Health
Episode 27: Environmental Medicine and its impact on our health
In Episode 27 of Functional Medicine in Real Life, hosts Sarah and Amy welcome Barry Smeltzer, a fellow Functional Medicine PA, to discuss the critical intersection of environmental medicine and healt...
Episode 27: Environmental Medicine and its impact on our health
Health •
0:00 / 0:00
Interactive Transcript
Speaker A
This is a Rogue Media network podcast.
Speaker B
Thanks for tuning in to Functional Medicine in Real Life. We're the team from Waco center for Functional Medicine, and when it comes to functional medicine, there's so much information and conflicting viewpoints. Our hope is to clear up some confusion around these topics and give real life applicable information on health from a holistic point of view.
Speaker C
Just keep in mind that this is not medical advice, so you should always consult with your provider before implementing anything we discuss on this podcast or schedule a consult with us. We would love to help. With all that said, let's dive into this episode of Functional Medicine in Real Life.
Speaker B
Welcome back to Functional Medicine in Real Life. I'm Sarah and this is Amy. We are Both Functional Medicine PAs at Waco center for Functional Medicine. And today we have Barry Smeltzer on. He is also a functional medicine pa. And so you have a practice in Bernie and then Austin as well, right?
Speaker A
Absolutely. In Texas.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker A
And loving it. Loving what you two are doing, getting the message out there, especially from a functional medicine perspective, and bringing a lot of different topics. So I really appreciate the information you're putting out.
Speaker C
Thank you.
Speaker B
And this is kind of a full circle moment because Barry actually is kind of the reason why I'm in functional medicine to begin with. So I took my son to Barry when I think he was like three maybe or something, and he had, you know, sensory processing disorder, wasn't sleeping, just a lot of. A lot of things going on. And so Barry was able to find that he had a lot of gut issues, some food sensitivities, you know, toxicities with different environmental toxins, and helped us detoxify his body. And he was literally thriving and grew like crazy amounts. And within, like, a few months of just making some changes. So then, of course, that just lit my fire to just research functional medicine as much as possible. And then now we're here. So it's kind of. It's kind of cool to be full circle like this. So.
Speaker A
It absolutely is, Sarah, because again, to me, you're doing what I was doing with you, and that is paying it forward because that's what happened to us when I was in Chicago and I was in orthopedics, so I wasn't in any of this. And it wasn't until my son got sick, fell off development developmental curve, ended up with no speech, no eye contact, contact ruling. And it wasn't me that said, oh, I need to do something about this. It was my wife. And her determination and persistence of this is more than just autism. Led Us down this road of understanding that the other factors that not many people even 15 years later are even approaching from a medical perspective, which is my son pooped maybe once or twice a week. He ate maybe five foods. He drank, you know, half a gallon of milk in three or four days. It just was. It was a recipe for disaster. Not to mention the immune dysregulation, the over vaccinating, his ability to, you know, deal with all of that at once. It led him down that vaccine injury where world simply because of everything that he was exposed to. And where we lived there was a lot of pesticide, you know, use if because we had. We were in outskirts in Chicago. So he literally was getting pesticide residue from the cornfields during the fall and spring. And then we also lived in Chicago. So you had all of the pollution coming off of the lake and from the steel mills in Gary, Indiana. So he was getting all this heavy metal exposure during the rest of the year. It was really surprising that he was doing as well as he was. Once we started investigating all of the different medical things that he was dealing with. And then the interventions that my wife started, like you were talking about dietary getting nutrient deficiencies caught up, getting him absorbing again. But we had to go even another step where we had to do a lot of heavy metal detoxification, a lot of pesticide detoxification, getting all that up. And just he was a beautiful responder, just like your son, where all those things just started getting him healthier. And the side effect of that was he started developing more. So it was such an amazing turnaround that as somebody who was in orthopedics and had no clue about any of this, I just looked at my wife and said, throw at me whatever you're researching because what we're seeing in Nick is incredible. And so that got me on that journey. And then I ended up working with one of the pioneers in a lot of the functional medicine, biomedical interventions. Her name is Dr. Andrew Usman and worked with her for over a year, I call it my fellowship because I learned so much in such a short period of time. But we just couldn't stay in Chicago. So we ended up coming all the way down to Texas because the only season my kids, all of my kids and I had four at the time, the only season they seemed to all be doing well was in the middle of summer. So my wife and I, well, south we go and so came down here and that's when we just had to continue the mission because at that point you can't not do this. I kind of feel that's how you felt was as much as you're learning and as much as you're helping your own family, it's like this has got to carry forward.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
You can't not do this.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
And that's where Healing Provisions was born. Was. I just. I couldn't not do this. It was too powerful. It was some of the most detailed, beneficial work I'd ever done. And that just got us started into seeing more of these kids on the spectrum, which then, you know, organically blossomed into seeing even adults.
Speaker C
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B
So Healing Provisions, you've. You've had that clinic for how long? How many years?
Speaker A
Going on 13 years.
Speaker C
13.
Speaker B
Wow, that's awesome. And so your son, at the time when he was kind of diagnosed with autism and kind of fell off the developmental curve, he was. How old was he?
Speaker A
Two and a half. He was two. Not even two and a half.
Speaker B
And how old is he now?
Speaker A
Seventeen.
Speaker B
All right.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
And thriving.
Speaker A
Oh, I mean, he's a typical teenager now, where he was pain in my butt.
Speaker C
And that's what you had six.
Speaker A
So, you know, that's number three coming down the pipeline. So this. We've already got two that. That have kind of been through this. And, you know, fortunately, we also have three behind them that are also coming up the stream and doing all this. So we get to see so many of the changes over and over again. So we get to fail in all sorts of new ways.
Speaker B
That's kind of what parenthood is. Yes, it is.
Speaker C
Yeah. Day to time.
Speaker B
So you see a lot of kids who have autism and stuff. So I mean. I mean, what do you find is a common denominator a lot of times with these kiddos who have autism? I mean, I feel like for me, a lot of times I see a lot of toxicity. Their bodies do not detoxify well. And if they've had vaccines, I mean, some kids have autism and they weren't vaccinated. And it's just. And you're like, well, thank goodness they weren't vaccinated, because who knows what have happened? But, you know, they. It's genetic kind of pred. They. They have a lot of genetic mutations like MTHFR or other mutations that make it hard for them to detoxify. Then it's like this perfect storm of, you know, I don't know. That's kind of what I find. But what do you typically see? Because you see a lot of kiddos on the spectrum and stuff.
Speaker A
Well, it's evolved Sarah it really has. And when we were first seeing patients back in, you know, early 2010s, especially in Chicago, it was, it was very heavy toxicity because Chicago is so toxic. A lot of heavy metal problems, lead toxicity, mercury toxicity. And it wasn't just from a vaccine perspective. It was actually literally just washing over their air because all the pollution. As we started to get more into seeing patients down here, I don't see the heavy pollution because we're in the hill country of San Antonio, you're in Waco. And what really changed was the immune dysregulation from more a chemical burden, but also from a allergen standpoint. But underlying, by far the number one most consistent thing that I see in every single patient, whether it be a kid on the spectrum or a parent that's coming in with fatigue, is gut issues. The constant under misunderstanding of people's thinking that calories in is calories out, and that when we eat something we automatically absorb, leads people to really not understanding that this is a dynamic of energy production versus energy demand. And if we're eating 2000 calories, but we're only absorbing 1200 because it's an open tube from here to the other end, then you're going to be missing out on a lot of energy that your body may be demanding and you're not supplying, right? And all of a sudden now you're falling under the demand, which means, number one, you can't get through your day without squeezing your three ounces to get through your day. Number two, you're not repairing anything at that point, which then if this starts happening chronically, all of a sudden your body says, well, we'll just rob from here to pay for this and that. Then now detoxification pathways suffer, hormone pathways suffer, neurologic pathways suffer. So now all these other areas are not getting what they need. And now we're starting to look into it from a functional medicine standpoint and looking at that and say, well, wow, we got all this stuff that needs to be supported. We're trying to recapture all that, but we're not going to that foundational baseline level of saying, what are they eating? What are they absorbing? What else is happening to the food that's not even getting absorbed correctly, that that inflammatory reactivity because it's not broken down fully, but sneaking in there and getting an immune reaction, because if it doesn't get broken down fully, the body, when it would not say it's chicken and you eat it, but it's not fully broken down but still sneaks into leaky gut syndrome, gets into the blood, the immune system from your parents looks at that and says, that's not chicken, and starts attacking it even though it's just chicken. Well, that then goes to the liver, and the liver now has to detoxify it versus using it for energy. So now you get a negative. So there's just all of those things. But now, taking it back to our kiddos who started off with this gut issue, you then added all of these other insults from what our kids are being born into versus what we were born into. Think about the water, the air, the food. I mean, not so much you two are younger than I am, but when I was growing up, organic food was called food.
Speaker C
Right?
Speaker A
We didn't have supermarkets that were ginormous. We had markets or grocery stores that could fit in a strip mall, because you didn't have. If food wasn't in season, it wasn't on the shelf, and you didn't have rows and rows of processed food like we do now.
Speaker C
Right. There's a new one every day, so they just got to make more room for all of it.
Speaker A
So gut issues then lead to more inability to detoxify, which then hits to your point of inability to. To detoxify. And I think it goes all the way back to even pregnancy, which is why I love doing prenatal patients, doing. Taking care of prenatal patients, because there is such a benefit to what I call ultimate prevention of having a healthy mom, being able to give birth to a healthy baby with all that knowledge, and then they're making better choices from. From day one.
Speaker C
Mm. Yeah. Well, and then, of course, we've talked a lot about the womb in which the fetus develops kind of prepares you for what kind of world it's going to be born into. So higher risk of insulin resistance just based on the mom's experience in the fetuses and your door experience. So that. That's like a decision that's not made for you. Even if you woke up on day one and made great decisions, Some of that's. The framework's already been laid down.
Speaker B
Or fight or flight cortisol. You know, mom is in fight or flight mode all the time in pregnancy, and her cortisol is always up.
Speaker C
Then, oh, we'll be born into the Holocaust. So let's. Let's plan on not like, rest, digest, reproduce. Let's just plan on being born in a wartime where food might be scarce and we might not be safe. We might be traveling a lot. So.
Speaker A
Well, what's interesting about that is we live in a first world country with no so called war going on right around us like it would be then. Yet you look at cortisol levels of many moms just because of social media, because of watching the news 24 7, getting on the Internet and seeing all the devastation happening everywhere and then getting into online talking points, these moms are actually showing signs of cortisol that's very similar to combat that.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
And then the other thing that's been really interesting that we've been doing a lot of research on just in the past, you know, year, within six months even is the, not only the vaginal microbiome, but the actual uterine microbiome and how that influences not only getting pregnant, but having a healthy uterus so that the baby gets that placenta that's actually nourishing them enough and not having all of the kind of failure to thrive issues that come up during pregnancy. Yeah, it's fascinating how much it matters.
Speaker C
Yeah, I read about that recently too. I was like, oh, well, of course, like it makes total sense. Of course it makes sense. But when you finally read about it, it's the first time you kind of actually make that conscious thought, thought process there.
Speaker A
But isn't it interesting even in our world where we're learning about this and I mean, I've been dealing with microbiome for 15 years and it's not, it just. The light bulb still just went off within last year of wow. How much that influences not only just pregnancy, but think of how many, you know, menstrual cycle and hormone issues and which then leads to a lot of adrenal issues because if your cycle's off, you're getting a monthly reminder that something's not right, which then drives, you know, women completely nuts because they have no idea what's going on.
Speaker C
Right. Yeah.
Speaker A
So it just, it is amazing to learn how much all of this is connected.
Speaker C
Yeah. And we've talked too about, you know, think about like progression of womenhood. Like women who, if you look back a hundred years, women weren't in the workforce, at least not the overwhelming majority of them. Their, you know, their job was in the home. Their job was to raise families, put food on the table. And, and then like we had the women who fought to sit at the corporate table and fought to have a career and, and so then they fought so hard to do that, but then they came home and did the same exact things and they tended to the children and then they made the food and they cleaned it up. So I Feel like we are starting to see a shift a little bit where now our generation is starting to say, you know what, I can't do 100% of both things. But as we're talking about how that affects the in utero experience for the fetus, I mean I think we're still seeing this evolve and hopefully, hopefully we're starting to turn a corner and like I said, maybe have a little bit healthier idea of what we can have on our plate as women. Because you really just can't have both tables 100%.
Speaker A
Well and I think that is something that we're trying to instill both with my own family, with our daughters, but also with the families that bringing their daughters in because that the other aspect of this is look what happened over this last three years. You know, I, back in mid 2010s I wasn't seeing perfectly healthy 16 to 19 year old girls coming into my office because they can't go to school.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
Wasn't seeing girls that are in their early twenties with such horrible dysregulated cycles that they, they are even contemplating, you know, hysterectomy. I mean this is crazy, right?
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker A
Or infertile infertility in a perfectly healthy mid 20 year old woman that it makes no sense history wise why they should have any issues getting your conceiva. And nobody is really even evaluating any of those stress and psychological factors, let alone all of the things that are like you're going to opportunities for this generation of women that have been long fought for and they're seeing these wonderful opportunities but carrying all the baggage, right, of have to do it better, have to do it, you know, perfectly, have to excel beyond any man or beyond any other nationality. And it's, it's that competition between, between each other that has in addition to all those other opportunities added this extra layer of burden of perfectionism and I.
Speaker C
Think like to a fault. We are raised by our parents and our parents are raised by their parents. So it's like that generational, I guess you can call it trauma if you will, but more like just patterns of how you know, my parents parents were in the Great Depression and how like the priorities of life and happiness were different then. However, me, however many years later, I'm still affected by how my great grandparents raised my grandparents. So we're just not taught and we spend a lot of time talking about this today like the basic functions of human life. Like we saw a holistic dentist. We don't, we're not taught how to swallow. We're not taught how to chew, we're not taught how to breathe. The pelvic floor therapist. We're not taught how to stand, how to put our weight on our feet, how to not lock our knees. Like we're not taught how to stay with posture. And we're taught everything else but the basic human functional things we're not taught how to do. We just kind of inherit those patterns or we make them up on our own, which may be even worse.
Speaker A
And then we're even into schooling where I mean I again, when I was in school it was mandatory to have home, home economics and to have shop class. Think of like just from not only like the very basic part, postural hygiene, those types of things. But now you're getting into how to make a meal.
Speaker C
Yeah, yeah, we're not taught that.
Speaker A
I mean, and how to take care of things at your home. You know, it's, it's incredible the how we are not setting up this generation for much success when it comes to the basic functions. Like you're talking about data, they lift.
Speaker C
Yeah. And I try to like a mantra I have in parenting is I have to. And I have to go back to this, that's why I call it a mantra is I have to always think about my child. He's seven. He should have only child problems. He should hit the problems that he has to encounter in his day should be only a child's problem. But if I if at, you know, 10 years old, I give him social media now I'm opening him up to the problems that are far beyond what his brain development can process through, his emotional intelligence can process through. And I think that's where you're going with the girls and the women and all the stressors that we have because we compare ourselves to this false ideals that are put out there.
Speaker A
Well, you're also hearing the opinions of people that number one, you don't know and two, that have no concept of where you're at.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
And what your opinion on. And their opinions can be as outlandish because there's no repercussion. You don't see them, you don't meet them.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
You couldn't be a bot for all we want. That's the craziest part of this is, you know, this is a such a isolated world with so much access.
Speaker C
But even still, if you know that like in functional medicine, like you said, people we were talking about earlier, people who are dabbling or like the, the things that are put out there, they're know that that's I don't know if that's quite right. But still as a human and you know, we've learned that we have to keep our, our, our minds open and we kind of have to always be willing to make space for another thought process or a different idea that may be different from what we do because that's how we evolve our practice and that's how we get better, is to kind of keep your mind open. But then you, so you still kind of have to check yourself like, well that lady, that, that's stupid what they just said. But then there's that party that's like, but I need to sit on it. And that's kind of stressful too, to be thinking like, okay, I have to carry this burden of the fact that this message is being put out. That's not correct. But then I have to also kind of like reevaluate it to make sure that it's not correct. Just a lot of pressure that I don't think we're intended to have.
Speaker A
I think that is something that's a lost art form called nuance. And being able to agree to disagree. Yes, yes, that's lost too many times. It's us versus them.
Speaker C
Yep.
Speaker A
And that has been fostered in our culture and I think that's where the online presence has been a huge negative. We don't see each other. And when you actually see somebody and have a face to face conversation and they disagree with you, you're apt to be more willing to compromise and come to an agreement because you're literally right in front of the person.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
They're a real person online and you're typing away. You're in a world of space, no one even knows who you are. So you be as vitriol as you want and you can just, whatever mood you're in can just come out as just verbal vomit. And it's terrible. And that's, it's one thing when you are in your 20s, 30s, 40s, odd, but it's these pre teen and teenage years that are so impressionable and they take it so personally. I mean, that's why you're, you're seeing teenage suicide rates at unprecedented levels and even preteen and then getting into image and dysphoria and why are we struggling now with all this gender dysphoria and all of these other questions. I mean, yes, this is, these are huge broad topics, but when you talk about functional medicine in real life, that functional side, we can't not think about all of those types of inputs and to your other point was generationally, there's energetic medicine practitioners that truly believe that the stressors of your parents actually are in your own DNA.
Speaker C
Right. Yeah.
Speaker A
And that has to be worked out through, you know, kind of a cleansing and kind of unburdening and that gets into especially a lot of my real sensitive patients. I do have somebody that actually sees them and can help them sort that out. And it really works towards autonomic kind of transitioning. That's, it's, it's kind of heavy things, but we're talking about getting them to their best version. You gotta go to those places.
Speaker C
Yeah. Mm, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B
And that's where, you know, functional medicine is very multifaceted. And a lot of times we, you know, say we are more like counselors than anything because we're talking about all those hard things. But I wanted to talk to you about environmental medicine because I mean, you're the president, right. Of American Academy Environmental Medicine.
Speaker A
I'm the executive director along White and our president, Diego Supporta is an MD out of New Jersey. He's an amazing man and practitioner as well.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
So we went to the conference in the fall and it was great. And I love that you have a lot of like minded people, you know, coming and speaking and it's all, you know, you never know what you're going to get sometimes when you go to those conferences. But for, I feel like they were all, we were all on the same page on lots of different things. So talk a little bit about what environmental medicine is and just, you know, I mean, it's very broad, all encompassing, you know, emf, mold, all the things. So yeah, just shed a little bit of light on that.
Speaker A
Oh, I really appreciate you stating that and that you had such a good time because you know, we work incredibly hard to not only discuss the core of environmental medicine, which is how our daily exposures affect our overall health and how our body responds to those daily exposures and toxicities and things that, I mean, because it's not just what's toxic to you that can hurt you. You know, you could eat a food like we just talked about. Chicken can hurt you if you don't absorb it correctly. Well, that's an environmental medicine type of subject because in our, in our philosophy, our mantra is everything affects everything. So that's why opening it up to even how your emotions can affect it matter. Maybe it's not the lowest hanging fruit. You definitely got to work on your daily, you know, exposures from a chemical perspective. Heavy metals, mold is a big Issue. Chronic infections can be a huge issue. Allergen sensitivity. So that's kind of hitting the core tenets of what environmental medicine truly believes in. But we had, like, two years ago, we had an entire conference based upon gastrointestinal health and how it affects the internal environment that then makes you more susceptible to the outside environment. This last year, it was all about new challenges and how over the last two and a half years, or last. At that time, it was two and a half years, how our world has changed, but more so, how has our body changed to this new, not natural exposure that has created havoc and immune dysregulation. So we had some excellent speakers talking about the science of not only the virus of COVID but the vaccine and the MRNA technology and all the things that can be a side effect or actually a cause to a new or worsening autoimmune issue. But we also brought in people that were actually talking about the energetic and the emotional piece and how the lockdowns, the, you know, forcing people into mandating them to get a vaccine, forcing them to not work, putting them out of work, kids wearing masks, people wearing masks, how that actually added another layer of trauma that the body now has to be burdened by. That, again, raises that body's demand. And we have no idea if we're even meeting that demand. And we're wondering why so many people are chronically stressed and all these new autoimmune issues are popping up. So to put it in a nutshell, that that is why environmental medicine, in our mind, is that natural evolution of where the combination of the foundational functional medicine core, now you add in the exposure and how the immune system not only is toxic, but prominent, but also could be hypersensitive to it. You could get a mold exposure that you aren't allergic to, but then the next time that you get into a building that has mold, you're instantly getting a headache, you're instantly getting nauseous, you're instantly having brain fog and can't function and not even realizing that's an exposure that you had previously that now is just prime the pump to. Every time you get a new exposure, you're now symptomatic.
Speaker C
Mm.
Speaker A
So there's all sorts of different things that environmental medicine is now evolving into, beyond just the allergy and how to retrain the immune system and how to get the body to shut off abnormal reactions to now encompassing the entirety of how our body gets exposed, how our body responds, and how can we create better balance between how our body is Functioning to this ever changing and unfortunately worsening environment.
Speaker C
Mm.
Speaker B
So what are some. I mean, so, for instance, mold exposure is one that's like a big trigger.
Speaker A
We found, you know, a lot of people.
Speaker B
Yeah. And, you know, it's so hard because when you suspect that there is mold in somebody's home, there's like this cognitive dissonance of, like, no, I don't want that to be the reality. So that can't be. There's no way, you know, so how. What do you typically recommend? Do you say, well, to just get an ERMI test and kind of swab and send it off and see what happens and go from there? Like, what? You know, what is your approach to.
Speaker C
Kind of a suspicion. Yeah.
Speaker B
Your suspicion of it. And then kind of not convincing your patient but saying, like, hey, you know, I think there's some. You need to look into this.
Speaker A
Number one most important thing to do is get the chronological history down. People. Once you start to actually go backwards and you start talking to them about how they were doing and how they were like, yeah, everything seemed to be fine in my 20s or my kids seem to be doing great. We moved into this one house. It was a rental. And about three months later, all of a sudden, you know, he started getting sick more often, or I started getting headaches, and all of a sudden I just had this overwhelming brain fog. I just thought it was because we were stressed out and this. And you start to say, okay, well, when did you move? And move. About two months before that. And what happened? And you said, well, was there any renovations done? Oh, we had this one water leak, but it was cleared up right away, like, yeah, okay. And then you start giving them that information. You kind of just start dropping those nuggets of, listen, was it okay, or was it maybe not okay? Did anyone really confirm that it was gone? Or, you know, did you know that there was things in there? And a lot of times that suspicion that you start sparking in them correlated with the timeline of their actual symptoms. It's enough to start saying, okay, well, let's just say maybe that it's still an issue. Is there a way for us to investigate that? Whether it's in the current home that they're in or in their body?
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
That's when we start saying, okay. In addition to everything else, this exposure, if it's ongoing or if it's previously and now you're primed to it, we have to identify to what extent. So it's not about whether you had a mold exposure. It's what can we look for that quantifies your level of sensitivity, your level of allergy, your level of toxicity? So that's when we start bringing in the different types of testing that can actually evaluate that for them. Because at least in my experience, if you give people the information that makes sense and is reasonable, they start saying, why wouldn't we do that? It doesn't make any sense not to investigate that. And that's kind of the reason they're there to see you in the first place, is not to tell them what to do, but to partner in crime with them and get them to that level of, wow. Yeah, we need to figure this out.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
That annoying train.
Speaker C
And now there's a train coming through.
Speaker B
Hang on. So then let's say you have a patient that has mold or whatever. Do you find, like, do you usually put them on, like, binders and things like that? Or what do you typically. I mean, there's Shoemaker protocol. There's all kinds of, you know, there's.
Speaker A
All kinds of stuff falling out of favor from. From Dr. Shoemaker's portable. It's not to say it isn't effective for anybody. I just saying that I have found that it really requires a little bit more of a nuanced approach or a little bit more identifying the. The. How the patient responds to things they've already tried. Because I have a lot of patients where, yeah, we did, you know, we went on activate charcoal, and I couldn't tolerate it at all. I went on Diflucan, and I was, you know, bedridden, or especially with kids, they just won't take it, or they want to put them on, oh, geez, cholestyramine, you know, and that's a. It's a pretty significant bile acid, you know, binder. And that's just very. Not very well tolerated, especially in kids. But still, they don't have any other options. Consider, you know, according to the doctors they've seen. So there's more. So I have tried developing a lot more options. You know, yes, I want to get binding. Yes, I want to get the bile acids to not get reabsorbed. Yes, I want to get the liver purging things out more. So I kind of go reverse engineer and say, well, what's. What am I looking to do? And instead of going to the medication that does it, are there other possible botanical, homeopathic, you know, lighter medications that I can start with that won't create an intolerance or be too much for them, but still somewhat effective? And then we can eventually, if need be, go to a more aggressive approach. And if you can do that now, you can give that patient or the patient's parents the availability of saying, well, you have this option, this option or this option. Here's the level of aggressiveness. You know, we can start here if you think that he's real sensitive. And we can just see a lot of times that's homeopathic because sometimes kids, to get them detoxing better, you just got to get their bodies back in line from an energetic standpoint. And all of a sudden they're actually purging a lot of it out. But you need to do a whole lot.
Speaker B
So when you say get them back.
Speaker A
In line, giving them more options. Sorry.
Speaker B
So when you say get them back in line from an energetic standpoint, are you referring to, you know, making sure they're absorbing what they're eating and getting their gut in check? And that kind of thing goes a.
Speaker A
Little bit beyond that because that's, I mean, bottom line, every patient that I see, we're working on gut first we're going to assess what are you absorbing, how much are you eating? Are you eating real food? You know, we got to get past the standard American diet. We got to get beyond just eating five foods. We got to get beyond routine of eating well, we got to have this, this day. And it's about variety. It's about getting, you know, a great options because you can't foster a good microbiome with eating the same things every day. So that's first and foremost. But when we talk about getting the body energetically in line now we're talking about more biophys, biophysiology from a kind of cellular energetic pattern that gets a little bit in the weeds. But that's kind of the basis homeopathy, where you're using it's like cures like. And I am by no means a homeopath and they are homeopathic practitioners that will explain is so much better than I am. But the way that I kind of explain it and how I understand it is the premise of homeopathy is light cures light. So say you've got somebody who has a chronic strep issue and they keep getting strep throat or they just have colonization, but they still have all these symptoms, especially even in the brain, like pans and pandas. There are formulations from a homeopathic standpoint that will actually give what would be considered strep, but it's diluted to such a degree that there's actually no strep left in it. And that is a dilution called Avogadro's number. That's such a dilution that there's no actual strep left in it. But what happens is the energetic pattern in that substance is still there. You have to suspend your disbelief a little bit. But by doing that and catching it at the right dilution, you're actually forming an equal and opposite to what that pattern is. That's stopping them from actually getting rid of the strap. And now it comes together and it eliminates that block and now they can actually do it again. So, you know, it's kind of like the old transistor radios where, you know, you had the dial and, and you would go to your station and then you hit the station and go right by it and you have to fine tune it. That's kind of like homeopathy. You got to keep giving the doses over and over until you hit it. And then it actually equals and opposites that that reaction. And hopefully, if there's any homeopaths listening, I did not do a disservice to the explanation.
Speaker B
Yeah, yeah. I'm not a homeopath, by no means. Yeah, well, so, so I mean, lda, I know, like you do LDA a lot too. I mean, that's not, it's not similar. But I mean, in terms of dilution wise, like, I mean, LDA just go into a little bit. Because you're kind of like the guru there.
Speaker A
One of my favorite subjects.
Speaker B
Yeah, you're kind of like the guru.
Speaker A
Environmental medicine introduced me to low dose allergen therapy. And low dose allergen therapy has been an absolute game changer for not only my practice, but for my patients, for our academy. Because low dose allergen therapy is retraining your immune response to all the things that not only are you allergic to, but even could be sensitive to. And how low dose allergen therapy works is instead of like when you are doing allergy testing, what are you testing for? You're testing for the IGE reactivity, right? And that IG reactivity then creates an inflammatory response which leads histamine, which then you have all this icky symptoms, right? When you do that, they test your back, they pepper your back with all those things and you have all those spots and kind of, you know, look like you've gone through a war and then they find which ones are high and they say, well, we need to desensitize you to those allergens. So they pick each one. They give you a dose that they feel is going to desensitize it. So they're basically trying to push down that IGE response. Where LDA comes in is you have to think of this differently because when we start talking about immune response, the immune response starts with the native T cell. Native T cells, the general of the immune system. Whenever we get something that gets in our body, whether it's an allergen, a virus, bacteria, parasite, et cetera, we have specific white blood cells called antigen presenting cells. They have little dendrites on them and they grab onto that thing and they bring it over to the native T cell and they put it on and say, is this us? Not us. And if the T cell says no, that's not us, it actually sends out the troops. That's where the B cells come in and make our antibodies. But that's also where the inflammatory cascade starts. So the inflammatory cascade brings white blood cells. That's why you get pus with infections, all this stuff, right. What you're doing from a regular allergy treatment is you're trying to desensitize those antibodies so that you don't have those like shooting blanks so you don't get the histamine release, you get allergy symptoms. Yay. How does the body naturally shut off an immune response? Well, it's not back and forth. You've got the native T cell and you've got the B cells and the inflammation. What shuts it off? Well, it doesn't go back and forth. Almost everything from a biochemical standpoint in the body is a leak, most often a negative feedback loop. Well, for the immune system, you have an entire different set of part of the immune system called our regulatory T cells. They're the ones that pick up the faint signals from the B cells, from the antibodies, from the white blood cells saying, hey, we got this handle. Goes to the beat to the regulatory T cell, regulatory T cell goes back to the T. Native T cell says, shuttle down, we're good, don't need to keep sending. Then the native T cell can go find the next antigen. That's the reader's digest version of our immune system works. What low dose allergen therapy does is instead of trying to suppress or push down the allergens, it goes over to that regulatory T cell. Because regulatory T cells have been proven to actually get down regulated from toxicity, preservatives, pollution. My best example of that is how many people had allergies 60, 70 years ago, a little hay fever here and there. Now it's a multi billion dollar Industry. What's changed in that 50 or 60 years? It certainly hasn't been our genetics, but have we had a slight rise in toxicity, especially when it comes to everyday exposures? Yes. Our water, our food, our air. So let's just say that that's down regulating those T cells. If those aren't online, then this isn't going to stop. So what LDA does is it utilizes an enzyme our body already makes a beta glucuronidase and beta glucuronidase actually, when you inject it right underneath the skin level or under your tongue, it actually proliferates. T regulatory cells, amazing. But then they're very sensitive, so we can actually give them a job, but we don't have to give a big dose of something that they're allergic to. You can give 1 10,000 to 1,1 million of a dose of something that they could possibly be allergic to where it doesn't even trigger an immune reaction, but the regulatory T cells actually pick up on that and they go to the native T cell and say, shut off from reacting to cedar. Shut off reacting to peanuts. Shut up to reacting to milk. So now you're getting the natural recovery of the whole system instead of trying to just suppress or down regulate the actual immune response in the first place. So low dose allergen therapy, instead of having to pick or choose, we can hit hundreds of things because what we're really doing is turning the stop lights back on. So we have just for foods, we have them just for inhalants, we haven't. Just for chemicals. And we hit hundreds of things all at once.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
So people who have like eczema, allergies, I mean, there's a lot of things that can be used for or with lda, honestly, food sensitivities, I mean, all kinds of things.
Speaker A
Chemical. It's the only, only immunotherapy that's number one for chemicals which hardly any other thing even touches chemicals. Like if you go into a department store and you're in the perfume area and you get an instant headache, you go into these schools that have been basically raided because of all the chemicals are spraying all over everything and the kid can't even focus because they've got so much exposure that they, this, their brain can't handle it. LDA can actually help with that as well.
Speaker C
Mm, yeah.
Speaker B
Yeah. We use LDA in our clinic too. And we've had patients, you know, a patient that I saw a few weeks ago and she was like, she's only got two doses of LDA and normally in the spring, she's in the ER four or five times. And she was like, I. My asthma is fine. Like, I've not had any asthma flares, you know, and she's only had two injections in the fall. And then have another patient who moved from Oregon. And of course, when he moved here, his allergies just exploded because Central Texas hates everybody. And so normally he has, like, sinus infection every single month, especially in the spring. And so he started doing LDA and he's like, I mean, I'm great. He's like, maybe a little bit of sniffles now in the spring, but honestly, like, night and day difference, you know, so it really does help. And what I like about it is you do an injection every two months. It's not like one every week. And then also, you know, you do eight to 12, depending on the person, and then they usually are good and.
Speaker A
Don'T need it, especially in kids. A lot of times I'll lose them because they just don't have allergies anymore.
Speaker B
Right.
Speaker C
They just don't come back.
Speaker B
I'm good, which is good.
Speaker A
That's our spreading it out. And then the parents actually forget to even make an appointment because, like, I'm not going to make an appointment until they're actually symptomatic.
Speaker C
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B
I still need to treat my family because.
Speaker C
Add it to our list, Sarah. Yeah, I know. Add it to my list of things.
Speaker B
To do with orofunctional myology and all the things.
Speaker C
Pelvic floor therapy and. Yeah, yeah. The more we learn and interview people, the more things we add to our list of things that we need to do for us and our families, which.
Speaker B
Isn'T good for our cortisol levels, you.
Speaker A
Know, but it sparks your curiosity. That's why doing a podcast is so incredibly useful, because you now get basically a crash course in all these different areas and all these different stories and that stuff that, you know, normally you would have to take time out to actually justify learning about, whereas if you're interviewing somebody now, it's like you become kind of a. You do some homework on it, then you learn first section hockey. And it's incredible how you can incorporate it not only for your own practice, but for your family. Like you're saying, yeah, yourselves, it's. It's a wonderful new medium.
Speaker C
Yeah, we really should use these as category two hours, too, because, I mean, it's learning for sure.
Speaker B
Cme.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
Well, okay. So one of the things that I know is big right now and especially I'm sure environmental medicine, like 5G EMFs, you know, I mean, how do we. How do we protect ourselves? Like, there's 5G towers everywhere. Like, I mean, what do you do? Like, how do you, you know, and that's one thing that we always kind of talk to our patients about is like, there's a difference in knowing and doing the best you can, but also not letting that spike your cortisol and stress you out too, you know, so there are so many things to know about and be aware of, but, like, what can you do? And you know, like, how the big.
Speaker A
Thing when it comes to almost all of these is you can work yourself up into a frenzy because just like Covid, these are invisible invaders. And you don't know if you are susceptible. You don't know if you've got it. I mean, until you start having sex. Symptoms and the fear factor that was with COVID like, you're talking about spiking your cortisol levels. I'm a huge believer in maintaining balance. So when it comes to EMFs, yes, 5G is a thing, but 5G is but a fraction of where we're headed. You know, 10G is actually already on the table. So it's not a question of elimination. Our world is. Is so tech hungry that they're not going to say no. So it's more of understanding the effects. It's also getting a little more educated on what the effects are. Right, but then how can you safely mitigate and how can you safely reduce? Because it's not going to be, can we just stop EMS from getting us? It's going to be, can we get to a point where no matter how high the frequency or how much we're getting bombarded, we have the ability to overcome it. Because everything else that we do have more control over, we can actually do something about. And that's where, yes, you can do things like turning off your routers. That's a very simple thing to do. You can put a Faraday bag over your cell phone. You cannot have it sitting next to, you know, your pocket or put it in your bra strap for women or put it in your pocket for men. So you have, you know, radiation right into your testicles. There's things that you can do. The question is, and it's. It's not, it's not a answered by any means is to what degree is it affecting you? You know, yes, it increases heat, but is that heat because of radiation or is that heat because of the battery itself? I don't know. And I'm not the expert. You know, we do have experts that are going to be speaking about EMFs, hopefully whether if it's not this fall at our virtual conference, we may have a pre conference at our upcoming EnviroMed25 in San Antonio this spring, which you'll be the first podcast that's learning about this in San Antonio that's going to be talking about not only EMFs but all the different kinds of everyday exposures, having some of the world class speakers talking about this. And for everyone, learning about this is going to be something you have to know about because it's, it's one thing to talk about it from a 5D perspective and how yes, it can be damaging, especially the closer you are to it, but we need to start figuring out what are we going to do to mitigate tension. Because whether or not we want it, it's coming and how can we do things? Because there are different devices, there are different things not just to block it, but actually to kind of create a equal. It's kind of like homeopathy, but it creates an equal and opposite. So the actual waves themselves kind of get dispersed so that they don't penetrate. Well, that's like that way then you can still utilize your phone. That's those little discs that you put on the phone.
Speaker B
And I've seen those and I'm like, do they work? How do you know they work?
Speaker A
Like I don't know yet. And that's where I'm really interested in learning coming this spring from some of these experts because the technology is getting much improved and I think that's going to be our only real option.
Speaker B
Yeah, what is it? I'm trying to remember the name of those devices where you can use it to look for dirty energy. I'm talking about like gauss meter. What did you say again?
Speaker A
I think it's a gauss meter.
Speaker B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like, I know if you ever hear like a humming coming from your outlets or light switches or whatever, like that is dirty energy. And that's basically, you know, I guess the question would be, okay, how far is that dirty energy traveling to then hit your body to affect your cells? And, and so I mean grounding, all that, you know, there's a lot of stuff like grounding mats and going outside and grounding, you know, and I got grounding sheets.
Speaker C
How do you. Yeah. Barry, what do you think patients generally like to do for grounding? Like what's the best, most tolerated, the people most compliant with it? They don't hate it like what's the easiest bang for your buck?
Speaker A
Barefoot?
Speaker B
Yeah. Going outside and walking around.
Speaker A
Get on the ground.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker A
You know, we're, we, you know, probably in the last hundred years have probably the only real generations that truly just stopped touching the earth. You know, think about even if you worked in a, in a, you know, so called town, you still, you know, walked on boards and you walked outside and you, almost everybody had a garden, so your hands were in the dirt, you were touching the soil that's electrically transferring energy back and forth. And there's Zach Bush, who's an environmental medicine type of doctor who very much talks about how our bodies are energetic and need to be out in nature because that literally centers us from a physiologic standpoint with the earth, which then that's where our food comes from. So then we're going to be more in tune with our environment in our boot. But yeah, this, the EMS are disrupting a lot of that and we have to keep resetting it and resetting it. So there's, if you can't do that and that's the easiest and cheapest. The other things like you're talking about with grounding mats and sheets and blankets and all that, those are all good as well. But I truly believe if you, it's kind of like getting into a sauna for you know, far infrared energy versus just being out in the sun.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
It's like one's good but the other one's truly what God presented. So it's, there's we are made their son, we're also made to touch the earth. So it's kind of gets into the, the premise of functional medicine in the first place which is get back in touch with nature. We were a lot healthier overall when we were doing that versus trying to sterilize our lives.
Speaker C
Yeah, I mean I think overall, generally the more you can uncomplicate things and go back to the basics and just take off the layers of crap that the world has on us is probably your best bet.
Speaker A
Think of what that does to your cortisol level.
Speaker C
I know, I know. And I think intuition has become broken as well. Like I think we've lost intuition, we've lost like, I think diet culture is a big example of this. Like to eat when you're hungry and like, hey, I think I've had an instinct to eat this instead of this. So. But I think we overthink it and we've just lost that ability to read our bodies and listen to our bodies and so we're just so far removed from it.
Speaker B
Yeah.
Speaker A
Chaos is definitely a big part of that too. Is the chaos of all of the information. Like chaos of our crazy lives. The chaos of just the norms.
Speaker C
Yep. Yeah.
Speaker B
The noise in my head that tells.
Speaker C
Me I have all these things to do. I know, I know.
Speaker B
Just to do all these things and.
Speaker C
Put them in the. What?
Speaker B
What is it?
Speaker C
In the container. Put them in the container, push it across the room, and then we'll deal with it later. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B
I mean, yeah, that's. That's the hard part too about functional medicine is there's so much and there's so many things that we don't know.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
Don't know about. And everything is. Yeah. And that's the hard part too that I find with patients is being like you said, having that intuition and being self reflective. And it's almost like you have to teach them, you know, how to do that. I mean, you have some. That kind of already are doing it. But I will say that since COVID and all that stuff, people are, they're a lot more in tune.
Speaker C
Yeah. One like we've talked about with the pelvic floor physical therapist and you know how we're not learned, we're not taught how to stand correctly and that's where a lot of our issues come from. Even like tmj, she was saying, and how like functional medicine is that way patients will come back. Oh, what about like the EMFs and then this and this. And then I read this article about this and then this. I'm. Okay, well, let's go back to the very basic things, like what are you eating, how are you sleeping, what is your stress level? Like, what is your day to day basis? Like where you are engulfed 99% of the time, what does that look like? And then, you know, we can add on the fancy, sexier, more exciting stuff later. But let's go back and start with the basics.
Speaker A
Foundational. You aren't eat, sleeping or pooping. You're not in health.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker B
Do you see a lot of cancer patients or do you, I mean, do you see any you refer them to?
Speaker A
Like, I, I have an amazing referral source here in San Antonio. Dr. Derek Guillory @ Rook Causes Medicine. He's also on our American Academy Environmental Medicine Board of directors. And he is one of his specialties really is cancer. And cancer is one of those things where my best treatment for cancer is prevention.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
Because cancer doesn't play by the rules and it doesn't care if you are a healthy person. If it gets started, it can start really decimating things. Another person and protocol that we follow and we help and we've had her speak at our conferences and hope to have an entire course with her is Dr. Naysha Winters who does metabolic terrain theory and her training and that is very geared towards cancer and helping patients to overcome in a more natural way, utilizing the body's innate ability to heal. And there's the Bredesen protocol and things like that too. So there's. There's a lot of different options.
Speaker B
Yeah, that's something that we are seeing a lot more in. Like for our primary care practice, you know, we are getting a lot of patients asking like, do you treat cancer? Do you help treat cancer? And we're like, nope, we do not. However, we can tell you these are things to help your body. But there's other people who are more well versed in it. That is not our kind of have.
Speaker A
To hit it with all guns blazing.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker A
When it comes to cancer. And that's why I love Dr. Guillory because he's got all the guns at his office. I mean he has got modalities, he has got IV treatments, he has got ozone, he has got hyperbarics, he's got hyperthermic chambers, he's got, you know, cold therapy. The guy is. His complex or his office rivals many cancer centers. So it's just great to have him so close and have him be such a good friend as well.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
Well, maybe we need to have him on next.
Speaker C
I know.
Speaker B
Pick his brain.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
Well, thanks for coming on and kind of sharing about environmental medicine and just your journey and just functional medicine in general. It's great to have like minded providers so close that you can kind of, you know, pick each other's brain and share. Just cheer each other on as we pioneer together.
Speaker A
So very big ocean we're in.
Speaker B
That's what it is.
Speaker A
It is something where if we're not sharing, that's. That's ignorance. We need to be sharing as much as we possibly can. This is not going anywhere. None of us are going to be out of patience any.
Speaker C
There's plenty around.
Speaker A
There's such a need for this and just to shamelessly plug again. If it's anyone that is a practitioner or even in the public. We do have some public spaces available. Come join us February 13th through the 16th in San Antonio. It's called enviroMed25 and we'll have it on our aaemonline.org website coming shortly and we'll be able to start Getting you signed up and registered. And we want to get as much information as to as many practitioners in public as we possibly can. And as you guys already stated, I think you found that it was incredibly not only informational, but I mean, the relationships and the people and out down to earth. Some of these guys have been doing this for 30 plus years. So willing to talk to any and everybody, I think is just so unique when it comes to accomplishments.
Speaker B
Yeah, we learned a lot.
Speaker C
Yeah, we did. Make sure you send those details to Sarah whenever they're registered.
Speaker A
We will have it absolutely to you.
Speaker C
Okay, sounds great. Yep.
Speaker B
And so. So you have a healing provisions practice in San Antonio and Austin and you have pretty long wait list though, but.
Speaker A
Hopefully, yeah, we're doing just fine. And again, this, this isn't going anywhere. And especially when it comes to seeing kids, there's so few and far between people that need to learn how to do this.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker A
Because our kids are suffering. They need help. They are being blamed that this is behavioral.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker A
Can't stand the anxiety generation.
Speaker B
Yep.
Speaker C
Yeah.
Speaker B
Well, and we, we are bringing on, you know, like vision therapists and you know, we're bringing on a lot of. Because a lot of times ADD is misdiagnosed. You know, it's really something else. And people just aren't taking a look under the hood to really kind of see what other things may be going on and then just giving them basic, like you said, foundational things that help their bodies function. So.
Speaker A
But, well, kids, a capacity to heal is so incredible too. Yeah, that's where it's. I love treating kids because you just find the right combinations to get their body back on track and they start taking off this beautiful scene.
Speaker C
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker B
Yeah, we saw it.
Speaker C
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker B
Well, thanks so much for joining us and we'll link all of the details below. And if you want to hear from Barry again or have any questions for them, just comment on our podcast and otherwise we will catch you all next time.
Speaker C
Thank you so much.
Speaker A
Thank you guys for doing this. Appreciate it.
Speaker C
Yeah. Have a good day.
Speaker B
Thanks for listening to this episode. Check us out on social media at Waco Functional Med or our website, Waco functional med.com join us next time.
Speaker A
This has been a rogue media network production.