Fix the Brain, Change the Mind: Root-Cause Psychiatry with Dr. Robert Hedaya
70 min
•Jan 21, 20264 months agoSummary
Dr. Robert Hedaya, a pioneering functional psychiatrist with 46+ years of experience, discusses how root-cause medicine can treat psychiatric conditions by addressing underlying biological dysfunction rather than just suppressing symptoms. He introduces quantitative EEG (QEEG) brain mapping and targeted laser therapy as novel diagnostic and treatment modalities that reveal brain dysfunction patterns and enable precise neurological interventions.
Insights
- Psychiatric symptoms often mask treatable biological conditions (B12 deficiency, infections, hormonal imbalances) that conventional psychiatry overlooks by focusing only on neurotransmitter suppression
- Functional psychiatry achieves 100% remission rates in treatment-resistant depression by addressing root causes (diet, infections, toxins, hormonal dysfunction) rather than relying solely on psychopharmacology
- QEEG brain mapping combined with structural MRI imaging enables personalized diagnosis and targeted treatment of psychiatric and neurological conditions previously considered untreatable
- Laser photobiomodulation therapy works by restoring mitochondrial ATP production and cellular energy, allowing the brain to activate its own endogenous repair systems
- Mental health is fundamentally interconnected with systemic health—treating the body's biological dysfunction automatically improves psychiatric symptoms and vice versa
Trends
Shift from symptom-suppression psychiatry to root-cause functional psychiatry in mainstream medicine and Medicare policyIntegration of quantitative neuroimaging (QEEG, NeuroQuant MRI) into psychiatric diagnosis and treatment planningAdoption of photobiomodulation and hyperbaric oxygen therapy as evidence-based psychiatric interventionsRecognition of metabolic psychiatry and mitochondrial dysfunction as drivers of mental illnessGrowing validation of nutritional and lifestyle interventions in treating severe psychiatric conditions including schizophrenia and treatment-resistant depressionEmergence of infection-based models of psychiatric disease (PANDAS, Lyme disease, dental infections affecting brain chemistry)Personalized medicine approach replacing DSM categorical diagnosis in psychiatryTraining and credentialing of functional medicine practitioners in psychiatric careLong-term remission outcomes replacing symptom management as treatment success metricIntegration of neurofeedback, hyperbaric oxygen, and targeted laser therapy into psychiatric treatment protocols
Topics
Quantitative EEG (QEEG) brain mapping for psychiatric diagnosisPhotobiomodulation laser therapy for neurological and psychiatric conditionsB12 deficiency and panic attacksFunctional medicine approach to treatment-resistant depressionRoot-cause psychiatry and biological dysfunctionMitochondrial dysfunction and mental illnessMetabolic psychiatry and ketogenic diet interventionsHyperbaric oxygen therapy for psychiatric conditionsNeurofeedback for brain network regulationInfection-based models of psychiatric disease (PANDAS, Lyme, dental infections)Genetic glucocorticoid resistance and stress hormone dysfunctionMicrobiome and gut-brain axis in psychiatryHormonal imbalances driving psychiatric symptomsNeuroimaging (NeuroQuant MRI) for structural brain assessmentCommunity and social connection as psychiatric treatment
Companies
Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI)
Launching $100 million, 30-site study of functional medicine for disease prevention with Medicare now using term 'fun...
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Referenced for DSM validity critique and historical role in psychiatric research and policy
Georgetown University
Dr. Hedaya's training institution where he studied psychiatry and participated in early functional medicine cohorts
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Dr. Hedaya conducted cutting-edge psychiatric research there; QEEG standardized against NIH database
People
Dr. Robert Hedaya
Pioneer in functional psychiatry with 46+ years experience; developed QEEG and laser therapy protocols for psychiatri...
Dr. Mark Hyman
Host; functional medicine physician; co-founder of Function Health; wrote The UltraMetabolism Solution and The Blood ...
Abraham Hoffer
Canadian psychiatrist pioneer (1950s) who used high-dose vitamins for schizophrenia; influenced functional medicine f...
Linus Pauling
Nobel Prize winner who wrote 'Orthomolecular Psychiatry' (1969) establishing nutrition-based psychiatric treatment fr...
Chris Palmer
Harvard psychiatrist; author of 'Brain Energy'; researches metabolic psychiatry and brain energy deficits in mental i...
Satchin Panda
Circadian biology researcher discussed on podcast regarding metabolic and psychiatric health
Thomas Insel
Former NIMH director; quoted on DSM's 100% accuracy but zero validity for psychiatric diagnosis
Quotes
"A woman comes to me and she's having panic attacks. She has B12 deficiency that I give her injection. With the first injection, her panic is gone. And I'm like, oh my god, what else am I missing?"
Dr. Robert Hedaya•Opening case study
"You can't look at the body without looking at the brain. You can't look at the brain without looking at the body, and you can't look at the mind without looking at the brain, which is sadly what most psychiatry does."
Dr. Mark Hyman•Mid-episode
"The DSM is good for insurance companies. It's 100% accurate, but zero percent valid. It's really good at categorizing people according to symptoms, but not telling anything about what to do."
Dr. Robert Hedaya (quoting Thomas Insel)•Mid-episode
"When you create health, disease is a side effect. If you eat healthy, exercise, sleep well, your diabetes is going to go away. Your autoimmune disease can go away if you do all the right things."
Dr. Mark Hyman•Closing segment
"I would say diet. Be careful what comes into your mind. You need to really communicate with God or the universe. Some kind of exercise, whatever is appropriate for you, is really critical. And I would say relationships are essential."
Dr. Robert Hedaya•Treatment recommendations
Full Transcript
A woman comes to me and she's having panic attacks. She has B12 divisions that I give her injection. With the first injection, her panic is gone. And I'm like, oh my god, what else am I missing? Today's guest is Dr. Robert Hadea, a true pioneer in functional psychiatry and has been doing this work for more than 46 years, helping people with some of the most complex and treatment-resistant cases. And now psychiatry are looking at the brain, doing imaging, doing something called QEG, which is like a brain wave test that maps out things that we never saw before. And they were not making sense of. Talk about some of your more recent work around the whole adoption of this technology of improving neuropsychiatric treatment with QEGs. What is it? Why do we use it? We can follow and detect the information flow patterns in the brain. So we can see this and study a person's brain and then correlate with the symptoms. So when you're seeing these patterns, it tells you like which area of the brain is working, which is not working, when you target, how a correlates with symptoms. And so you can see almost like diagnostically in a way that you can never see before. Yeah. Oh, it's mind-boggling. You're the only one doing this? To my knowledge, yeah. So what do you think the most common things that are causing these problems of sort of anxiety, depression, cognitive mind? I hate that question. If you said to me, what are more things that you could tell a person to do to help themselves? I would say diet. Be careful what comes into your mind. You need to really communicate with God or the universe. So whatever you think this greater thing is, some kind of exercise, whatever is appropriate for you, is really critical. And I would say relationships are essential. As we head into a new year, a lot of us are thinking about what habits actually move the needle for our long-term health. And you know, I always come back to the gut because so much of how we feel every day begins there. One of the easiest, most impactful steps you can take is adding a high-quality symbiotic to your routine, which is why I continue to recommend seeds DS01 daily symbiotic. DS01 is formulated with 24 clinically and scientifically studied strains with whole body benefits, supporting gut health, healthy regularity, skin health, gut barrier integrity, immune health, and even micronutrient synthesis. And it fits seamlessly into a daily routine. For me, it's as automatic as my morning supplements. So if you're looking for a simple, meaningful way to start your year feeling your best, this is a great place to begin. Go to seed.com slash hymen and use code 20 hymen to get 20% off your first month. That's 20% off your first month at secd.com slash hymen, code 20 hymen. As we head into a new year, a lot of us feel that natural pull to reset, to feel lighter, clearer, and more energized. And it makes sense. Our detox pathways take a hit this time of year from stress, disrupted routines, and environmental exposures. The truth is, sometimes eating well isn't enough to fully support that reset. That's why in my 10-day detox, one of my favorite tools I always talk about is infrared sonotherapy. A high-quality infrared son, helps your body eliminate toxins more efficiently by boosting circulation, supporting lymphatic flow, and creating a deep, productive sweat at a lower, more comfortable temperature. I personally love Sunlighten's infrared sonas. Their patented technology delivers the highest quality infrared and is backed by over 25 years of research. Sonas sessions can help reduce inflammation, balance cortisol, support metabolic health, and restore energy. If you're ready for a fresh start, visit sunlighten.com. You can save up to $1,400 plus get exclusive year-round savings to the code, Hyman. Bob, Dr. Hadeyat, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Mark. It's great, great, great to be here. Holy cow, I don't know where to start. We were the OG functional medicine, Neophytes, learning functional medicine together at the first training session that applying functional medicine, clinical practice, and giga-harbour watching, and what was it, 1990? 98. And we were one of the first cohorts to go through the program. There were more teachers and there were students in the class. And we became best friends there, and it's been almost 30 years that we've been doing this functional medicine stuff. And I want to say thank you to you for what you've done functional medicine. You know, I'm the scientist, the clinician working, you know, in the trenches, you know, learning and expanding and doing all this, and you're out there. I'm just a big mouth. You're doing a great job, man. You're doing a great job. You're spreading it to the world, and it's fabulous, because it's really needed. I want to be the mind-viarist that inflicts every time. Right. Yeah, it's amazing. When we went back back then, and we were just sort of joking before the podcast, that, you know, people were laughing at us for what we were doing, and we're making fun of us for talking about things like leaky gut and mitochondria and the microbiome, and we didn't even call it that then, and we call it the gut. And now it's sort of mainstream. And just last week, I got a call from the Chief Medical Officer of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation or CMMI, which is the innovation hub within Medicare that looks at new solutions to product disease and problems. And she called me to tell me they were launching a $100 million effort with 30 different sites, $3 million or so each, to study functional medicine and lifestyle medicine in the treatment and prevention of product disease. In my lifetime, I never thought that would happen. And in the website of Medicare, it says the word functional medicine. And I'm like, wow, and we've come a long way. And you know, you are a psychiatrist, also in everything is at this point. As you say, accidental psychiatrism and accidental internist. Internist, yeah. So like you can't look at the body without looking at the brain. You can't look at the brain without looking at the body, and you can't look at the mind without looking at the brain, which is sadly what most psychiatry does. And we're this extraordinary moment in revolution. I mean, you're 73, I'm 66. We're kind of kind of old now, but getting younger. Getting younger and we've seen, we've seen the trajectory of science emerging over the last decades. And now there's people we've had on the podcast like Sabani Sete and Chris Palmer talking about metabolic psychiatry and norms of psychedelic psychiatry we've talked about with Dr. Madden others. And you actually, you know, do ketamine assist it there, which is in that realm, you know, you've really gotten in front of receipt to what's happening in the field of mental health, but from the lens of punctual medicine. And your book Way Back When, which I think was even before, you, you, you, you, you, you, it was before functional medicine. And then the standing biological psychiatry. I didn't know it, but I had discovered functional medicine. Yeah. In 1987. That's right. And maybe even, even before, because my internship there was a woman who had low potassium, and I decided to give up bananas instead of a, instead of K-light. You know, they did, they were not happy with me. No. That's right. Food is medicine. And you basically have seen, you've seen the development of this field and how so much of our ideas and concepts around mental health are just wrong. And that in order to treat people, you need to think about treating the whole system and that there are ways to fix the brain that changed your mind. And that's not something that is really done in psychiatry. In therapy or psychiatric drugs, they suppress symptoms, but they don't really deal with the root cause. And you know, as functional medicine doctors, we are root cause specialists. That's what we do. We like dig and dig and dig until we find the things that are off and then we try to correct them. And we also then try to do things with modalities and we're going to talk about, which help map out where the dysfunction or balances are. And then how to correct them by supporting the body's own endogenous healing system. They all didn't built in repair system that we have, which is available. Like we just don't know how to activate it. But what's really tragic is that there's so many people suffering with mental health issues and they're not able to access the care. They don't know that this is even an option for them. They don't understand that there's a way out of their suffering that has nothing to do with talking with therapists or not that that's bad, but I've certainly used them or taking psychiatric drugs, which generally don't work or cause a lot of side effects or have a lot of symptoms of suppression that don't really do the trick. Maybe you kind of walk us through sort of the original insight see how to run out, how to think differently? Because as you mentioned before, I wrote about called the Ultramarist Solution in 2009, which was a good decade more than when we first met and where I basically was seeing all these people and treating their bodies and their mental symptoms like better the ADD or the dementia or their impression or anxiety or whatever was going on or bipolar or schizophrenia. I was like, well, what's going on here? And I realized, oh, the body is connected to the brain. I saw the neck, it's called the neck. I think we missed that lecture, right? They didn't give that lecture, actually. It's true. We don't really think about, in psychiatry what happens below the neck, but that's where all the action is typically and it's systemic. So can you kind of walk us through the kind of origins or how you begin to understand this? What, when we saw the original cases you had were and what you've learned over the last 30 years, give us a set of the bird's eye view of the life and mind of obendium. So a quick thing that happened in medical school is I took six months off of medical school to study medicine on my own. And I had the two years under my belt and I took six months off and I said, you know, I'm memorizing stuff. Let me get this, right? So I took six months off and I was studying about 10 hours a day. I had a whole thing that I laid out and I stuck to it and I was very diligent and very busy. And I actually came to actually understand the body and basic physiological principles. I wasn't just memorizing. Fast forward, I go and I'm gonna be a surgeon. I have a great mentor who teaches me how to do hypnosis in 10 minutes. I'm like blown away by the results. I switch to child psychiatry, I go to the Georgetown, then I go to NIH where they were doing cutting edge research and then I go into practice and I'm in practice doing basically psychopharmacology and I'm doing cognitive behavioral therapy, which is at the time cutting edge therapy, which I learned from really one of the top doctors in the country. So a woman comes to me, her name is, we'll call her Joanne and she's 50 years old and she's having panic attacks. I'm like, well, this is a piece of cake. I mean, I'm just, you know, I'll do some cognitive behavioral therapy. Well, that didn't work. So I'll do some, you know, for me, you know, or Xanax came out at that time they were telling us to use eight milligrams of Xanax. Eight milligrams? Geez, it's like a horse's dust. So my working hypothesis was she's 50 years old, she has an unhappy marriage, her only child is going off the college. She's having separation anxiety because she wants to leave her husband and panic is basically separation anxiety where you think you're gonna die and then this deep parts of the brain, you trigger the adrenaline in the brain, the locus surrealistic, it's activated and you're like, I'm gonna die and you have panic. Your brain says mortal threat. So a year into treatment, I'm dancing Saturday night at a bar mitzvah and my page goes off and look, go find the phone booth back in the day, right? Okay, cool. Joanne, what's going on? I'm having a panic attack. Okay, talk to her and then I'm like, what is going on here? This is a year. She should be better. So Monday morning I go into the office early to look at her chart. I had one lab at a CBC, a complete blood count. Psychiatry and blood test, God, that was her AC back there. I had one turn out to be crucial. The size of her red blood cells, the MCV, that means really high. It was not really high, it was 101, the range of 80 or 100. I ignored it because two reasons. One, I was taught to treat train wrecks. A little out of the range, don't bother. Because I was trained in the hospital. They treat train wrecks, right? And the second thing is I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know what it meant. So I said, so I went to the National Library of Medicine, I looked it up and it says, oh, could be a B12 deficiency, do a shillings test. No longer available, but at the time I had done it, but I did it. And she has B12 deficiency, I give her injection. With the first injection, her panic is gone. And I'm like, oh my God, what else am I missing? Because people are in the system. They're just in the system. They go around this revolving door in the system, this doctor, that doctor, this medicine, that medicine. That's when I was like, I must be missing a lot of stuff. Yeah. And then there were series of things where my mother-in-law was, you know, when the doctor says it's all in your head, it means either you're crazy or the doctor's missing something. And I would say nine times that a 10 or more is the doctor's missing something. This is very true. In one sense, this is very simplistic, but you have the soft wear, which is how you think about things critical, obviously. But then you have the hardware, how's the brain functioning? Does it have the nutrients? Does even inflammation low? Are the circuitry, is it working properly, et cetera? Well, you got to have good hardware to deal with the software, right? If the hardware is broken, then you're not really going to get too far. You're going to be in therapy for 100 years. You're not going to get anywhere. So I always say it's a lot easier getting lightened if you're not mercury poison or B12 deficient. Your thyroid's working and your microbiome is healthy. It's a lot easier to work. Yeah, if it's working, like, how are you going to run the race? If you got rocks on your back, you can't do it. Well, that's an amazing story. I mean, I, you know, that's just one example. It's not that everybody with panic attacks has a B12 deficiency. That's the problem in medicine. We're like, oh, you're panic attacks. Oh, the cause of the B12. No, that's the symptoms in psychiatry are all based on a categorizing people according to a specific category and a disease, but it doesn't tell you anything about the cause. The DSM is good for insurance companies. That's the cause that the diagnostic and statistical manual for psychiatry, which kind of is organized based on categories. The encryption's what it doesn't tell you about etiology. Of course, at all. No, I once said, you know, remember Thomas and so was that, and then I asked him to, National Institute of Mental Health, and I had the inner rhythm once I said, so Thomas, what do you think of the DSM? Fine. And he goes, well, I think it has a 100% accuracy, but zero percent validity. I mean, it's really good in categorizing people according to the symptoms, but not telling anything about what to do. And I think this example of the panic attack is so key because there are many reasons for panic attacks, such as one, and it's, and you start looking at the biology, you kind of have to do a deep job to see what's going on. I mean, I had to, I was, I was, I remember writing my book, Culture Mind Solution, I was talking on the phone and something I was fixing my stereo or something in the office, and he heard me chatting, he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I was so depressed, and then I took the B complex and I was cured. And I'm like, well, yeah, if you have, if you have fully deficiency or B6 or B12, those infection or transverse, and it works, but it's not, I mean, everybody with depression has that. Right. So you kind of had that insight, you saw this. Yeah, and then I had to, my, I really, now don't get me wrong, alopathic medicine is great for certain things as we know, I don't want to throw that out. Of course, of course, I should throw it. But, you know, I saw really horrible care, my mother-in-law, my father at the major hospitals in New York City, and they misdiagnosed my mother-in-law. She had, she had mixidema, and they wouldn't treat it because the reference range, they didn't look at her clinically. That's true thyroid, low thyroid. And, and the reference range said, no, she's not, she's not abnormal. That was the same test we use now, but the reference range was up to 10. 10. And she was 11, they didn't want to bother treating it. Right. Like, it should be in three and a half, or two and a half even. And if you have a psychiatric problem, maybe even lower, and you have certain genetics, even lower. Yeah. So it depends on that. So anyway, whatever, you just forced to learn because there's nobody out there to help you patients. I would send people to end the chronologist, but I'd get back nothing. So I had to actually learn myself what to do. So you're the accidental internist. I'm the accidental psychiatrist. It'll all count as you're out of the same stuff. Because the body's one big interconnected. All these things traveled together. Now there's this whole deal that metabolic psychiatrist who talked about on the podcast, which uses like ketogenic diets and nutrition more aggressively. What do you think about those? I think it's great. It depends on the patient. You gotta see what each person needs. It really does have to be personalized. And one thing, let's say this, understand this. The people should understand this. There's a book called Mad in America. And it traces the history of psychiatry in America over 250 years. And what you see is that there are fads in psychiatry and probably in medicine as well. And so you see that maybe a hundred, 200 years ago, we thought that the problems were demons in our heads. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And we said, okay, accessism for everybody. And then actually they started putting people in giant centrifuges and spinning them around. And they said, oh, hey, it works. The studies show work. So the hospitals got together and they made these centrifuges that had like, they could spend 12 people at a time. That's great. They get the carnival. Yeah. Exactly. And so bigger and bigger and bigger. And then after about 30 years, the science, they started to say, you know, the study's not holding up. This is questionable whether it works. And then it comes in new model. Insulin coma, you know, right? And then we had the psychopharmacology revolution in the 50s, right? And I don't want to say medsared bad because I wouldn't want to practice without them, but it's so overused. Yeah. Over the years, I've worked with many trekkers, athletes, and even Olympians, people who consistently push their bodies to the limit. One thing I always recommend to keep their energy up, muscle strong and body resilient is timeline powered by mitochondrupure. My dear friend, Colin O'Braidy, who is currently trekking solo across Antarctica is no exception. When someone is facing conditions that extreme, there are a few non-negotiables I insist they pack. And my depur is at the top of that list. My depur is the only clinically proven uralith in a supplement that helps renew your mitochondria, so you feel clearer, stronger, and more resilient. Not the jittery kind of energy, but deep, steady energy that actually lasts. And while I may never trek across Antarctica, like Colin, for me, my depur is the bridge between, I think I can do this and I know I can. It's the tool that helps me take on the day, whether I'm on my bike during my workouts, or just getting through everyday life. Whether you're taking on something big this year, or just want to power through your day with more ease, give yourselves the support they need. Right now, you can get 35% office subscription at timeline.com slash dr-hyman. That's timeline.com slash dr-hyman. More than a decade ago, I wrote my bestselling book, The Blood Sugar Solution, because maintaining healthy blood sugar is one of the true foundations of lifelong health. When your blood sugar is stable, everything works better. Your metabolism, your energy, your mood, even your cognitive function. But here's the problem. Most health bars and grab and go snacks are anything but healthy. They're loaded with sugars, refined carbs, inflammatory oils and additives that send your blood sugar on a rollercoaster and undermine metabolic health. That's why rely on paleo-valley superfood bars that are made from real whole food ingredients. No gluten, no refined sugar, no inflammatory oils, and no synthetic fillers. As a physician, I appreciate that they provide steady, nutrient dense energy. Instead of the metabolic spikes and crashes caused by most packaged bars, the dark chocolate chip and apple cinnamon flavors are simple, clean formulations that reflect the integrity, I value and food. If you want a truly healthy option, you can trust, check them out at paleo-valley.com slash dr-hyman or use code hymen for 15% off your first order. There's always feds. There were feds. So the metabolic medicine to get to your question, if you don't want. So I think for sure we're onto something here in functional medicine. There's no question about that. No question, but you have to also recognize we have a chronic disease epidemic in the Western world for sure and spreading. And we're gonna actually succeed because we're identifying now through functional medicine, the root causes and it's gonna permeate the system. It will take 10 million, 20 million, 30 million. It's gonna permeate. Disease is change over time. If you remember in training thyroid problem, oh thyroid problem on the fifth floor, everybody runs up to see what it is. Let's feel the goiter. It's so rare. Now what is it? One in five women have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and the disease changes. So as we treat the chronic illness epidemic, we may have other things to deal with. So things do morph over time. We have long COVID. Right, now we have long COVID. Who would have thought that was coming? So you basically kind of mapped out this field of biologicals, psychiatry, even before you kind of found functional medicine, but you've evolved the model over the years. I knew treat people with dealing with their diet, with their gut, with nutritional status, detoxification with hormones, your infections, all the like, tick infections, whatever it is you have to deal with. But what I think is really interesting about your work is that you evolved into using certain modalities, which typically haven't not been used in psychiatry. You know that I always say this on the podcast, but like the joke is the neurologist pay no attention to the mind and psychiatry pay no attention to the brain. But now psychiatry are looking at the brain, doing imaging, doing something called QEEG, like an electron cephalogram, which is like a brain's wave test that maps out things that we never saw before. And they were not making sense of, and using modalities that people aren't typically using. So I let's sort of talk about some of your more recent work around the whole adoption of this technology of improving neuropsychiatric treatment with QEGs. What is it, quantitative EEG? How does it work? What does it do? Why do we use it? How does it connect to imaging? Like what kind of imaging do we do? And what kind of things are you seeing? Essentially the quantitative EEG is, we put a cap on a patient's head. We measured the electrical output at 19 points, and it goes into the computer. And it's really AI-driven. This is standardized against a age and sex match control through the NIH database. And what we do is we get all this information over the course of 15 or 20 minutes with eyes open, eyes closed, and then the computer takes that. So you're just in there, like quietly laying down in the... Yeah, your eyes are closed, painless, non-invasive. If you do it, we do it at home all over the country. Actually, we send the equipment to people's homes, it takes about an hour. And what we get back from that is a... Basically a wiring map of the brain, we can actually see all the networks in the brain. We can see the surface areas of the brain and how they're functioning. We can follow and detect the information flow patterns in the brain. So for example, dissociation, you'll see the information flow from the frontal lobe on the right side to the parietal lobe, on the right side of the brain. These are two different parts of the brain that is not flowing. This is dissociation. So we can see this and study a person's brain and then correlate with the symptoms. And then we also do imaging like the neuroquant MRI, which tells us the size of different areas, small areas in the brain. And we correlate all that data with the patient, with the symptoms and we say, okay, here's what's going on. This network is out of whack or this, it's working too hard or like your worry network is just like it's not resting, you know, or you have trouble with the salience network. So you can't decide what's important you get overwhelmed. You can process things properly. So when you're seeing these patterns, it tells you like which area of the brain is working, which is not working, when you target, how a correlates with symptoms. And so you can see almost like diagnostically, in a way that you can never see me for. Yeah, oh, it's mind boggling. I could see if someone has a metabolic problem and you could tell which areas of the brain are not working and what working. So what do you kind of see? And what are the kinds of patterns? So someone's like having depression or they're having, so in the polar or they're having whatever. So in depression, for example, you'll see that the frontal lobes are not talking to each other. The information not flowing from left to right and right to left, right? So that's something we can treat actually, you know, with a light to the brain, specifically targeted to those areas. Or for example, a guy I had who had schizophrenia and I didn't know he was paranoid. Okay, I didn't know to it. I did his QEG. I could see this track that went from the front of the brain to the back of the brain, the visual part of the brain. And this helps you, this track helps you assess the valence of a person's face. And I said, oh, this is strange, right? So I treated it with a laser. We could target it exactly. And after two or three treatments, he says, you know, I'm reading much faster and I didn't realize that whenever I look at someone, their face was getting distorted. And they looked like they were looking at me with disgust. And it actually, he says it, he said this. I remember him telling me this, that it actually doesn't make physical sense that their face would look that way, given how their body is. In other words, he could now see that is the distortion and that was gone. That was the basis of his paranoia. That's amazing. Amazing. It's astounding. You see the patterns in the brain waves that correlate with different areas of the brain that are dysfunctional, that are not aligned for various reasons. So what are the reasons that people's brain is not firing? I think of like almost like an arrhythmia for the heart, that your heart rate is not normal, your brain waves are not normal. What's causing that? Well, as many causes obviously, so it could be head injury. You know, it could have had a head trauma, you don't even remember, or maybe you had one when you were a kid. And that part of the brain, we had the trauma got segregated. In other words, it couldn't wire when you were adolescent and a young adult, brain rewires and it couldn't really rewire with the whole brain. So you had to re-route all the information highways in a different way. And now you don't have certain skills and you don't even know because you're just so used to it. You know what I mean? It could be that. It could be toxins. It could be certain infections have a tendency to go to different parts of the brain. Microplasma goes to the basal ganglia, for example. I've seen it. And then you treat the microplasma and you actually see the QEG change over time. It's slow. If you have an infection that affects your brain function, they won't really normalize for three months. It's gradual, but it will normalize. But it takes a while. Different infections go to different places. It's strange, but that's what they do. We know pandas, you know, strep infection with some kids, you know, goes into the, yeah, OCD in the basal ganglia in the core, they don't really us, et cetera. So, you know, we're seeing deep into the brain in a way that we could never see. And, you know, there's so much information in these scans. So I can say, oh, this net, you have, you know, you have six networks that are at a balance. Let's say, but which one of these is bothering you the most? That's where we're going to start. Yeah. And that will help reduce your stress, enable you to function better. You know, and oh, now I can start to cope with my life. I can organize things now. You know, that kind of thing. So you're basically seeing the abnormalities, but then you have to trace back what the causes are. Yes, we're always doing the root cause medicine. Thing is there a good thing? Always do the root cause. Yeah. Oh, we kind of can see that the pattern in the brain, which gives you a more targeted therapy. So you do the root cause analysis and the treatments. Right. But you also then do other modalities that are kind of insular, like neurofeedback, hyperveyorcoxion, laser therapy, which is something you've kind of innovated. And I love you to kind of talk about the hammock moment, everything, what is this sad about? And like, how did you kind of get all these pieces that come together? It was from God or the universe. What if you want to call it? So I was actually forced to take a vacation because we had paid for this place in somewhere in the Midwest. And they wouldn't give us how money backs so it was like, all right, we gotta go. So we took a week off and very sparse, very sparse. It's like nothing to do. Right. So just hanging out there and my daughter was with us and we went into a sweat lodge and there was unbelievable. It was great. And then the next day I'm in a hammock for six hours. And I'm actually at the time retired, because I had retired in 2014. Yeah. I missed medicine a lot, but I was retired. And I'm in the hammock for six hours and I'm reading a book, I doid, I think, how to heal the brain. I think that's the name of the book. Anyway, so I'm reading about Russia. In Russia, they're using lasers for the brain. They snake it into the body up into the brain. And they lay through the Instagram. Yeah, like it, through the arteries, through the veins, I did not the arteries, but the veins, right, into the brain. And then they're talking about how it works. And I'm like, oh my God, this could really help the brain. This is amazing, because it's giving ATP. It's doing a lot of different things we could talk about, but I was blown away. Then I'm like, well, I don't know, how would I even know where to point this thing anyway? And the next chapter is QEGs. And I'm like, oh my God, this is how I would know. And so I studied QEGs in lasers. Laser I should define is just focused light. It can be very low potency or high potency, but it's very target, very focused. So we could control the wavelength, how the frequency of the pulses, and a lot of parameters about it. So I'm, oh, I could learn QEG. And then I could probably know looking at symptoms where I need to apply the light to heal the brain. Yeah. And so I studied for three years, and I started to do it in 2017. So you were doing QEGs, you read about them. I'm thinking to learn about them. And I hire a mentor. And I studied for three years. What are they used for now and then? There's a difference between EEG, electroencephalogram, that neurologist do all the time. Procedures and things like that. Yeah, to see if you have a seizure or something like that. And then there's a quantitative EEG, which is AI. It takes all this data that you can never analyze. Yourself, all those squiggly lines that you see. Correct. 19 lines of this you can't, you can't put that all together. So the AI actually puts it together and gives you visual patterns and network analyses and analysis of the electrical patterns and different surface areas of all brain really. And that's the quantitative, it's quantity EEG. And it's all AI driven. Wow. And you were telling me that you can basically just send out a helmet that is not a helmet or a helmet. Or some kind of a box, a box, a computer and various things. Yes. It'll get up to your own brain. You don't hook it up to your brain. You put the cap on. No, the cap on. No one would think they're looking at the brain. You just put this cap on with gel and we have the tech who shows up on the screen and tells you what to do and make sure the connections are good. And then you just basically look at the screen for about 15, 20 minutes, depending how much time we want. Then you close your eyes, 15, 20 minutes, take it off, wash your hair, pack it up, send it back to us. That's amazing. So really anybody can get this. Anybody can get this. And then you get to report and then you identify the patterns and then you design a program. But you also have to do this sort of. Well, we do, that's part of what we do. But then I want to, I got to get clinical data. Right, know what's bothering you. And then I want a neuroquant MRI. So I can correlate it. There's a strong, explain that because you're talking about waves to the brain and then you're talking about structural changes to a quantitative analysis of a brain MRI. So the neuroquant is telling us about the structure of the brain, right? Is it big? Is it small? Is it inflamed? Is atrophied? Is trunk? And then the QEG, the quantitative EG that we do, that we put that cap on you, that tells us how to function. We have structure and we have function. And then we correlate them and look at your symptoms. And then we can say, okay, this is where we need to focus. Are you the only one doing this? To my knowledge, yeah. No one else using laser. And there are people, there's a lot of, they call it photo biomodulation, right? So there are people making these helmets now, right? They're red light therapy, and they're gonna do it. There's 1064, 810, whatever. And the helmets that they put on for the gender of disease and that kind of thing. But the thing is, I think that that is a non-specific, like we're very targeted, we're very specific and we've personalized that's kind of a non-specific. So, and I don't know, I think it's definitely debatable whether that penetrates the brain. It's highly unlikely that it penetrates because the laser, the laser penetrates about 2.6% of the light gets through that we know. Some people say 4.2%, about 2.6 let's say. But the LEDs, which are basically these lights that are very weak, you're not gonna get much going into the brain. But you may still get some general benefits because you have all the blood flow and the mitochondria and the cells and everything. So this is really key. You just said a big word about a condra. And I think, you know, there's a lot of work in this field around mitochondrial health and the brain. Whether it's Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or autism, who's in goes been on the podcast, is on tremendous work in understanding the mitochondrial dysfunction, autism, as a way of both understanding the disease and also treating it. Chris Palmer and Harvard has wrote a book called Brain Energy about the brain energy system and how that's so dysfunctional as a driver and that basically had energy deficit in the brain that leads to mental illness and by restoring healthy brain energy through ketogenic diets and metabolic health, you can correct a lot of psychiatric problems. So you kind of come at this the same way. And one of the treatments that you use, the laser, actually works by increasing mitochondrial function and ATP. Right. That's one of the main things that it does. So when you basically put the laser pointed to a certain area of the photons, the light particles or waves or whatever they are, go into the brain and they actually go to the mitochondria or like little batteries, right? And we have hundreds or thousands in every cell. And they have four points where they function and the electrons like floating down there like a wire, right? And the mitochondria do so many things, but one of the things they do is produce energy without that ATP molecule with dead, right? So the photon from the light actually knocks off a nitric oxide molecule and then the ATP flows through. It's more complicated than that, but the ATP now instantly flows through. Now you have more energy. Now the brain says, oh, now I have energy. I can do some repair work, fix the potholes. You know, do the work that needs to be done. Then you have the nitric oxide, bring more blood flow and then you have changes marked that are amazing. Like, misfolded proteins and proteins in the brain that don't fold right and they cause problems and they're like viruses, they spread, right? And it actually reduces that and reverses alpha-synucleon, misfolding and- And it's a dementia protein. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and tal protein, you know, all these things that beta amyloid, you know. And so there's the acute effects of the delight, the laser, which we're directing to specific places and then there's a fix that occur over time. Basically, do like the QEG, the brain imaging, the functional medicine assessment and work up for causes. Then you design a comprehensive plan and then you use various modalities. Laser therapy is one of the key ones that's kind of new and novel. There's a lot of research on this. A lot of research on laser. A lot of laser in the brain. Yeah, we're just in laser. Laser in tissues, laser in body, laser in the brain. I haven't seen anything about it used. Like I've seen the transcranial magnetic stimulation which is also used for depression and mental issues. But this is really different than that. Yeah, I personally think it's better because the TMS, the transcranial magnetic stimulation is basically like a shock. You know, it's a magnet that's shifting everything in one direction and then it shifts back to the other direction. So it's a little bit of a shock to the cells and the outcomes, although now they're modifying a little bit but the outcomes, they're not durable really. If the six months is a high relapse rate, you know, and it's a lot of money and expense and time and it's a laser, you don't see the relapse rate. It depends on the person. So now if you're treating a young person, well, as an example, this woman, the first patient I ever treated with the laser, she had facial blindness. And I didn't even know she had, I didn't even know what, I didn't even know what existed. Okay, and I'm treating her because she has a little early dementia and some memory problems and she has a little bit of a temporal lobe seizure. And anyway, I treat her with the laser based on the QEG and where I'm gonna treat her because she's having trouble finding words. And she tells me after the first visit, like five minutes after the first visit, she says, oh my God, I can remember the, I still hear her voice. I can remember the face of the person I worked with this morning. Now she had built up a whole structure because she was going to people's homes to do environmental consults. So she'd take pictures of their faces, the house, everything. Everything was documented because she couldn't count on her memory for a face. So she'd come to the door and see someone she would, like I never saw you before in my life. And then with the laser, five minutes later, she's, oh my God, I remember the face of the woman I treated this. That's pretty amazing. And then her husband and he had this mall on his face and like, wait, wait, wait, this, what are you talking about? This doesn't make any sense. I couldn't figure out, but what I figured out eventually is that the brain has a lot of cells that are kind of alive, they have a heartbeat, but they're not doing their job. I say that in a liminal state, the kind of on the border between alive and dead. And if you give them the energy, they wake up. And so her cells woke up, she was cured. That was it. That's amazing. I published it. It was the first ever cured acquired prosopagnos, you have facial blindness. And how long do you have to apply the laser to this head? It's a matter of how much energy you want to deliver to the, so we kind of measure the area we're treating. The square, how many centimeters squared we calculate, how much energy we want to deliver. And then I decided on the other parameters, you know, pulse frequency, et cetera. There's a lot of different parameters. And, and then we start slow. We always get certain imaging before to make sure there's no reason not to do it. You have to make sure they don't have an aneurysm, there's no tumor or there's no, you know what I mean. And then we apply it. And in some people, it actually really boom, they're on the road, they're done. Is it five minutes? Is it an hour? No, no, no, it's maybe, it depends. It could be 10 minutes to 20 to 25 minutes. It's a short treatment. Oh, short. And you're just seeing one treatment or needing multiple. For most things, you're going to need multiple treatments. I can't wait. So for example, for the visual thing, the guy needed three. I just did it on a guy who's 80 with Parkinson's. I did the visual thing. And he needed three and that was cured. It was cured. Not the Parkinson's, we're treating the Parkinson, but this was a different visual treatment. Yeah, yeah. It was causing trouble. But if you have someone with a chronic condition, then for example, one guy with Parkinson's, we were doing twice a week and now we're down to twice a month. And you combine that with other stuff, like hyperbaric oxygen therapy and neurofibid, and you back, speech therapy. Now there's, you want to, it's like going to the gym, the brain gym. You go into the brain gym. Before you go to the gym, if you want to work out, you buy steps, you have to eat the food, and then you've got to work them out, right? This is a really revolution. Are there any other your colleagues doing this? No, no, that's why I want to do these educational cons. I want to train people who need this. I have people coming from all over. So people listening and are curious about this, they can ask their doctor to work with you. Yeah, you can go to my website is wholepsychiatry.com and we have an educational consult model that we've been doing for about a year. And basically, you go to your doctor and you say, there's people feel weird asking the doctor, you know? So they go to the doctor and say, you know, you've helped me a lot, but we're kind of stuck here where I'm on too many meds or have these side effects, or I want to see if I can get to the root causes of my problem. And there's this guy, Dr. Hadella, who's doing this method is his website and he does these educational consults. So your doctor stays in charge. And I, I, you come and visit me and physically in person, and we'll spend probably four or five hours together. And I'll do physical and go over all the records and we'll have the QEG and we'll have the imaging for the structure. Have all that when you come. And then I process all that and I say, okay, here's what I think is going on. The root causes, here's what's going on in your brain. I'll show you and I'll show the doctor. I'll share the screen and then I'll say, okay, this is the workup. I want to confirm my hypotheses about your immune system or this or the other thing. Right? So you'll do these tests. And when we get all these tests back, I'll sit down for about typically four to six hours, both at all the data, which probably I won't have to do in the future when your company is in my office. I'll go with all the data and I'll come out with a plan, which I will make a sequential plan for the patient. Dirt on paper presented to the patient that come back to my office for the presentation, the doctor's on Zoom. And then the doctor will consult with me as needed going forward. And the point of this is to help a lot of people around the country and to train the doctors in this kind of methodology. That's my goal. That's my goal. I want to train people. This can't stay with me. And just to be clear, it's all based on clinical, the basic science, it's all there. Just go do a AI search on photo biomodulation of the brain. You'll see there's hundreds of thousands. Yeah, it's been to an interesting thing. There's a lot of advances in medicine and science, but they kind of languish outside of medicine because it's Dr. Tonodoppo. They can take decades. The decades, yes. So, I mean, I'm gonna mention that. Right? For people who don't know, this guy, he actually learned in the late 1800s, I think, that handwashing prevented peripheral fever. Well, a lot of women were dying after all the midwives were washing their hands. And the doctors weren't. Right? But the doctors didn't want to learn. And they were like when he said, maybe we should wash our hands, guys. They were like, oh, you're a heretic. How could you imply the doctors would cause their patients to become sick and you're banished from medicine? And he died in disgrace. You know what he did? He sent out a letter to 100 hospitals about handwashing. And they were incensed with him. Yeah. They didn't start washing their hands for 50 years. 50 years. His tragic. And one of our presidents died because the doctor didn't wash his hands real. McKinley was shot in a stomach. And you remember, McBernie? The McBernie's point from medical school with appendix. You know, the appendix point where you push on the stomach was named after the surgeon, McBernie, who got called to see McKinley after he got shot. And he stuck his finger in the wound. And he got infection. And he died from the infection. It wasn't from the kind shot. You know, it's not theater Roosevelt became president. And yeah, it does take a long time. I mean, you know, we've been doing this for 30 plus years. Most of us medicine around for 40 years. Right. Now only now we're seeing it in Medicare language on the website after decades, right? It's sad because so many people are suffering. And I think that, you know, the work you're doing to understand the biological mechanisms are really important. And the kind of, there's a lot of ways into repairing the brain. And what the modalities you use are actually different than using a drug because drugs typically interrupt your suppressor blocks and something in the body. These actually enhance the body's own repair systems like hyperbac oxygen and neurofeedback and laser. Can you talk about these as sort of therapeutic levers that you use in psychiatry and a little bit more about each one and how they work? You talk about the laser, but I think, you know, it's about energy, right? You least an improvement. Yep. So hyperbac oxygen, in a general sense, you could think of it as a general tonic for the body, right? Because you know, you're treating actually the whole body. It's not, it's not targeted necessarily to a part of the body, right? And in hyperbac oxygen, you're, you're doing so many things. You're increasing delivery of nutrients, right? You're increasing delivery of oxygen. You're actually increasing nerve growth. In fact, there's your stem cell growth, right? Capillary perfusion, right? So it's really helpful unless you happen to have babesia as infection, then it's maybe not the best idea because they love oxygen. The babesia loves oxygen, right? It lives in red blood cells and they love oxygen. So we don't do it if you have babesia, but we'll do it for lots of causes. And we don't use it in everybody, but we'll use it for people to... You have it in your office or you just have it? We have a couple of chambers in our office. And we... People have to live there near you to do it. Because it's good to go. Some people will move for a few months or a few weeks, six weeks to three months or even six months to get the treatments. And some people will buy a H-bot and put in hyperbac oxygen chamber, put in their house, for example. And then, you know, with the laser treatment, it has to be done in my office, but as I train people in this, which takes time to train them, then I'm hopeful that people will actually be able to do it with their patients in that city where they are, you know. But right now, I'm the guy who's doing that. And you see the results using this sort of extra combination of things in addition to functional medicine you weren't seeing before. By seeing results in situational... In other words, you've been doing functional medicine as a country for decades, right? So with the advent of these new technologies that you're applying or these old technologies that apply to new ways, what are you seeing as the improvement over what you were doing before? First of all, I can reach conditions that I can never reach. So for example, schizophrenia, a schizophrenia effect of disorder. Yeah. What, you know, depends on the resources the patient has they're willing to put treatment, for example. A lot of times these are infection-based, you know, you can actually normalize things, you can treat this particular area, the super-marginal gyros with the light, you know, which is helpful. I'm seeing people with Parkinson's disease now, which I never thought of the treating before. Now I can treat it with the neurofeedback, the hyperbar, and with the targeted laser. And you find that this is fascinating that Parkinson's like everything else is kind of a waste paper basket diagnosis. There's multiple types of Parkinson's. I have a guy who came through with Parkinson's and by looking at his QEG and then taking his history, his QEG was the tip-off. It turned out he fell or was bicycle twice in the same place and you could see it on the QEG. So all I had to do was laser that and he's been stable now for six, seven years without any laser without anything. Over the years, I've cared for thousands of patients and one thing always surprises me. We often wait too long to take care of our health. We tell ourselves, I'll start tomorrow or I'll deal with it if something goes wrong. But the truth is, real wellness starts at the cellular level. Every single day and how we nourish and protect ourselves really determines how we feel, how we age, and how resilient our bodies are over time. That's why I'm so excited about C15. It's the first essential fatty acid to emerge since omega-3 and it plays a critical role in keeping our cell membrane strong and healthy. In fact, research suggests that not having enough may actually speed up cellular aging. That's why I take fatty 15 every day and it's become a non-negotiable part of my routine. It's simple, it's easy and it feels great knowing I'm supporting myself and long-term health in such a meaningful way. If you wanna try for yourself, head to fatty15.com, slash hymen and use code hymen to save an extra 15% on a 90-day subscription. That's F-A-T-T-Y-1-5.com, hymen and use code hymen. When outside my practice or traveling for work, I'm focused on rituals that build my internal resilience and give me effortless energy. And when it comes to my wellness, I rely on brands I've trusted for years and peak is consistently raising the bar for high quality science back products. The secret to my transformation is their Pou-Air T-Duo. If you are seeking true lasting vitality, the answer is a powerful two-part solution. One element to fortify the gut microbiome and one element to optimize metabolic signaling and digestion. The green Pou-Air acts as your foundational gut strength in her, delivering polyphenols for cellular renewal and clean energy. The deeply fermented black Pou-Air is your metabolic enhancer, packed with naturally occurring pre, pro and postbiotics that support efficient fat metabolism and target discomfort like bloating. Together, they provide smoother digestion, steadier energy and a functional internal reset. Redefine your standard of health and secure 20% off your order plus a free starter kit to begin your intentional wellness journey today at peaklife.com slash hymen. That's P-I-Q-U-E-Life.com slash hymen. Now, I know you've seen the same thing where it can like psychiatric conditions, like bipolar or something like that. So with bipolar disorder, you have to be careful using the laser. They have to be stabilized before you do it. Because they can respond with too much activity and you could actually precipitate a mania. So you have to actually make sure they're on a stabilizer. If it's bipolar one, the severe type, you have to have the medicine to stabilize them for sure. Bipolar two, you can stabilize most of the time with lifestyle and treat the infections and the hormones and all that sleep and all those things. And then there are things like severe depression, treatment resistant depression, which nothing touches. And then I have a guy who's now 45, who depressed since he's 12 and started treating with laser. And he's been doing great for a couple of years, hadn't done that well for a long time. Now the laser has to be recalibrated now, so he's not doing as well. But you know, there's amazing things that we can do and neurological things, that's the other thing. For Alzheimer's. So one of the nice things about this is like people will come to me and they're like not ready for the whole million tests and the four and a half hours in the whole thing. So I could just say, you know what? I'm just gonna jump in with these non invasive things. I'm gonna do my quantitative EG. I'm gonna look at the volumes in the brain. I'm gonna take your history and you see what's going on. Do some objective testing with a computer and see where your cognitive abilities are, et cetera. And then I could just jump in and treat. You don't have to do anything. The neurofeedback you watch a movie. Just watch a movie. That's all the media. You have to actively engage with it. No, you can't control it. Your brain, I've done neurofeedback before and I had a different video game where I basically had to use my brain waves and I had to calm myself when I can get a certain relaxed brain wave than the video game would work. I'm stressed it wouldn't work. No, this is different. This is different. Your brain, you say, I wanna watch this video. Your brain tags it as a reward. And now you're watching the video and we control the settings, right? So let's say the default mode network, we wanted to function in this frequency. We wanna downregulate it or upregulate it, right? So we set the bar and we say, okay, when your brain default mode network goes here, you get to watch the movie. And when it doesn't, the movie gets gray or goes black where the sound goes down, right? So we start easy, you're getting reward, reward, reward, reward and then gradually make it a little harder and a little harder and it takes about six or seven sessions and then brain says, okay, I know how to do this. You cannot control it. This is automatic. Automatic, your brain is like, I want the reward. I want the movie. It'll be a good movie. Wow. And you also mentioned some of your work about a case of a dental infection and schizophrenia. So this is very interesting. There's a woman I've been treating her since late 90s, actually. And she has severe dental problem and she's just not gonna go for anything. So I put her on, didn't go to dental. She will not go to the dentist. She has so much infection in her mouth. And as you know, the infection causes changes in the brain chemistry. Right, increases glutamate, excited, toxicity. So she was going in and out of the hospital periodically for decades and put her on two antibiotics to at least control the infection, you know. And she hasn't been in the hospital. She's doing great. Better than she's done. And I've known her now for 26 years, something like that. Doing great. And she's the antibiotic. If you look at the genetic studies on psychiatric illness, they're called genome-wide association studies, right? Where they look at millions of people and look what genes show up in psychiatric. So what does, you know this. It's like the immune system and it's the hormones. Those are the big drivers of psychiatric inflammation. Yeah. So we're treating the neurotransmitters, right? But, you know, we're kind of missing the bone. Again, not that these meds are not useful. But you've got this woman eventually treated dental infections. No. She won't go. But she's stable and doing artwork and she's amazing. So they're really severe psychiatric problems. So they're treated to be a screening resistant depression. Yeah, you're treating these things. Or any different things. Yes, we treat like 40 different conditions. I mean, you know, as you do, you know, these things all travel together, right? So what do you think the most common things that are now today causing these problems of sort of anxiety, depression, kind of like what? I hate that question. Well, I mean, there's common things that are going, right? So like, you know, there's so many, there's always the outlier case. But like, what are the things that are really are driving this and I think? This food, right, this mental set, your mindset, right, this hormones, this infection, this sleep, there's a social breakdown as a big factor, right? Anti-social media, you know, you know, it's really a big problem. So there are problems at many levels. I don't know. We have long cohorts. So I would say if you said to me, like, look, what are four things that you could tell a person to do, right, to help themselves, right? I would say diet, right? So assimilation really, be careful about what you eat, right? As you say, your fork is your best medicine, right? Right? And also be careful what comes into your mind. What are you exposing yourself to? What are you listening to? What's on the social media? Who are your friends? What movies are you watching? What's so long? Brain pollution, right? It's all information and it damages you. You know, we're floating in a cesspool of bad information. I don't really try not to pay too much attention to news. And I just opened a newspaper app and I was a robb, a writer like stabbed by a son and Jews killed in Sydney and the people at Brownian, I'm like, what is going on? I just, it's so depressing. I try not to be an NBA campaign attention toy. It's not, it's not good. And so I think you have to work on this. I strongly believe this and I think your previous podcast guest talked about this. You need to really communicate with God or the universe. So whatever you think this greater thing is and be developed in relationship because the universe works with you. You work with it, it works with you, ask for help, you get help. Not always the way you want or when you think you should get it, but the universe has got you back. But yeah, I think I have to be more specific because I was like, I really want to sit down some more time at home, but then I didn't say how. And I just kind of bike accident and bust it up like very careful. I'm like, I can't go anywhere, but it was in one I had mine like these specifically, I want to be healthy at home. Right. Yeah. So that's very, so as a simulation, the food you take in the information, the people, that's one thing. And then you have exercise activity and it doesn't have to be crazy exercise. I mean, your bike or I'm a bike or right, but I've moderated and I wish I had moderated earlier, even though I love it. But exercise, some kind of exercise, whatever is appropriate for you is really critical. And I would say, we'll say relationships are essential. I think community, you know, they say social media and the community and social media is not a community. People don't even know what a community means anymore. I myself recently moved from Maryland. I was at Georgetown, Maryland and I recently moved about almost four years ago to New Jersey and I'm on the beach, right? And I have a whole community because I grew up with this community. I know people, people I'm walking down the street and that's Jersey shore. Jersey shore, yeah. Yeah. Bruce Springsteen, right? That's where he grew up. And people say, Hey, Doc, I don't even know who he is. Hey, Doc, kind of give you a lift. It's like, and I stop. I'm doing some with my car. And other guys, there's the guy who looks homeless. He's near my car. Somebody else says, Hey, Doc, this guy bother you. He's fine. He hangs around for a while. I go to synagogue and I have friends. I have people. I didn't realize how lonely I was actually in Maryland. I was pretty, you know, I had friends and I had my practice, my wife, my kids and everything. But I didn't realize that I didn't have a community. You know, and so the, I think people need to develop. It's important. It's definitely one of the best investments you can make. Yeah. I think community is medicine. Yeah. It really is. It really is. I'm a functional medicine perspective. There's a lot of things that are really going on now that are driving mental health issues. Like the microbiome changes, mitochondrial injury, toxins, nutritional factors, deficiencies. Yeah. It's just so much. The whole list. Yeah. I'm thinking a lot about the biomarkers of mental health, you know. And in function health, you know, the company co-founded, we do a lot of labs and we can see a lot of things that are related to mental health. People typically don't pick up on what is my marginal thyroid function like you were talking about or whether it's a, you know, B12 deficiency or whether it's a big one. You know, it's a big one. A big one is genetic, glucocorticoid resistance. So corticosteroids, which we make those are stress hormones, right? So they're a set of genes, five genes in R3C1 of KBP5, CRH receptor one and two, CRH. Yeah. And then it'd be a test on that, guys. Yes. I don't know. You know, whatever it's these genes that basically when you're when you make your stress hormones, when you're under stress, whatever is causing it, the stress hormone goes to the cell and then it goes into the cell, knocks on the door of the nucleus, the center of the cell where your genes are hiding, knocks on the way, hey, let me in. I got a message for the genes. Nobody answers the door or it takes a lot of knocks. So you have the stress hormone, but it's like insulin resistance. You're not really reading the signal. So now you're more vulnerable to PTSD, the depression, you know, even suicide because because you can't, the cortisol doesn't hit the receptor part. It doesn't translate to the genes to tell the genes that you're under stress. So you don't make enough proteins to help you cope with the stress. So it's that it breaks down some of the pathways that are to keep your body healthy. You can't respond to the stress. How do you know? Now you have PTSD much more easily, right? One of the things you talked about was you had like a 23-treeb and resistant depression patients and you had 100% for recovery rate. Like when you look at psychiatric medicine, like if 30% remission, that's like out of talking. You see my French like a miracle. That's right. And you're talking about 100%. That almost seems like, you know, too good to be true. So tell us about that. With my second book, which was the Anti-Depreson Survival Guide or Program, which was really functional medicine. I had a four-page spread in the Washington Post Health magazine and we had thousands of phone calls, I mean, thousands. You couldn't put phone down without someone calling. So I couldn't really obviously treat everyone. So we screened people with looking for people with treatment, resistant depression. Yeah. And basically people who had the resources, meaning the support to do what I was going to ask them to do, functional medicine. And I'm treating people and I was doing a lot of psychopharm, you know, I was hadn't dropped that too much. I was still doing a lot of psychopharm. So three years into this after the book, I'm like, wait a second. Everyone's getting better. The diabetes is going away. I see a process going getting better, right? The mislead is going away. Like maybe I'm lying to myself, maybe it's selective attention to the positive. Maybe I'm forgetting the failures. So I hired a statistician and, you know, we're collecting data on everybody. And I said, you got to go over the data and tell me, you know, hear all the patients, I've got the log. And he came back to me, he says, no, you're not lying to yourself. Everyone, the mean depression score at start, it was in the severe range, the low severe range, they all were better by 10 months. And you could see when doing just those combination of things, hand functional medicine, yeah, just doing the functional medicine by four months when they're implementing the program, three months, four months, they saw it to get better and they steadily improve and their overall health. All the other things are getting better too. Right. Well, that's the thing. You treat one thing, you treat everything, right? Right. That's the thing. I load form of medicine where each specialty folks on their particular organ or their particular body part and their disease categories, but there's so much cross all these diseases, like they're all inflammatory mostly. Right. And vital conjure. It's, we're really in a revolution in medicine, a revolution psychiatry. You know, I can't believe you're still going at it this hard. I, you know, I can't stop. I love it. Yeah, it's amazing. And there's no end to what we can learn, right? No, we were just like at the beginning. We were the OG kind of, we thought we like, I remember when I took that, I was like, oh, this is a vision established field. I'm like, we were kind of the few guys who kind of started to poke our nose around. And we've been doing this for so long. And the reason we keep doing it is because it works. Like, you just see miracles. I always say, every day I get to be witness to miracles, things that I never thought would possible to cure or treat in medical school and things that people suffer from that they don't need to and that we have answers for. They're just like getting them in. And then there's prevention, right? You know, you have a problem in your family history, there's vulnerability. You know, correct, you diet, exercise, you talk, get rid of the toxic influences in your life, you know, and prevent. I think about prevention is treatment. In other words, we kind of define treatment and prevention sort of separately. But I think if you do the same things you would do for prevention, you're also going to treat the problem. And if you eat healthy exercise, you sleep by, yeah, your diabetes is going to go away. Right? You know, right? Your autoimmune disease can go away if you do all the right things. If you do the things that you had healthy, then automatically I always say, when you create health disease, those are ways of side effect. And as a thing of it is, right? Also, if you have say you're working with someone in functional medicine and you know, you're correcting your diet, well, that's why your kids are going to see. And you're going to be helping generations, right? So it's, I think really we are. It's a revolutionary time. People are taking control of their health more now. They see the system is broken. It's not totally broken. There's a lot of good stuff going on. But it's, it's very limited with this chronic disease model. And what are you seeing among your colleagues in psychiatry? Are they fendling to these ideas or they resistant to they like, you're a crack for get out of my space, you know, like I think, you know, I get this thing from the New Jersey board, right? And there are no ideas in medicine. Let's talk about B vitamins. And I'm like, all right, well, that's a start, you know, but like I might, this rate, at this rate, we're looking at 100 years. I'm like, I want to, you know, I want it now, I want it now. And the other thing is not everyone has a bandwidth mark. You have the bandwidth, I have the bandwidth, you have the curiosity, you know, you want to get to the truth of it, you get to the root of it and you're just going to follow the science, you're going to follow what, what the truth is, you're not wedded to a model. I'm not wedded to functional medicine. If something else comes back out, that's better. Of course, great. Ready to the truth. Yes, exactly. But a lot of people are, they're too algorithmic and they think they too rigid, they're afraid they don't have the bandwidth. They can't handle the anxiety of not knowing, right? But we live in uncertainty, you know, that's life. Thank you for all you've done for the last decades to advance this field. You were kind of the OG functional medicine psychiatrist when there wasn't any. And there's Abraham Hoffer who was, he both got to know who was sort of pioneer really of functional medicine. You know, he told me with my second book, I'm very, I was very honored. He told me he said, I had lunch with him at a functional medicine conference. Yes, actually, I think I might have been there. Yeah. I think you were there. And he said to me, he says, Bob, you wrote the book I wanted to write. Yeah. He saw this. Well, he used for those listening to kind of close up. He was, you know, a psychiatrist in Canada back in the 50s and was a kind of a colleague of Linus Pauling and was sort of experimenting with schizophrenia by giving them high dose of certain vitamins and believe that there were certain pathways that were stuck that he could unlock. And that led to the development of sort of this field and in general, functional medicine. In fact, Linus Pauling went on to write in 1969 a key paper in science magazine called Orthomolecular Psychiatry, which was sort of, in sense, the original paper describing how he used nutrition to optimize your biochemistry to change your brain and your mood and your cognitive function. It was sort of so far ahead of its time that was like 1969. But I remember Abraham Hoffer, he was quite a guy. Yeah. And I'm so glad I got to meet him. I actually got to meet Linus Pauling to back today. He was, he was, yeah, he won the Nobel Prize for, for folding a protein, but also for, for the peace prize for the nuclear test band treaty in the 60s. Yeah. So he prevented the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons. And, yeah, he was part of the home movement that I was a part of, which was in medical school, called the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. And I got to kind of hear him speak. It was, it was pretty inspiring. Wow. Wow. A lot of journey, yeah. Yeah. Amazing. But a journey, yeah. So thanks, Bob, for being with me. It's been great. And anybody wants to know more about your work, find out more, where can they find you? Oh, they can go to like, it's like Whole Foods, you know, only its Whole Psychiatry. Okay. And we have, there's a lot of information on there. The videos is all kinds of information. And then there's a contact form. And if you want an educational consult, you know, look for a functional medicine doc in your area. And, you know, contact us and we'll help you find someone if you can't find somebody. We have a network that we're building. And, and then we'll meet, typically we'll meet on Zoom for 15, 30 minutes. Make sure this is right for you. That's the right fit. And then I think I can be helpful. And then we go from there. Well, I know I'm going to get my QEG. I want to see what's going on in my brain. That's what's happening. I, you know, I do it, I do it regularly. And I don't know if it's, I do the laser on myself, by the way. And I don't know if it's that or 25 years of mountain biking, but my doctor told me my brain looks like a 55 year old. Amazing. Which is thank God. I can only help. I can only help. I'm thanks for being here and thanks for coming all the way out, Stan. And I was a pleasure seeing you, Mark. It's been too long. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions, neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at...