherapy, and why the nervous system may be the biggest lever most people never touch. Next off, we'll thank two of our amazing sponsors that make the show possible. 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So if you want to support your energy recovery and healthy aging at the cellular level, you've just got to give Beam a try. All you have to do to do that is go to beamminerals.com and use code NAT20 to get 20% off your first order. Dr. Clement Lee, welcome to the show. It is an absolute pleasure to finally be able to connect with you. Yes, likewise, Natalie. This has been a long time coming. I'm so happy to be here. I feel like every episode starts like that because everybody's so busy. We, by the time, you know, once we decide we're going to do an episode, it always takes a really, it takes a bit of, it takes some coordination to make it happen. But it just sticks in everything. Yes. A hundred percent, but it's always worth it in the end. So I wanted to kind of jump right in and help the audience learn a little bit about you. And I mean, lots of people know about you. I know this because in my membership community, I have all these people that tell me, Oh yeah, I go to Dr. Clement Lee. Oh, yeah. Come up. Dr. Kalee saw you and blah, blah, blah. He says hi. Clearly you're known. But for the people who don't know you. So when we strip away the titles and the credentials, who really are you at your core? Like when did you first realize you were meant to be work to be a healer, to work in this healing space? So a quick question. As a kid, I was a Boy Scout growing up and I became Eagle Scout. So it's kind of my nature to help people. so it just kind of carried over with just what profession in life to be because i think uh an undergrad is figuring out myself whether i wanted to go into medical profession of some sort at that time i didn't even know about naturopathic medicine i just knew about mds not even do's not even chiropractors i just knew about mds and acupuncture really so those are like that that uh those two class of professions and then uh luckily i had a family friend who was a year ahead of me and she had already started attending naturopathic college and I looked into it it made a lot of sense because it married a bit of the western well realm with all of the integrative holistic route and as a kid growing up I was you know more influenced by Chinese medicine I was treated with Chinese medicine so that kind of was more of my background and it just kind of made sense that that's how I wanted to treat myself in the future as well as my family and friends this is the route for me to take and so that's kind of led me on this route. And luckily it vibes with where the world is heading right now. We're trying to help the body heal most naturally as possible with probably the most effective tools that we have available. Were you ever tempted to go into traditional Chinese medicine? Because it's a very powerful modality. I mean, I know that in my experience, some of my most challenging things were dealt with really effectively by traditional Chinese medicine. And so, A, do you weave that through what you do now? Or were you ever tempted just to jump whole hog into that? A little bit. In our actual naturopathic profession, we did have acupuncture training. So in Arizona, you can get duly licensed into acupuncture as well as naturopathic medicine. But in California, you had to take a whole separate program to be able to do acupuncture. So when I moved back to California, I actually did attempt to start an acupuncture program, But I realized, I mean, I have so much more to offer in the naturopathic realm that I can still use the philosophy and the acupuncture meridians in what we do, but without having to spend all the extra education and the board exams to be able to administer it. Would you say that there was a defining moment or patient early in your career that changed your understanding of chronic disease? Because chronic disease is really the direction you moved in, that, you know, everybody kind of finds their sweet spot. And I think it enables you to become better at what you do, and especially with something like chronic disease that's so complex. So was there a person or a moment when you're like, you know, I think chronic disease, a lot of people running the other way. Sure, sure. You can run towards the fires. Yeah, just, I think, well, I first started off with doing regenerative medicine in the realm of prolotherapy. So that was in my third year of naturopathic school. We attended Hemel Hackett training for prolotherapy. And the constant prolotherapy is just utilizing the body's own natural innate healing mechanisms by creating a mock injury with the injections. So knowing that, that you can start healing old injuries. Even myself, I had like an ACL strain in high school that really put me out. And so utilizing that for myself as well as other patients, these type of therapies can harness the own body's natural healing ability beyond what it can do when it's stuck in a stasis. it expanded beyond where you know some people responded exceptionally well to prolotherapy and some didn't what were those reasons why so it was kind of a overall learning curve as i started actually practicing where we had some patients that would respond to the prolotherapy injections and then those didn't you know we had brought in patients that had like lyme disease and mold i didn't know that much at the time but like they responded but they also flared up or they didn't respond at all or they had like an ellers danlos where they were too stretchy and didn't really actually respond too much to the treatments. So I had to dive into what other reasons why they might not be healing. And that's when I started going down the deep dive and learning, you know, how to treat Lyme, mold, oncology, just a lot of different things that are in the same wheelhouse, just helping the body heal itself. Okay, so you've mentioned prolotherapy a bunch of times. Not everybody knows what that is. Do you maybe want to speak to the audience? Yeah, sure, sure. It's very powerful. Yeah, it's one of the oldest standing natural regenerative therapies. So it's almost 100 years old by now. But it basically involves using concentrated dextrose, which is a sugar molecule, along with the local anesthetic, usually laticane or procaine, and then diluted with some saline or water. So basically that concentrated sugar, when you inject it into the joint, it actually irritates the tissue via the process of high osmolarity. So it actually draws water out of the cells, which injures the cells some of the cells that take all the water out too quickly they explode and die but that initiates the whole healing cascade just like when your body naturally hurt itself somehow so it wakes up old injuries where there may be tendon ligament connective tissue injuries and so the body can start over wherever it left off it could be you know five ten years ago of injuries or even the older it just gets the body to know that there's an acute injury now. Yeah, it's interesting because what you're describing is when your body is healing an injury, it's something that I think a lot of people, we don't think about necessarily is that it'll get you to a certain point. Once it's gotten to a point where it can manage, right? It's good enough. The inflammation is resolved. The active injury is calm enough. As far as the body's concerned, it's done what it needs to do to live to fight another day. Whereas you're like, well, wait, I want to be able to do shoulder presses. I want to be able to do all the things I used to be able to do with my shoulder. And to your body, it's like, no, you're good enough. We don't need to take it all the way. And you're now basically, you're basically bringing attention back to the injury. And so the procaine, in that sense, is it there just to numb the injection? Because it's not like neurotherapy, right, where it's an actual procaine injection? Well, it depends on how you're utilizing it. So if it's into the joint directly, procaine does have extra benefits. So it has the anesthesia effect, it has a neural reset effect, and it also has kind of vasodilating effect. So If you're using it strictly for prolotherapy, you're just primarily numbing the area. If you're using the procaine on the way through the different structures of the fascia, you do get a bit of that neurotherapy effect, and you can reset some of the scarring so the tissues get, again, more tension back to the area. It depends on how you do it because there's a version called neuroprolotherapy, which is much more subcutaneous versions of the procaine, and sometimes just dextrose alone, diluted dextrose in this case. But it's, yeah, you could kind of get two birds with one stone when you're using the procaine mixed with the dextrose. Yeah, because the neurotherapy treatments I've received were procaine. I mean, whether there was dextrose in there or not, I think was secondary, but it was really about the procaine. And that's really about, again, to your point, bringing attention back to the area, but also very much affecting the nervous. It's affecting, kind of interrupting a pathway with the nervous system, hoping that you'll get a nervous system reset. Right, right. Sometimes the pain can be like a chronic misfiring of the neurons. So if you just inject procaine, even without the dextrose into the joints, you can reset the pain signals back. So, yeah, that's kind of the concept of neural therapy. Yeah, it's an interesting concept, right? Because what it says to people who may or may not realize this is that the nervous system can continue to signal an injury even if the actual physical injury is no longer there. And that might be where you might have conventional imaging done by a conventional physician who says, I don't know what you're talking about this pain. You look fine. Yeah. And the patient is like, dude, it's a 10. And the doctor's like, it's all in your head. Right. As if it's a bad thing when actually it is all in their head. Yeah. It could be reset. Yeah. Or locally into tissues. But again, they can't really see it on the image or anything. Yeah. Yeah. No, really interesting. Okay, so let's go a little more into this chronic illness thing. So what assumptions about chronic illness did you once believe that you now realize or you eventually realized were just completely wrong? When you first got into this, you're like, okay, chronic therapy is a thing. I mean, chronic illness. But were there assumptions that you'd made that you eventually realized, oh, no, no, got that wrong? Well, actually, good thing for me. I never really had like strong assumptions. I was always open-minded to learning things, but I know like in conventional medicine or even in our educational training for the basic sciences, you know, when you're talking about autoimmune diseases, you learn about the disease-modifying medications, which are just typically Band-Aids, you know, anti-inflammatories or immunosuppressants, and you're not really getting the full picture of being able to actually help the person heal beyond that. So you're learning how to manage those medications. And that was part of our pharmacology training too. But, you know, luckily for me, it's like that's not the end of the world. I mean, there's more that we can do beyond that. So, you know, as seeing our patients start to get better with some of the just more basic principles of lifestyle, diet, and, you know, removing the obstacles to cure, we can see that people can no longer have to rely on those medications. So I saw it as a student. into like, yeah, we learned those things, but I actually seeing it in real life really changed my belief that the body has a really powerful potential to heal, right? It's amazing. You just need to support it however you can. Yeah, no. And I mean, you know, it's a recurring theme and it's a theme that I don't know that conventional medicine doesn't believe it. I think it's more a question of that's just not the focus and where the attention goes. it could be i mean i i believe there's there's some some like rheumatologists some uh chronic disease you know conventional doctors that realize that the body can but they may be limited to in their immediate modalities or the type of labs that are offered in the you know conventional hospital systems they're not really geared toward addressing those things and so yeah i understand that there's some but then they also get up to the other side and they start learning all the other functional medicine routes to try to change their, you know, their tool belt here. Yeah, no, 100%. All right. So you describe chronic illness as something that the conventional system really generally is just chasing symptom after symptom, like they're going after symptoms. So in your experience, what do you think the biggest blind spot is in how the conventional system approaches chronic illness? I think the biggest blind spot is the immune system. they see it as defective in a certain way, where it's smart, it knows what it's trying to do, but there's these other threats that are getting in the way of it properly signaling itself. So the whole conventional medicine is really invested heavily into different anti-inflammatory medications or immune modulating effects or basically immune suppressing effects, really. um so they're just kind of quieting down the switch which is getting the body to have these this runaway inflammation to an extent but the thing is they're not addressing why that happened down to the cellular level to an extent where it can actually have a pattern to be redone or a pathway or blueprint to to uh rewire or fix itself you know to an extent yeah no 100 and i think that by shutting down the immune system, you're now leaving the patient a sitting duck. Like when you see the steroid use and stuff like that. You can get respiratory infections or at least low-grade lingering infections that you normally shouldn't have. Yeah, that is a big deal. Well, and the immune system at this point is disabled, so it can't even do what it's supposed to do, right? Like, I mean, is that the reason why people talk a lot about, you know, somebody has joint pain, they get, you know, one of the approaches of conventional medicine, and not to say that there's never a use case for this, but one of the approaches is to inject a steroid into the joint, which we know the problem with that is it prevents the body's own healing systems from kicking in. So you get a removal of pain, but you get a worsening down the road of the issue. I wonder if that's basically this, that whole approach that says, I just want to make you feel better now beyond the like because there's also the insurance carriers that they are dictating the level of service that's allowed as well as you know different uh people pulling the strings of the doctor's you know uh tools so there's also some limitations there uh but yeah i think that's the whole concept is like they're trying to get a pretty much a quick fix you know for the symptoms at the moment well and as you allude to it's standard of care right i mean there's there's a book that you have to follow. So, okay, let's move on. So when you meet a patient who's been like, they've been everywhere, they've tried everything. So, and they're dealing with fatigue, inflammation, autoimmunity, metabolic dysfunction. What's the first, what's your first stop here? What's the first thing that you do that is going to give them the inclination that, oh, this is different. Nobody said that. You know, it's, it's, I think looking back, like I've learned this along the way, but I think the biggest limitations that people need to start addressing would be their own mindset to an extent, because that also is fundamentally part of that limbic system realm. And then also the autonomic nervous system. But sometimes if you don't want to heal, or you've already been told by so many doctors, you can't heal, you may get that as a little bit of a roadblock. You know, there's a bit of a placebo effect in that, but we know how powerful placebo effect can be or nocebo effect in this case um so we've got to let them give them a little bit of hope to an extent where that they can get them out of the funk but don't going down to more of the science behind it it's like the limbic system is a part of the brain that houses memories of these emotions and traumas but it actually dictates cellular like healing and inflammatory moderation and so many different survival pathways um but if it's stuck in a mode where it's chronically stressed the body is going to be stuck there in the healing cascade and it's not going to go into you know that more rest and digest which then influences the autonomic nervous system as well too so i mean it's two separate systems but the autonomic limbic system are kind of i'd say the roadblocks to healing for most patients if they've been in something pretty chronic and so how do you express that to a patient you know like if you've you know what i mean like you have someone in front of you who's been told, you know, nothing's going to change. We can't fix this. This is unfixable. Just deal with it. You'll be on painkillers, whatever the case is, or there's nothing wrong with you, you know, whatever that story is. And somehow they've found it in themselves to say, okay, I'm going to try one more thing. And they're sitting in your office across from you. And here you are not with a pill, not with a magic something or other. You're saying to them, you just need to believe like just click your heels together and that sounds a little hokey when you first hear it yeah um well there's well there's multiple layers i mean i don't like to just leave it it's all in your head or all in your nerves but definitely but i mean i also like to address like you know there may be nutritional deficiencies that may not have been addressed which also influenced by the state of your limbic system and your nervous system um also there's other kind of burdens that may be coming from infections toxins etc that are all playing in a old. So if they've already addressed it with other functional medicine practitioners, we definitely want to keep that in mind. But if they haven't yet addressed these aspects of kind of the more primal part of your body, then we should address that first because the body is smart. It's into, you know, it's trying to gear towards survival wherever it can or thrive whenever it can, when the stress is out of the way. But if the stress is kind of permeated itself and then now perceived stress is actually something that's on 24 seven, then you're going to get just really, you know, stuck in this, um, kind of pathway, which leads into like, there's actually more of a cellular model, which is called the cell danger response, which actually describes it in a cellular level, which is more biochemical, uh, which is where we can actually, uh, give a little evidence, you know, behind why physiologically this is going on, why they're stuck, you know? Yeah, no, I, we're going to talk about that too. So are there specific, any patterns that you're seeing repeated in these people who are staying sick for years and yet their labs are normal oh yeah yeah what are the what are they um well the the pattern is they had some level of stress or stressors you know either cumulative or maybe childhood or just an acute stress um that they think they got rid of but they maybe just are still stuck in that like stress state but managing So that's pretty common, but then that leads to more downstream physiological effects like gut permeability or gut dysbiosis, which then opens up the door for more inflammation. And unfortunately, maybe on the labs, there's not too much going on, maybe like high cholesterol, maybe moderately high blood sugar and very little inflammation but really like the body is signaling that it not feeling so good Fatigue you know brain fog all these common symptoms are there Yeah What I hearing you say over and over again is this is the state of the nervous system has everything to do with both our ability to heal and how what's actually happening under the surface. And, and we don't measure, I mean, we can, but we don't, you know, no conventional. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's interesting. Do you think there's an overlook, like now moving back, before someone gets chronically ill, do you think that there's ever any kind of early warning sign that we're missing before things go chronic? I think fatigue is definitely something. And it can be transient fatigue to an extent where they're just tired one day and they don't know why, but then they get good sleep and then they feel okay. But then it just doesn't, like the sleep doesn't catch up anymore to an extent. I think that's one thing or just like finer aches and pains that, that you think will go away, but they just keep coming back. Like those are maybe early warning signs that things are not so good or even like brain fog to an extent. Yeah. So those are more of this kind of thing. Well, and you know, what's tricky of course is as people are aging, they expect to be, it's all part of aging. They say, yeah. It's all part of aging. Oh, your joints are going to hurt. And, you know, I think the big part of the work that doctors like you do is that is resetting those expectations and saying you do not need you shouldn't be getting more tired. I mean, maybe when you're 100, you'll need more sleep. Like, who knows? But, you know, ironically, older people tend to get less sleep because they feel that they need less sleep. They're not sleeping till first night. yeah and yet you know when i you know i have i have a very good friend who's dealing with a lot of serious health issues right now but i think one of his biggest issues is this guy doesn't sleep yeah well there's so yeah there's circadian rhythm issues as you get older too that's a another topic but in terms of yeah the the sleep is a big factor if you're just not rested you know you can sleep but you don't get rested then your body doesn't get to heal very well yeah yeah well I mean, it doesn't repair. Yeah. In the first place. Yeah. You know, you're working at this intersection of naturopathic and functional medicine. So in your mind, what is root cause medicine really about? Like, what does, what does that mean? It was a big term for a while. Yeah. Well, the thing is like, if you put a body in an optimal environment with optimal nutrition, optimal social, we tend to thrive, you know, the, the, the, the body and the humans, you know, like in those blue zones, they, they're in those right environments with the right people and you know maybe not the best lifestyle but generally they have some really good things that allow them to live over 100 years so yeah if you take that kind of concept and for our bodies is if we are not achieving where we want to be there may be some things in the way and for us is to be able to figure out what those things are that's where we can get to the root cause of why you aren't feeling your absolute best and some people unfortunately they never felt that's the best so they don't have anything they gauge themselves on, which is why we got to suck somewhere. But yeah, I mean, reality is like, we just kind of figure out whether there's, you know, nutritional deficiencies or toxins or infections or emotional trauma, or just some, you know, some type of unknown kind of thorn at the side of the bodies from healing. And we just encourage them to, to get better. We can use, you know, more advanced tools like peptides or stem cells, other things to kind of push it a lot faster. but you know innately the body has typically what it needs to get you know pretty far along the the journey yeah yeah and you know one of the things you said is that chronic disease is like it's rarely a single trigger which i think is a little bit what you're saying here yeah um it's kind of a constellation right yeah so what are the non-negotiable categories you evaluate in every patient like is it you know i'll give you some ideas here there's inflammation burden environmental toxins mitochondrial impairment like things like yeah maybe immune resilience um yeah you know is our hormones a big piece of the puzzle and obviously we know nervous system dysregulation yeah of course at least all of the above but i think the biggest issue right now is man-made are the toxins that we're exposed to i think that is definitely accelerating the level of chronic disease, even childhood diseases as well too. Because the kids that are born now, they have way more toxins than we did 10, 20, 30 years ago. So their bodies just can only handle so much. So I think that's something we test on anybody who's willing to test for is the level of environmental chemicals, heavy metals, pesticides, even mold toxins. Because those things unfortunately come from our immediate environments nowadays. And so those are just big threats all the time. Yeah. It's interesting you brought up kids. Do you work with children? I do. Yeah. I do have some patients that are children. Yeah. Because how often do you think that's being missed in kids? Like, you know, how do you actually, that's not the question I want to ask. The question I want to ask is how do you think it shows up in kids? uh attention and mood uh disorders as well as just their eating habits i mean usually it starts off with the gut you know but the gut is highly sensitive but it's also affected by these environmental toxins and so you you create this perfect storm where that needs to lead to neural inflammation which for kids present as mood disorders or cognitive behavioral issues learning yeah how much i mean this is a crazy question and i don't know if you can answer it but do you have a guess how much of the add adhd epidemic that we're seeing might have something to do with toxic uh i'd say a large percentage a large percentage yeah i mean that was such an interesting study right like you know almost you'd almost love pediatrics to kind of take on toxin screening yeah part of a kid's the problem is there's just too many darn chemicals out there i mean we know that glyphosate is one you have food colors additives um even like big you know countries have actually banned food additives their food colorings into their food chain and also uh glyphosate too so those are definitely starting points but then yeah big ones but then there's also like plastics and other herbicides pesticides that are not you know banned yet those those have a role to play and then uh you know unfortunately mycotoxins are another big deal which are these molds uh you know chemicals that are released by molds so yeah yeah they permeate our food chain so those are a lot of different variables you know and so do you have any thoughts on is there anything parents could be doing i mean so there's the obvious don't consume processed foods don't have red spittles yeah right but is there but do you do you think like is there anything you feel parents could be doing without getting too neurotic but is there anything they could be doing be helping their children's system to like to kind of move this right this is something that i recommend for most people nowadays is some level of a binding agent where there's humic pulvic minerals activated charcoal like because kids can do like humic pulvic minerals usually the liquid forms um and just like minerals or something uh be mineral yeah that could be one or i use ion gut uh health which has you know the pulvic in minerals so they have like a mild binding capacity or something even like zeolite they have the mild binding capacity for some of these environmental toxins so within the gut they have a way of just getting excreted um it's not they just start accumulating in the body over time, which, you know, then starts getting to issues. So having, having an outlet for these is where I'm going with. So like for adults and kids, you know, some type of thing to just be able to draw these chemicals out on a day to day basis would give you an edge. Yeah. And I would think, and you know, even things like make sure your children are pooping regularly. Yeah. Those are the basics too. Yeah. Make sure they're peeing, pooping well, sweating, you know, all the, the natural excruciation. like moving bodies like if you think about it all the things in adults like a stagnant system someone who's just sitting for 10 hours a day if your kid is addicted to screens and not moving much and not getting outside to play like it's these are like they seem like such basic like what are you talking about things and yet because they're part of the human condition that we're getting away from because of technology now yeah we now have to go back and start paying attention to these crazy things that shouldn't even be a question. Yeah, I know. It's kind of like it should be done, but it's like no one does it anymore. I know. I know. It's nuts. Okay. Let's get back to our talk. Sorry. We got a little off track with the kids, but I just thought that was really interesting, right? Yeah, of course. You talk to so many parents who are at their wits end and so bewildered. And I think the last thing I'll say on the topic is recognizing that the mother, unfortunately we do pass a toxic burden to our babies not unwittingly you know and so it's a reason why if you're going to do a any kind of detox support you want to do it ahead of time before you get pregnant before conception while you're pregnant do not detox don't mobilize anymore yes no more mobilizing you're stuck with what you got and then on the other side when you're done nursing okay so now let's ask the question that i think is one of the big confounders in in complex medicine or complex case medicine is what do you start with? What do you fix first? How do you know where to begin? That's a good question. This is where we have more individualized care, just chatting with the patient, seeing where their roadblocks might've come from along the way. This is where we can introduce functional lab testing to kind of figure out for them. Sometimes they need a little validation that they actually have something going on. But just really finding out that there's maybe some dysbiosis, some overgrowth of unwanted bacteria, fungal, parasites, sometimes biopersistence, and then showing them their level of toxins as well. that gives you kind of a snapshot of what they might be dealing with. And then we do more in-depth blood testing to look at the hormone profiles, thyroid, inflammatory, more deeper inflammatory pathways, and then sometimes nutritional levels for them just to see if they're adequate or not. And then putting all that information together, we can kind of get a good game plan of the right either nutraceuticals or some supplements, herbs to support that pathway. but I often bring up the Olympic system and nervous system area in the beginning. Cause these are things that they can be working on the background as we try to figure all this out. Yeah. Well, and as you said earlier, somebody who's stuck in fight or flight, their body's not functioning properly to begin with. They don't have the nutrients that we're giving them to like, you know, if you learned the hard way, you know, you can put people on 10, 20 supplements, but if they're stuck in a fight or flight mode, it's going to like, not, it's going to go right there. Yeah. Well, for our longevity audience, who of which, you know, is largest part of our audience here, what do you think the earliest interventions are that people should be doing now that will make the biggest impact down the road? Is there are there a couple of big things to be doing? Well, from the beginning, it's optimizing the Vegas or the autonomic nervous system includes sympathetic and the Vegas, but also the limbic system. Just make sure that there's no like skeletons left in the closet or just, you know, requiring a little bit of attention in your brain because that'll drive hormonal pathways or immune pathways just to less efficient areas. And then environmental toxin load. Like I think, you know, most people take enough supplements that have probably some good stuff in there. But the toxins that you may have accumulated since, you know, conception until now, they may still be in there to an extent. And that is going to interfere with your body's optimal trajectory. So those are the big things I recommend for most longevity patients of mine, too, is looking at their toxin load. Yeah, I think it's becoming the biggest topic right now. Even thinking about, you know, if you've got heavy metal issues, they will occupy receptors that will prevent those supplements from helping your body do what you're doing in the supplement for in the first place. Definitely. Not to mention they create oxidative stress all the time because they're very reactive. So you're just creating more inflammation, even low-grade inflammation that your body is trying to combat. So if you can remove these little thorns at your side, then the body really has an easier chance of doing what it's supposed to do. So we talked about the fulvic and humic, which will naturally bind things. But do you think people should be kind of out of the gate testing for heavy metals once a year? My opinion is, yeah, I mean, the thing is, like, you try to avoid it from, you know, maybe limiting your sushi intake or other things. But, I mean, the air itself, you live in a big city, you're probably going to get some lead, some arsenic, some stuff just kind of floating in. And, you know, our bodies are a good reservoir for some of these things. So you may accumulate faster than you're limiting. So at this point, if you know where you're at, you actually have some more objective data to work with. Otherwise, you're just suspecting it and you may not actually have any symptoms until much later on in life. It's too late. So what would be your, what, what method of testing do you think is the best because there's hair mineral analysis that people will use, but that, that gives you one picture. It doesn't give you the full. What do you, what do you think the best testing is for that? Well, clinically we've been using the provoked urine testing for probably over 15 years. That's why I was trained in. But we use a, like a random sample of urine, which is like your first morning urine, which just tells you more of your acute exposures because most of the metals will be hiding away in your tissues. They're not going to be released into your urine or your blood at the time. But then afterwards, we give you a chelating agent, which is usually a DMSA, but sometimes it could be EDTA or DMPS, depending on what we use. But the DMSA is standardized capsules. They have an affinity for a large amount of the metals in your system. So after you take them, they're actually actively withdrawing the metals out into the periphery. And then typically you pee or sweat them out. And then we collect via urine, which gives you a little more standardized approximation of what might be hiding away tissues. And from there, we kind of get a better gauge of how much you might, how much your burden might be. Okay. That's interesting. So because I remember I was working with, I did a, I delivered a talk for Sunlight, an infrared sauna company, and they were talking, we talked about a specific challenge test that they did, and they measured the toxins and the heavy metals and toxins in people's sweat. Yeah. And one thing that this study noticed was that different metals and toxins get released in different mediums. Medians, yeah. Through different pathways of elimination. Right, right, right. But it's interesting to me that, you know, it releases certain ones. Some is going to go into the urine. Some is going to get released into the stool. Right. So you almost, I mean, in a perfect world, you'd want to be. doing in the mall. Yeah. There's just no one test that can test them all. This is where we say, this is a really good one. If you just had to pick one. Um, but again, like, yeah, it's, it's more accessible, you know, that's, that's why we like to do it. Yeah. And I would think that, I mean, again, infrared sauna, if people have, have access to it is a really nice kind of ongoing, how to reduce the load. Right. Right. Cause at least you can sweat it out, you know, more, more so than your body could do on its own. So now you often talk about inflammation loops, right? Or to get stuck. So what are they and how, how do people get stuck in them and how do they break them? Okay. Starting off with the joint, joint pain realm. That's just a little more straightforward. You know, if you've ever sprained your ankle, you know, like it, it heals, but it doesn't always heal super well. And then you might have a little pain here and there. And if you try to use it, you might resprain it again. Well, unfortunately, that is a inflammatory loop where you get the first phase of healing, which does start to grow new tissue, creates a little bit of scar tissue, but doesn't resolve to the original tissue that you had when you before the injury. Sometimes, if you're lucky, it does, but usually it doesn't. So then, unfortunately, that every time you're trying to use it, you're kind of redamaging the scar tissue, which creates more inflammation, but it's like more sub chronic or not sub chronic, but just like threshold inflammation that doesn't really promote tissue growth to the extent that you want it. So then that just cycles with just more swelling, more inflammation and non-healing and still a dysfunctional joint. So this is where something like prolotherapy or any of the regenerative injections nowadays are really helpful. But now we see, and even in the realm of peptides, exceptionally well for healing, you know, breaking that threshold of healing where the BBC, GHK or TV4, they have a huge potential just to kind of let the body break through and start to get to the healing side of things. So that's really, yeah, that's the first, you know, at least more tangible one you can see. The other one systemically is you just have low grade inflammation and may show up as high CRP or maybe it's slightly elevated white blood cells or just body aches, you know, occasional body aches. But really, like, yeah, that's a sign that the body is trying to do something but not really attending to it all the way. So for those, like, my thought process is to go at maybe the root causes, which are typically the emotions, toxins, or infections. You know, one of those few or a combination of those would be those driving factors for why the body's not resolving the inflammation. Yeah. Okay, so then the next question is, what do you think are the most surprising sources of inflammation that your patients are always like, you're kidding me? It's coming from there. Is there a place that inflammation hides or a driver of inflammation that people are always shocked when they find out? Mold. Mold is a big driver of inflammation. Mold in the home. I didn't realize. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of the missing link for a lot of patients with chronic disease, even chronic Lyme patients. If they don't address the mold aspect of it, the body will be kind of stuck in a less than optimal inflammatory state. So I think that unfortunately sucks because most of the houses are built in a way that is more likely to grow mold. And, you know, you want to think that there's no mold in the house, but unfortunately it just may creep up in there or maybe from old houses that you lived before. but it kind of carries with you till present sometimes. So I think that that's an area that is often overlooked that I find as a root cause for a lot of patients inflammation. Yeah. I think mold's going to be the end of us. I mean, since biblical times, it's been something we've been battling with too. So it's kind of the human experience to an extent, but now, nowadays, if you recognize that as a thing, you can actually do something about it. That's the first step. Well, and I think the other thing is it triggered that what you just said, it triggers other latent infections you may have in the system. So you have, you know, many people have Lyme, Lyme dormant in the, in the system, a mold exposure or re-exposure could be the thing that challenges the immune system enough for that Lyme to now say, Oh, this would be a good time for me to make an appearance. Right. Right. Yeah. Unfortunately, the mold is like the perfect thing in our ecosystem to kind of recycle the human body back to the earth when you're ready for it. If you're already dead, there's no problem. But if you're live, it's something that is going constantly against all your mechanisms of survival. So yeah, that is a bit of a problem if you don't address that. Listen, you all know me well enough by now. I am all for aging gracefully. That's what so much of this longevity work is about. And when it comes to my skin, I don't necessarily mind the aging part. 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Part of the reason why I really advocate for people having really good, at a baseline, having a couple of very good air treatment systems in their house, because I think it can give you, again, it can give you some buffer to a certain degree. And then, you know, if you've got a massive issue, then it's going to have to get dealt with. It's just, it's one of the most vexing issues I think I'm seeing pop up these days is people are really at their wits end trying to figure out how to find the right people to diagnose the mold, find the mold, then remediating it as a whole. It's easy when you've had blood, right? It's another thing when you're looking for something you can't smell or you don't know where it might be. So, okay, well, I'll have to do a whole other podcast on that someday. So you work extensively with metabolic dysfunction How does metabolic health interact with chronic inflammation and ultimately biological aging Because that what we here Yeah that all the intersections of these things Well, basically metabolic function is just energy utilization. So when you go into these chronic states, your energy kind of sucks. You feel that way, but your energy is not very efficient, which then can lead to slow metabolism, weight gain, and with the weight more inflammation and that cycle keeps kind of persisting. so at the cellular level is just there's signals that may drive the body to be less efficient and that might be an actual protective mechanism but oftentimes if you're just trying to flood the body with you know supplements nutrients that are just geared at putting more energy they may backfire if you don't recognize that the cells are trying to do something to protect itself by shutting down the energy pathways to an extent um so that's that's where that cell danger thing goes into which we can talk about in a moment here well i mean you know you brought it up a couple times i want to kind of get into generative medicine and the fancy stuff but before we do that this is i think cell danger response mcas histamine like all that whole family of mess yeah um is very much next to the nervous system it's another one of those things that is not necessarily acknowledged in the conventional system why people are being told i you know i don't know what you're talking about because your labs you look fine right you're fine and meanwhile you've got a crawling around trying to find well i mean this is very applicable for those who are the sickest but also the healthiest because sometimes when you're super healthy you might run into an illness that gets you on to the other side but how do you get back right so if you understand like how to address the cell danger and response if you get stuck there somehow then you can restore the body to the full potential that you need to or if you're already starting at the poor end, you can get out of there and finally get to the longevity end. So it's very applicable for anybody. Yeah. So I guess if you want to start into the, want me to start into the cell danger response. And you know, it's funny because I, when I was coaching people years ago, I remember someone, a woman saying to me, oh yes, my doctor tells me I'm in cell danger response. And I had never heard of such a thing. And I'm looking at her going, you are nuts. I don't know what's wrong with you, but I'm pretty sure being crazy is one of the things that's wrong with you. But as it turns out, whoever that physician was, was way ahead of the game. He recognized that everything that this woman did, and I believe knowing what I know now, the state of her nervous system had a lot to do with what was going on at a cellular level. And maybe you want to talk a little bit about that relationship, how the nervous system dysregulation affects people at a cellular level, which is what, you know, it's the thing we have to get our heads around so that we can handle it. Well, this is a good way to bring this in. So in terms of the, I guess the nervous system is a communication pathway for basically all your organs, but also to the cells. And so when you have this fight or flight response, it's kind of gathering resources to be able to run away from the bear at the moment in time. But at the same time, it's like a seesaw where you suppress the rest and digest or the parasympathic side of the nervous system. So the parasympathic side is really associated with rest, digest, repair, regenerate, sleep. And so you lose that ability to control that side of the body, which is where you want to be. But down to the cellular level, the cells then recognize that these signals are there for survival and they gear up to protect themselves from these threats. and the problem is even if the threats are gone depending on what happens sometimes the cells might be stuck in that mode and it may be stuck indefinitely and so these are the people that we see that are reactive to pretty much every food or supplement that they come in contact to or they have the histamine response and things that you normally you know imagine would help them don't really help them because they're just in that kind of frozen state or stuck state so kind of go into that i guess we'll talk about the different stages of cell danger response so it kind of helps to uh paint the picture so yeah there's three stages cdr1 two and three first state is inflammation and defense so when you get that immediate threat uh let's say an infection coming in the cells will signal themselves and actually it's kind of mediated a lot through the mitochondria they they release atp out and that signals other cells to kind of go into this defensive mode. So what it also does is stiffens the cell membrane. So it makes it less permeable for things to go in and it downregulates energy because it can use energy for other things later on, but they may not happen. So this is where the fatigue may set in. And then it creates a lot of these reactive oxygen species or inflammatory cytokines to help defend. So you're actually creating a lot of inflammation as a way to maybe clean up these infections or other threats that the body perceives. So in a perfect world, it resolves. It may neutralize infections and resolves. And then you go into stage two, which is you start to repair tissue, generate a little bit more energy. You start creating a little bit scarring just to help immediately fix the tissues. But some people can get stuck there, which you end up creating more fibrosis or more scar tissue or keloids and things like that. So it's not always a good thing to be stuck in stage two. But stage three, if you can complete stage two, stage three is more that anti-inflammatory generated pathway. So you are basically quenching a lot of the free radicals at that point. The cell membrane starts to get soft again. And basically you generate back to normal levels of ATP and energy into the system. And that usually gets you out of this whole chronic cascade. Usually if you just like sprained an ankle, you have a normal healing response. You'll go through stage one, two, three, you know, in a matter of days and you'll be out of that. But some people don't. And this is why we got to figure out why these might be the case. whether it's coming from your emotions or traumas that may be driving more of that stage one or lingering infections or, unfortunately, chronic mold exposure or other toxins that might be still hanging out in the system. So it's kind of a dance. I mean, some people, they may be okay until that major threat comes in the way. Like, for example, COVID, this was a really big situation. People were fine. They may have had a little bit of line. They may not have mold, not knowing. They're just getting by and they're feeling all right. And all of a sudden they get COVID and they turn into long COVID. So this is kind of that whole concept that can explain it to an extent where the body's now stuck in this low energy state indefinitely until they can get out of it somehow. Yeah, they just can't get, they can't break free. And I mean, you know, it keeps coming back to the same things, right? The nervous system regulation, the toxin exposure, whether it's molds, heavy metals, whatever the case may be. the traumas that, you know, I think we're just getting to the point where people are recognizing that you can't just bury your stuff at some point, it's going to come back to bite you. So you may as well dig it up and clear it out. Yeah. But, but now let's talk a little bit, some of these advanced treatments that you rely a lot on in chronic disease. So obviously the, and this is, I think a message that everybody really, people are starting to get again, because it's being repeated by people like you. And that is that these next things that we're going to talk about next are almost the shiny toys of this discussion. The foundational pieces that you can't get around and these might help, but they won't help as much if you don't address the stuff that's a pain to address, the trauma, the nervous system, like that stuff. But now let us speak about the top of the pyramid, kind of the shiny new toys, which conversely, I've had physicians say to me, these tools have allowed me to reduce the amount of time it takes me to move a patient from really sick to well, in some cases, it cuts it in half. Right, right. Right? Yeah. And so let's talk a little bit about what those are. And I'm going to give you a list and then I'd love you to kind of flip through it and say, oh, I like this. Okay. We have peptide protocols. We have IV nutrient therapy, which probably can really raise the bar when someone's very depleted and you don't have time for vitamins. Cellular support therapies. People are going to be sitting there going, what are those? Hormone optimization. A lot of people talking about that. And then mitochondrial restoration, which I want to talk about the restoration, not the activation, because if the engine's broke, gunning it's not going to help. Maybe you want to poke around in those a little bit. So I guess in the realm of peptides, I mean, they're very helpful for, I'd say, majority of the patients because they're just, you know, right cell signaling that can get the body to manage inflammation, promote the level of healing. I've seen it backfire too, and patients are in stuck in cell danger one where they actually feel worse from using any of the peptides So we think that would normally help. Yeah. So let me interrupt you on that because with, let's say, for example, with BPC-157, which universally is like the beloved peptide, right? It's like, it's so multifaceted. It affects so many different aspects. And I'm sure you've seen this now. There's a subset of people that BPC-157 makes them crazy. Have you connected the dots? Nobody's given me an answer on this. I'm suspecting that there is a cell danger, MCAS, toxin. Yeah, I think there is a potentially like a shift in serotonin, which can be a driver for maybe more stress for some patients. My other inkling, too, is like the BPC does have some antimicrobial, especially antiviral effects. So you might be knocking down some viral load and then the patients are responding to the aftermath that can occur from that. so that it's possible i mean especially if their brain's already kind of a little bit inflamed like you're just adding a little bit more icing to the cake that can drive them into more of the neural inflammation pathway so i think i've seen a couple times that that happened it probably varies i guess i think that's what's saying it's probably but but have you seen those people where i mean i had one guy who's like i'll use bpc because of this that and the other thing but my dog hides under the bed the entire time because i just get mad yeah i've seen that i've seen depression occur i've seen from insomnia occurs i've definitely seen some interesting yeah cases and so you're saying that it really it depends on the person like it's different reasons for different yeah i would imagine so i mean there's there's more that we didn't look into genetics and other things too but in terms of like you know their load they may have viruses parasites toxins but that's the things that we don't really know at the moment in time but you know until we explore that but yeah that can change their symptom presentation you know because after you clear some of those things people can then start taking it and feel fine like get all the full benefits that they're supposed to get you know it's shocking right what are your thoughts on there's a peptide there's a little peptide that doesn't get a lot of attention but i'm curious about your thoughts and whether it's something you use quite a lot um it's called ll37 yeah and it's an antimicrobial so it's antiviral antibacterial but i've seen it can really bite back if people don't use it properly yeah so one of the proposed mechanisms is it cleaves the cell membrane which then exposes it to your immune system to get in there so oftentimes when people use that they can actually get definitely a herxheimer response where they feel worse rather than better that's usually the immune system actually waking up to clean up all the debris or the the toxins in the cell itself might be also permeating tissues, which just creates another cascade of inflammation beyond that. So I've definitely seen that occur with the LL37. So that happens. I mean, it's kind of like just like taking an antibiotic too. I mean, when you take an antibiotic, you kill the bacteria and then the bacteria dies off and you deal with the leftover materials. So it's kind of the same concept there. Right. And so is the answer not to use it or do you think the answer is just to use it in very tiny amounts? Well, more of a holistic approach is make sure that the body's capable of clearing up the mess before you start killing things. So make sure your nervous system's regulated because your detox pathway is heavily influenced by your parasympathetic nervous system. But also, make sure you're peeing, pooing, sweating, and you may have some different supplements to support your liver, colon, gallbladder, kidneys, lymphatics, so that stuff has a way of getting on out. This is where sauna might be helpful too, just getting stuff out. Nice. okay IV nutrient therapy what do you where is your we use a lot I mean I would say it works to give you immediate nutrition to the cells especially a lot of people when they have like leaky gut they aren't absorbing you know half the oral supplements that they're taking um yeah there's a wide variety of nutrient therapies there's you know old school Myers which is vitamin c b vitamins minerals nowadays add amino acids and now there's NAD and other IV therapies that We use botanicals, curcumin, phosphatidylcholine, methylene blue, the list goes on. There's a lot of cool things that can be done in the IV therapy realm. You mentioned hydrogen by IV. Is that something you're just starting with? Is that new? I've been talking about hydrogen for a long time, but never by IV. Yeah, yeah. So in the past month, this is actually pretty new for us. we've got the first I think machine from Japan that is making medical grade hydrogen that can be used as an infusion so it infuses hydrogen gas into your saline or whatever solution you want and it disperses it so that you can get the hydrogen in the water coming back in the IV I find it very helpful too I mean it's kind of like a moderator for inflammation to an extent or an accentuator for certain things where I've seen like a normal nutrient bag, adding the hydrogen in there, get more benefits. You actually have more energy, more cognitive benefits with that. Or if you're doing things that like, for example, LF30 or anything that's killing things, it minimizes that die-off reaction to an extent so far. So it's pretty neat. It helps things and it minimizes some of the Herxheimer reactions, although I've seen on a couple of patients that it actually creates a little bit of Herx too. So I haven't yet kind of gone to the mechanism why that may be happening but you know some people yeah some people respond that way to hydrogen too even though they're taking tablets they don't feel that good initially so there may be some balancing effects that are going on because tyler lebarin who's the guy that you'll see talking about hydrogen a lot um always used to say and i don't know if he still says this but he used to say he used to refer to hydrogen as a selective antioxidant yeah in the sense that It's not that antioxidant you have to worry about overdoing things. It just seems to, and I think it has to do with its binding power. And so it'll somehow go after the worst of the worst, but leave the other pieces behind, which is a really unsophisticated way of saying. Yeah, and I've seen that too. And I think there's a lot more to explore with this because the IV administration just drives it in faster. And so I've seen it actually accelerate some of our normal treatments but also flare up certain patients where we normally don't see them flare up on. So it's more to explore, you know, in this case. Yeah, no kidding. A lot of big learning here again. Yeah, well, I mean, and he always used to say also that if you take your hydrogen with your supplements, it'll make the most of them. Yeah, yeah. So I think you get some better absorption because you're kind of quenching the inflammation that would normally prevent you from absorbing them. and also you get those redox pathways that are meant to be running without the suppression on those as well. So I think it's a very nice balancing act. Interesting the machine came from Japan. I mean, definitely Japan, countries like Japan are way ahead of the curve. Yeah, way more forward-thinking. They already have them in hospitals and ambulances. They use it all the time. Exactly. um okay so then what about those cellular support therapies what are those um so we have laser uh which we have an intravenous laser through a weber laser so they allows us to do a fiber optic cable in there and then we can get different spectrums of light so oh that's when you see people with yeah yeah so that can be in a cellular support therapy in a sense that you're using the light to activate different aspects of the mitochondrial respiration chain. So you can generate more ATP or moderate inflammation that way. So down to cellular level, the light kind of gets in there rather easily. We often pair it with other nutraceuticals or other IV therapies, such as phosphatidylcholine, which is really like, it makes up the majority of the cell and mitochondrial membrane. So when you add it with the light, it actually enhances the absorption and the effect into the cells too. So we actually pair them all together. But I guess people in the chronic illness realm may be familiar with something called the PK protocol, which is using phosphatidylcholine, sodium phenylbutyrate, and leukoborin, which basically gives you a lot of materials to repair your cell membranes in a short amount of time. But that's a way of just rebuilding the structure around the cell membrane. Because going back to cell danger 1, when the cell membranes are rigid, they can also deal with a lot of inflammation. So if you have a lot of toxins, emotions, and a lot of reactive species, you literally punch holes in the cells, and you got leaky cell walls, too. So by having those type of materials, you can actually physically repair the structure around the cell membrane. And so sometimes IVs would be a faster way of getting that in. The other one, which I think you're familiar with, is fatty 15. Fatty 15, it makes up probably like 1% of the cell membrane, maybe up to 5%. 5%. And then the mitochondrial membrane, probably like two to 3%. So less than 5% of the cell membranes, you know, inside and around the cells. But those sometimes are the missing links. If you don't have that fat, you still can have leaky cell walls, which allows toxins, infections, and these signaling molecules to kind of threaten the cell all the time. So I've seen that as a kind of a game changer sometimes to get the body out of cell danger and repair the cells. So if the cells are less stressed, then they can go on to the next stage. yeah so you're kind of talking here about mitochondrial restoration that we were going to get to both yeah at the same time is because yeah the cells yeah so cell and mitochondria kind of go hand in hand because of the cells seeing threat the mitochondria the first you know uh responders to that environment okay do you think that uh i mean i should have asked this when you were talking about peptides earlier do you think that they're overrated in any way uh no no they're not overrated i think well i guess depends i mean some people who are just peptide people and just say it's the cure all i mean i have to say that probably not but definitely helps a ton without a doubt it helps but then you got to know when to use it and why and you're just you're not following a cookie cutter plan you you can you can you can accentuate the peptides by doing these other things or knowing where the roadblocks are you can definitely like slam or allow the peptides to run full force depending on where you're at so i i find them very helpful i mean they are they do move the needle faster than what the body can do on its own. Definitely. Okay. So for someone who's chasing longevity, but they're not sick, which of the regenerative tools do you think really move the needle and which don't? Well, like what's the longevity? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, the peptides are super helpful. I think for me, it's just getting all the elements that would impair your optimal health to get out of the picture. So if you have the toxins, It's definitely detox support. Clear that out. One of the things that I've seen move the needle a lot are in the realm of those stem cell exosome growth factors. Those really help rejuvenate the body beyond the peptides themselves. So I think if people have the finances for those, those would be kind of right now the holy grail in terms of turning back the clock. Yeah. No, for sure. I think that, I think, what about, yeah, no, I mean, look, there's, there's a lot of really, and it just seems like every day there's a new thing, right? The total plasma exchange is becoming really big. The, the plasma phoresis is another one. Like there's all these different, and, and they all seem to be vying for attention. Yeah. Do you think it's gonna, it's gonna pan out? Like, do you think it's, it's, cause I think replacing someone's albumin is a very aggressive strategy. And it seems to me that filtering the blood and the plasma might be less aggressive, but give you as much. Yes. I think, yeah, right now what's available in the U.S. is therapeutic plasma exchange. It's been in the hospital system for so long. So it's more accessible. These newer filter devices are starting to get FDA approval. So probably sometime next year, we'll see there's two major players that I know of. One is inospheresis, and then the other one will be Clarify. So they are using a filtration system to filter your plasma so you can get your plasma coming back, but then it's cleared out of majority of the plastics, mold toxins, inflammatory milieu, and all the different things without having to throw away your plasma. So I think I'll be exploring that. I'll be offering the Therapy of Plasma Exchange initially but as soon as those get FDA approval we'll bring them in as well too because I think yeah anybody coming over for that all right definitely yeah there's something about the plot the TPE and I know people are all about it right now I just I just feel like you need to clear the space in your life for it because you do come out the other side a little you know it very draining you know it very draining because you are throwing away you know majority of your plasma at the moment in time and just so you lose minerals and vitamins as well as your um white uh your your um your immune cells yeah yeah a lot of immune cells but your immune signaling uh so you kind of start a little bit fresh but if you're not you know super healthy to begin with, you might feel wiped out for, you know, days, weeks on and after the procedure. So the other filtration devices are definitely a way to go. But going back to your longevity, you know, side of the thing, you those things are helpful, especially if you can afford them, because the toxic load that we are exposed to is kind of unfortunately outpace our ability to excrete them at some point. And so, you know, we're going to be brewing our own crap soon. so these tools are super helpful but if you're already on the sick side i mean your detox pathways aren't that great to begin with so you need something to move the needle faster so it's very applicable to to you know different different parties you know pretty much anybody at this point yeah no it's it's i mean it's because i think it could be ultimate the ultimate hack yeah we've been talking about all these years yeah ultimate hack this is yeah taking out the trash that allows the body go back to working. So, okay. So for the people that we're going to go back a little bit to an earlier conversation. So, you know, you've talked about people being mysteriously inflamed and their bodies are overprotecting. So we're back into this whole MCAS cellular alarm system world. You know, when are you able to say, oh, this is a cell danger response that's just overreacting? Like, is there a signal for you that's like, oh, yeah, this is overactive cell danger, which is not, I mean, it has to happen. But is there a sign for you that says that that's what's going on? Most of the time is when people develop these histamine type of reactions. But the problem is histamine can present in every organ of the body. And so it basically manifests into different symptoms for some people. But more obvious ones are like reactivities to foods that they probably didn't have reactions before or skin rashes or headaches or joint pains that come out of nowhere. You know, those are signs that the body is trying to defend itself by releasing histamine or other chemicals that are tied in with the cell's defensive mechanisms. Right. So that's when you're like, OK, no, this isn't gut dysbiosis. This is like this is something else. Yeah. I mean, if it's gut dysbiosis, if you treat it, you know, either, you know, evict the pathogenic pathogens and put the right bacteria, they get better. You know, those people, they get better in a short amount of time, like in a month or two, versus the people that have done all the gut repair and take tons of probiotics and they're still stuck in the rut. There's something else going on. We've talked about stress a lot today. Did we talk about how the nervous system actually primes mast cells and really drives this cell danger response? Do you want to maybe talk about that a little bit? Like, is there a mechanism where that chronic stress being stuck in fight or flight is actually getting relayed down to the cell? Yeah. Okay. So it kind of goes back to a level of vagal inhibition. Because the thing is, for the body to get all clear that things are good is usually when the parasympathetic function is firing normally. and if you're stuck in this chronic fight or flight response typically what we call is a sympathetic dominant state so your body's more easily agitated you can't calm down you can't sleep rest um and that drives more of this inflammatory pathway but the way for the body to resolve itself is to know that it's all clear and this is where the vagus uh nerve may be be frozen, stuck, inhibited, or injured. And then it's hard to tell the body that it's safe again. So the cells are picking that up. So the cells are picking that up to an extent where then inflammation is still running away and the cells are still like stealing energy, you know, or preventing the energy to be made just to survive to the next day. Right. So what's your favorite vagus nerve strategy? like what's your favorite quite a quite a few yeah well the neural therapy i would say it gives you more instant results for if anything where we do the ganglia injections yeah it's a quick yeah it's a really quick fix for a lot of people but yeah injecting procaine into uh the vegas and also the stelae just other ganglia to give a fast you know um break in the signal uh so it can reboot itself that's i've seen a tremendous benefits that way not everybody is comfortable doing those injections or not everybody can find someone to do them. So the next best thing are the vagal stimulators. There's a lot of these devices on the market now that they actually do help. They don't reset the nervous system pathways, but they just tell the vagus nerve to fire more, which can lift you a little bit out to kind of downregulate the sympathetic a little bit. But it's only good when you're using it because when you stop using it, if you don't correct those other reasons why the sympathetic tone might be high, then you might eventually stay in that sympathetic state again. so it does require more consistent usage um and then a couple neat things that i've come across more recently are various supplements well one of them actually they're peptides um there's a peptide i'm familiar with lactium nope yeah i heard that one okay so lactium is a 10-meter acid sequence derived from milk protein so it's actually naturally occurring okay yeah so there's there's a lot of companies supplement companies that actually make a product with lactium in there But there's one product I like that it's called Serenitin Plus, if I throw a name, but it has L-theanine and lactean. What's interesting about that is it works on the same receptors, GABA-A receptors, that Xanax hits. So you can actually kind of down-regulate the stress response, anxiety, and sometimes sleep with that. One of the other proposed mechanisms is that it can knock the cortisol or other stress hormones off the receptors in the brain. So it has more centrally acting effect where you can actually knock the stress hormones off the brain so that the body can start over again. Because if you're stuck in a state where the stress hormones are released and they're sitting on the brain, then you're going to be in that chronically stressed state until they can get released. And sometimes they never get released before they're released again. So you can kind of break this vicious feedback loop by having enough of these receptors freed that the body can feel safe again. So I pair it a lot with the injections when people, you know, after injections, have them start taking it or some people don't get to do the injections to start taking it. And over time, they can start to feel a little bit more relief in their overall symptom picture and feel more relaxed. Because once you can sleep, digest and all the other stuff goes with it. It sounds a bit like an inflammatory loop that we were talking about earlier, only in case with. So what's the name of the supplement? The supplement name is called Serenitin Plus, but the actual ingredient is called lactium. yeah so it's like i've seen it maybe health jevity uses it in a formula um they don't i should tell them to put it in there though they should yeah they should combine it yeah because because the other one i've been using is the the pepti sleep one which is uh which is in there so jevity uh they have that one which uh pepti sleep is like a derived from rice brown rice i think uh so it's a peptide naturally occurring from there this one has a slightly different mechanism it actually uh blocks the feedback loop for cortisol on the adrenals directly so it works on the lower level of the body so if you work on the lactium on the brain and you work on the adrenals you can kind of down regulate cortisol to an extent so you can sleep you know and then starts to break the cycle of the stress that way so cool yeah so histamine intolerance often people are down to like a food yeah yeah in your practice what really breaks breaks that so a lot of things i've seen so definitely if we can do any type of the autonomic nervous system reset work that's helpful i've seen limbic system uh treatments or the limbic system retraining work help a lot too um it takes time though that's that does take time and then the other things i've seen um pretty interestingly affect is the uh eviction of parasites from the gut and mold from the gut. And so if you remove those, you know, fending agents, they're creating less reaction to the microflora, and then you can eventually get good bacteria. The other one that I see kind of interestingly is fecal transplants. You know, if you get somebody else's healthy poop, typically those people are already eating whatever they want without any reactions, and you get the instructions from those bacteria coming into your gut ecosystem, they kind of re-educate your gut ecosystem to match the diversity so that you can start eating foods again. So that does, like those things help a lot. Yeah. It's pretty extreme, but I would, but you know, I'm not a fan of people just buying it, but I think when you're, when you're working with somebody, there's, there's a few ways. I mean, there's the live poop and then there's actually the newer product, which is a plugin for another name called Theta Biotic, which is a freeze dried poop. So you're not worried about somebody's poop overpopulating your gut. It's another way of doing it. Okay. All right. A couple more questions and we're done. So for the longevity audience, like coming back to that, those people want to really live a long time. So these are people who feel mostly fine, but they're still under, I mean, look, I don't think anybody can say they're not under some degree of chronic low grade stress. What are the early warning signs that they should watch out for that their system's getting overloaded like their mass cells or immune system is slipping into a hyperreactive state well like the food intolerances could be one like they're just eating the same thing they're eating and all of a sudden they just don't feel as good or they look rumbling and they're good i mean uh there's there's also just the cognitive issues again you can have a occasional fatigue that you you can't relate to anything um so for those i mean there's just minor slowdowns in your normal high level performance uh yeah or labs you know and sometimes the labs will pick it up before it shows up by the physical uh effects too so so you're just kind of feeling off like getting make sure you feeling off is not a good sign yeah so for for those individuals you know i mentioned earlier like toxin testing find out what their toxin loads are the other thing i wanted to bring up is just doing occasional parasite cleanses too i mean those kind of come in the environment because the food chain unfortunately does carry parasites. And if you don't do anything about them, they just hang out with you for the long haul. And that's something that could be a roadblock in the optimal performance as well. Do you have a favorite? I've used cell core products. I use prescriptive agents like ivermectin, Alinea, Mabendazol. So there's a lot. I mean, it just depends on what type of parasites you have. There's some stool testing that can kind of pick it up. uh but energetic testing is sometimes the way to more you know i say definitively diagnose it but again parasites are a tricky beast because they don't show up in the soil all the time so it's it's really it's a game it is a little bit of game yeah but again there's some herbs that you can like for example cell core you can take them every full moon or every few full moons just as a way to kind of clean house you know just occasionally they they're good broad spectrum ones that'll work for most, you know, average healthy people. Okay. All right. Let's look at where medicine is going. We're going to close up. Last three questions. Okay. You imagine medicine 10 years from now, what's one innovation you believe will radically change how we prevent or treat chronic disease? Right now is AI. It's quite helpful. It could basically do a lot of the brain thinking if you know how to use it and work with you on kind of figuring out the best treatment options for an individual so i think that is definitely going to change the way doctors practice and make some of the cookie cutter doctors more effective but may put some doctors out of business too depending on how it goes um so that that's one and then what i've been seeing right now and what we've been using is uh cbd uh cbd oh right yeah we're gonna talk Yeah, we're going to talk about that. So I say that CBD is it's it's it's coming and it's still here. I mean, it got legalized, which is a big step in allowing it to be used as medicine. But in the clinical realm, like this is where I've seen a big change in patient populations was with the use of intravenous CBD. yeah that's wild when you mentioned that earlier and so is it with the intravenous cbd where what's it what's it doing is that part of the nervous system reset is it a pain thing information pretty much all all of the above um so what makes this formulation unique is that it's water soluble because most of the cannabis is fat cell fuel or and it doesn't really penetrate and the other thing is the molecule size is down to the pico size. So extremely tiny. So it's a thousand times smaller than nano. So it can get in pretty much all the nooks and crannies of the body regulating all the things it's supposed to regulate. But going to why it's so helpful is the endocannabinoid system, if you're familiar with, and some of your listeners maybe, but just to kind of keep it simple, it's a communication pathway, cell messages that regulate a lot of things, including inflammation, pain, sleep, immune system, even oncology aspects. So it's basically something that your body should be producing to regulate the cycles of pain, stress, all the above. When it gets dysregulated, usually because of chronic stress or unfortunate age, you lose out on those communication molecules to an extent where you're not then controlling all your different pathways. So then you may develop insomnia, pain, fatigue, all these other things, or the inability to actually fight off general viral bacterial infections um so the cool thing about this is with an intravenous infusion you're flooding your body with all these usable cell molecules that facilitate some level of restoration in your communication pathways but more immediately this is where we were really like seeing some crazy stuff is that it has a direct antibacterial antifungal effect so any pathogens that might have been hiding, they actually start to get neutralized. And then it regulates the immune response, so you actually can mount up a proper fever-like response, which is the body's cleanup mode, and starting to clear that out. And then you also get a bit of mood stabilization. You get actually restoration on some of the autonomic functions, and there's a longer-term anti-inflammatory effect that happens after the treatment. So it's pretty interesting. And this is, I'd say, the forefront of medicine. That's really interesting. And is it a one and done? Or are you finding people need a series? It's usually a series. If you're relatively healthy, you can do it once in a while. So for the longevity side of things, people can do it alone. And actually, we've seen when you do it alongside of NAD, normally when you get NAD IVs, if you go too fast, you feel chest complications and you feel poorly. Well, the interesting thing is the anti-inflammatory or the antioxidant effects of the different molecules of CBD buffer that. So you can do a higher dose of NAD without feeling poorly in that same combination. So it's pretty neat. You can see you get more NAD. It allows NAD to recycle longer. So it's actually pretty interesting how the CBD may help in the longevity aspect. There's other downstream effects that it enhances stem cell signaling or stem cell differentiation. So it's pretty neat. You can amplify a lot of the already longevity therapies you're doing with the help of CBD. And is there any THC in there? This one has no THC. There's no psychoactive effect. So no psychoactive effect. So in the formula that we're using, there's actually a few formulas, but there's one formula that we're actually working with the company to get FDA approvals eventually on the treatment of infections, fibromyalgia. but the formula that we're using is called the CBD broad spectrum, which has CBD, CBG, CBDA, CBGA, CBC, and CBN. So it has no THC. So you don't really get that psychoactive component. Although some of those other cannabinoids, you do get a little bit of a relaxed sensation, a little bit chill sensation, but definitely no crazy response. No munchies either. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, that was fascinating. That was a great little guys. I almost forgot about the CBD. I'm so glad you brought that up. Now what's the longevity science you're most excited about and the area you think might be overhyped right now? Testing the, the testing for longevity that that's, that's where there's a lot of tests on the market and they all have their pluses and minuses. There there's one test that I kind of I'm trending towards that I like, which is the Generation Labs testing. Yeah, I just heard that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a neat one because it's looking more as instead of just your length of telomeres or the actual biological age that you have, it differentiates the rates of aging of your organ systems. So you can kind of get a better picture of which one's aging faster or slower. So for us, we can actually dive into those areas of concern. So let's say, for example, your lungs are aging faster than all the other areas. Well, let's just know there's something going on, whether it is respiratory infection that's untreated or mold, or you just came over a bout of flu or cold. That's something still lingering in the lungs. And so it gives us more usable tools to address it. Now with the PED-type bioregulators, you can be very specific on the organ itself, or in this case, any hidden infections or toxins that might be troubling those organs, you can work with some information. Yeah, it gives you an area of focus anyway. Okay, so last, last question. So what would be the very first thing you would change if you could redesign the entire healthcare system to actually prevent chronic disease? Teaching people about their nervous systems, honestly. I think just understanding how much of a role chronic stress and nervous system dysfunction leads to the whole cascade of events. I would say it's teaching that like from childhood, you know, starting with ways of coping with stress, you know, bagel stimulation, exercises, stuff to be able to, you know, downregulate whatever stress that comes their way. Because we are not immune to stress and stress will still be part of the human experiment. but uh it's just knowing that you can do that ahead of time and this is where like the doctors have a role unfortunately with limited time it would be difficult but if it's taught in the normal you know education experience then people will have less disease i mean then the next thing is diet too you know diet's a whole other beast if there was one easy free strategy you could share with people now that would help them to mitigate the negative impact of stress on them? What would it be? It could be breath work. It could be anything. What would be anything that would be easy for someone to start today? Yeah. Breath work, but just first step is like awareness. Is this being in tune with your emotions, knowing where they may have come from? So, and just understanding that impact on the body. So if you know that that's the case, once you can actually identify it and possibly even name it it changes your your uh relationship with it you know you may and also the other thing that goes with it is like a bit of forgiveness too because you know holding holding on to these emotions are really like linked to chronic disease states like cancer and autoimmune diseases so the emotions the first thing recognizing it and the next step is finding a way to let go like those are free but not easy and it requires a little bit of work but just first step is acknowledging that they exist as a part of your whole symptom presentation. That would free up a little bit more physical bandwidth or biochemical bandwidth for the body to start the healing process. I love it. Clement, this has been great. Thank you so much for your time today. Yes, you're welcome. I'm so happy to share this information with everybody. Yeah, I'm thrilled that you did. So why don't we just let people know where they can find you and where they can follow you, all the things. All right. So my social media is not super active at the moment, but it's Instagram is that Dr. Clement Lee. So D-R-C-L-E-M-E-N-T-L-E-E. And then our office website is opthealthwellness.com. So those are the main areas that people can find me. Yeah, we're working on trying to put some social media content in the future, but that's, you know, too busy helping people. Too busy helping people. Too busy helping people. Thank you so much again. It's been a pleasure. Have a spectacular day. Thanks, Nat. Thank you. Same to you. Thanks so much. Hey, folks. Just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only. No medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.