What Is Functional Medicine? with Dr. Joe Mather MD

– Dr. Joe Matthew, thank you so much for joining me on my show today.

– I’m so happy to be here, thank you.

– You know, I gotta say to, I’m especially interested because as I understand, you are a functional medical doctor. Is that correct?

– Oh, got it.

– Okay, and I don’t know what the difference is between functional medicine and normal medicine. If I go to a general practitioner, what kind of medicine am I going to get? And how does that differ from functional medicine?

– You’ll probably get 10 different answers if you ask 10 different functional medicine doctors. So I’ll just give you the one that’s in my head. And I think of it as a conventional doctor, typically, we’ll be addressing symptoms with medications. And they’re kind of just trained to kind of ratchet through the symptoms and applying medications to that. A functional medicine doctor, it’s more of an idea of why is someone ill, can we fix that to get the symptoms to go away? It’s not that we don’t use medication or supplements or lifestyle, we do all the time, right? But it’s a focus, it’s a philosophy, it’s an idea of, let’s get to the reason the root cause why someone is sick. Fix that, it’s a more elegant solution.

– I like that, and if I understand correctly, because a lot of times, a symptom, let’s take a symptom like irritable bowel, and then we can give a medicine and this stops that symptom, and maybe it interferes with the inflammatory process, or something like that. But what it doesn’t do is say, well, wait a second, why do you have irritable bowel? What’s your diet look like? And even if we’re using this medicine now, we don’t want you to have to take that the rest of your life, how can we actually fix that problem? Is that what I’m hearing?

– Yeah, so you both prevent the need to have to take a medication for the rest of your life in a good case, right? But also the underlying disease process is stopped, and so the downstream inflammation or the downstream effects of that disease process go away as well.

So it’s a much more elegant way, and it really is just good medicine. I think in a lot of ways, before conventional medicine got side-tracked with just thinking that they provide surgery and medicine. This is what good healing medicine is done of all sorts of varieties for centuries. It’s just good care.

And in our case, we focus a lot on gastrointestinal health, simply because so much secondary health problems come from disorders and gut. So in our clinic, we spend a lot of time thinking about the gut as one of the main drivers of disease.

– Yeah, and I agree wholeheartedly with you, and I don’t know what’s going on in this world. It chemical toxicity or something. It’s almost as if everyone has some degree of dyspiosis, acid reflux, you know, gird, crones, siliac, irritable bowel, inflammatory bowel, got a gazillion names. And it’s almost as if everyone is affected to some extent, because there’s really no way to avoid the toxicity.

What we can do is try to minimize the damage and keep things working as good as possible. So even if you don’t have IBD, this is a topic for you. This is something to pay attention to today as we dive into this.

– You know, an amazingly high percentage of the population have IBS or would qualify for it. Up to 40%, 20% to 40% are the estimates. I see depending on the definition of symptoms or if they’ve actually been diagnosed by a physician, but huge percent of the population. And, you know, IBS is very distinct medically from inflammatory bowel disease. And some of the other conditions you mentioned, but it certainly seems to me in my young career. I’ve been at this for a decade now. Patients are sicker. I’m seeing more complicated autoimmune disease. And I don’t think that’s just a function of my experience attracting sicker patients. I really think people are getting sicker at a younger age now than they were even 10 years ago.

When I talked to my mentors, who have a even wider timeline of experience, that they echo that pattern, that people are sicker now. And there’s something very profoundly different about the world today than it was even 20, 30 years ago.

I completely agree with you. The chemistry we are using nowadays is sickening, literally. And it’s in everything. It’s, you know, we can buy everything organic. We can, you know, filter our water till there’s nothing but H2O in it. And it’s still in the air. And it’s still going to rain down on the organic crops. And we might be buying the best in doing the best we can. But the chemistry and the radiation, the pollution, it’s everywhere.

One of the most depressing things that happened to me in the last two years, what I had a patient who was eating about six to eight servings most days of organic spinach. And she was losing her hair. And we did a panel for heavy metals. And she had valiant toxicity from her organic spinach. Cale in organic spinach. You know, she’s trying to do everything right to get in, you know, what’s recommended that a lot of leafy green vegetables and going organic yet still being contaminated in the farm.

And I live in most people who save the healthiest food available. I live in Puppeno Beach, Florida and I grow some of my own food in my yard and I do a good job. We don’t use any chemicals and, you know, our grass has weeds in it because we don’t use the things to grow only grass that kills the weeds. We don’t have any kind of herbicides, it’s just, but every now and then about two or three in the morning, I see this blinking light and here there’s buzzing noise outside as these trucks come by killing off all the mosquitoes, spraying pesticides everywhere. So, I can’t grow organic in my own yard and, you know, nothing works to say, “Many way because you go out in the morning and then all the bees are dead everywhere.” It’s absolutely ridiculous what we as people are doing to the environments we live in.

Now, if you’re buying organic, we’re not saying it’s bad, it’s not the ultimate, it’s a set of standards and probably the best a lot of us can do because a lot of us can’t grow our own foods, and really have a grip on what’s going, and even if you are growing your foods, you don’t know what’s leaching into your soil from the things around you, but we can minimize it. We can choose the best route and help understand some of the things we can do to nurture our guts back to health. That’s a lot of what this discussion is about.

I also want to get into some of the conditions that seem to go hand in hand with the irritable bowel and flimatory bowel and problems that people are happening, having to, in this day. How do we identify inflammatory bowel? Is it mostly symptom-based?

Yeah, to two main ways. The first is symptom-based. So, someone with inflammatory bowel disease is typically going to have frequent bloody stools and mucus in the stool. That’s something you don’t see with irritable bowel. So, right off the bat, clinically as a physician, that that’s one of the very simple ways that we’re differentiating.

The second would be getting into testing. There’s a great test called fecal calprotectin and calprotectin is a very well-validated marker in scientific literature. The higher the level is, the more likely you’ve gotten flammatory bowel disease. And if it’s low, then you can very easily kind of rule out inflammatory bowel disease and start thinking more about irritable bowel.

But the longer I’ve done gut-based functional medicine, we are working very hard at our clinic to make things practical, simple and effective. And we’re finding a common set of treatments that if applied sequentially, help in flammatory bowel disease as well as irritable bowel. So although they are very different disease entities, right? In flammatory bowel disease, you can lead to people having their colon resected taken out, right? That can lead to increased cancer. You treat that differently than you do irritable bowel. But at the end of the day, a lot of the same treatments work for both entities. Which is one of the nice things about treating the gut.

Absolutely. Yep. And I would probably throw in there, you know, and skin conditions, because as we’re healing the gut a lot of these other things that go alongside happen to get well as well.

Yeah, rosacea, in my mind is dyspiosis until proven otherwise. I see a large number of patients with herd of carrier hides. They get better when we treat infections like age pylori, when we clean up small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, acne, eczema, many, many skin conditions are very closely related to the gut health and to the extent that you get the gut better. I tell patients, okay, there’s a very high chance that when we get these GI symptoms down, you’ll start seeing your skin conditions ratchet down as well. And that’s usually the case, maybe 50, 60% of the time. And then simply, if we’ve done your homework on the gut, but skin conditions still exists, you want to look a bit deeper. There’s something else driving those remaining symptoms.

And, you know, people listening in right now, think about it. You know, you have kids that have acne in their most vulnerable years, you know, where it’s the most important to them. And their diets are a wreck. And the common treatment might be something like antibiotics, which can actually further damage the gut flora. And taking a more meaningful functional approach, healing the gut. Someone can clear up even acne conditions. I’ve seen it myself. I know you’ve seen it. It’s a beautiful thing.

Absolutely. And those those animals seem to be, their their their doxus cycline and minus cycline. The tectrus cyclines are the classic drugs commonly prescribed to teenagers in this group. And they’re very broad spectrum. And it seems to me that that that that’s a vulnerable period for the gut. And I tend to see a lot of patients who have developed autoimmune disease later in life who who’s telling me that there was a two-year period where they were taking minus cycline on a regular basis for acne in their teenage years. It’s it’s something that that comes up fairly often. And I think it does point to the the power of the gut being disrupted causing problems later in life. And and how important it is to take good care of our gastrointestinal health.

I’m absolutely sure that you know the the balance of flora. It seems like it’s very hard to get back to that normal balance easier to disrupt it than restore it.

I’ll push back a little bit on that. I think it’s actually made more complicated than it needs to be. Because unfortunately, I think a lot of functional medicine doctors have gotten into this idea that the stool testing is extremely accurate and definitive. When it’s just not the case, but when you look at some of the clinical patterns, it’s very common that we see patients come in and they’ve had small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and they’ve been treated with number of treatments that once they’re right diet and probiotic pieces put into place, their symptoms go away quickly.

We also know that for many antibiotics, the microbiome will snap back in place within, you know, days to weeks. And so it’s, it’s, it’s, it is a resilient system, but it absolutely can be broken. If you take enough swings at it for long enough, then it can be broken, but people are resilient. And they’ll heal when you do the, the right treatments.

And it’s one of the things that we’re, we’re constantly trying to hammer into our patients is that functional medicine doesn’t have to be difficult. If you’re doing the right thing, you get a result. And if you’re doing something and not getting a result, the answer isn’t to do that thing more. It’s to take a look at what else you may be missing.

Are you missing a toxic piece? This is so common, mold toxicity, metal toxicities. Just in my world, that’s probably what I see the most in Louisiana. We were talking before the video started about I’m coming at you from New Orleans and we live in a bowl under sea level. And so there’s a lot of water damage here. There’s a lot of flooding and I see a lot of mold toxicity. Really making people sick. Pretty sad.

Yeah, let’s talk a little bit more about that. I’m specifically mold toxicity from what I’ve seen from what I understand. Once people have that, there’s a detoxing program that can take quite some time. Yeah, that is that work. And is it, is it the mold that we’re getting rid of or is it toxins from the mold? What’s going on?

Our best understanding is that it’s full. So most cases that I see, my assumption is that they are colonized in the sinuses and in the gut where there’s actual physical mold growing. The mold itself will then produce a series of toxins called micro toxins and they are responsible for their own set of problems. But for most of the patients that I see, it’s definitely both issues. There is kind of those are kind of the internal issues.

There’s also the external mold pressure. If you’re living in a water damaged home, you’re being exposed to the toxins in the air that the mold can produce that are small enough. They can go through drywall or through the cracks and you’re going to find a trickle out that is circulated at the house, but it’s not just the mold toxins. It’s the volatile organic compounds. It’s the bacterial and yeast growth that works along with the mold. Actinomyces is a species that we think about with water damage building.

So you have this external pressure that can be really, really devastating to people’s immune systems in cognition. And then it leads typically to an internal problem. So it’s a complicated entity and that’s one of the reasons it takes so long is that you have to weed out, well, this, can I get this patient in a healthier environment number one first and foremost? That’s enough to fix some people. But then you have many, many people who’ve been exposed, say even a decade ago, that have lingering ongoing symptoms. And they’re never fully able to get to the bottom, despite, you know, working with a great doctor or a good integrative or functional doc. You know, they’re still having these persistent gut issues. They’re still having persistent cognitive issues. And that’s one, what we really look up to to see is there to the best of our ability and internal source involved.

Yeah. As I’m picturing, you know, I think you use the word colonized in scientists and is that something that we can kill off? Is there a treatment for it? Or is it more like, you know, balancing flora of the scientists, so that the good for it eventually takes over. What do we do?

So the second, the second I’m very interested in that possibility, that’s not something I think it’s been shown that we can do, but just just lately with with my colleague, Michael Rusho, we’ve been experimenting with nasal probiotics, and the idea is, can we shift the microbiome of the scientists to make it inhospitable from mold.

Clinically, we see that that happens with probiotics, that applying probiotics aggressively in early to patients who we think are colonized with mold. I see there a timeline to heal from mold get better, because I think that the probiotics are acting as many anti-fungals and pushing out the mold that’s in the gut, right? And I think the same would work in the sciences. I just haven’t been proved. Right? Yeah, I’m just unsure. So I’m still working my way through that. But yes, it can be killed. And anti-fungals, no sprays are very helpful for patients to recover as our anti-fungal herbs and prescriptions to kill off mold internally. It’s an infectious problem at some point.

What about things like netty pots?

I think they’re helpful. I don’t think a netty pot will be enough by itself because of the way that these mold critters tend to find a nice home and don’t want to leave. They mold loves dark damp places, right? So it does not want to leave and I think just trying to wash it out with saline isn’t going to be enough. You have to convince it that it’s not in a good place.

So I’ve heard people say I’ve been diagnosed with mold in my brain.

I was made really sick with mold and this is this is where I kind of got the mold specialty. It’s that two years ago my medical office, they did some AC work next door. It changed the pressure inside and all of a sudden humidity went through the roof and mold is growing in the AC and it changes your cognition, it changes your mood, changes how you think. It’s very poisonous to the psyche and to the mind and the depression and cognitive change is often the worst symptom of mold toxicity. In my personal experience in my patients, you get body pain, you get fatigued, you get chemical sensitivity, you get food sensitivity, all those things are devastating, but it’s the mental changes that were the, for me was horrible.

Thankfully, I had been treating mold before, so I got the jump on it and I think my course was a little easier than it might have been had I not already been treating it.

It doesn’t get in your brain as far as I know, but I think the toxins themselves are very inflammatory to the brain and we think but haven’t I don’t think it’s been conclusively shown the toxins are fat soluble, which means that they tend to accumulate in fat-rich tissues and the neurons themselves are very dense in fat and so these these micro toxins I think can get embedded in the neuron to cause inflammation that then causes the symptoms but whether there is mold crawling around in the brain I’m not sure it works quite like that but the treatment mold in cognition gets better

that’s what I suspected wasn’t sure I’ve heard it before and I think what they mean probably is no it really affects my brain and like any disruption of chemistry can absolutely you know

there’s a lot of conditions that and as we’re talking you know one of the things you’re revealing is that we really don’t know that much about a lot of things there’s things now that are being talked to when I went to medical school how practice school when I took medical classes we didn’t know these things we didn’t even know how cells communicate with each other things that are just being revealed in the last you know five years there’s a lot of conditions that will diagnose will name them without even really understanding what caused them or being able to say this is why we’re calling that um things like you know five or my algebra which is kind of a non-specific diagnosis um what types of diagnoses might people have when they come to you when in actuality it’s a mold toxicity.

Very good question and there’s a specific answer. Fiber mileage is one of them um that would be number one on my list because of how commonly mold will cause deep-seated muscle pain and fatigue as well as sleep destruction. So Fiber mileage is definitely when you mail that one.

The other ones I would put on your list would be any a typical neurologic diagnosis so someone comes in with a typical Parkinson’s disease, a typical multiple sclerosis, a typical Alzheimer’s disease. Those are more often than not caused by mold. They don’t quite fit the bill. They’re causing a neuro cognitive decline. They don’t quite fit in the classic diagnostic schematic for those diseases but that would be my answer. A typical neurologic neurologic condition.

Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense and even in a lot of those neurological conditions, we don’t fully understand them. You know, we see a certain group of symptoms. We give them those names and we don’t really know what’s causing them. So it’s a great answer. And anybody listening, thinking I’ve never been able to get help with this fibromyalgia or with this, you know, whether they call it, oh, what’s the neurological condition that so many women have had been diagnosed with MS? Multiple diseases. You know, in just summarize. Yeah.

So it definitely be worth getting checked in, considering that possibly molotoxicity. Yeah. And start treating things like your microbiome and getting things cleaned up and working right who knows? Yeah.

Right. To follow up on that last point, one of the things that that we’ve spent a lot of time of micro-rusher and I putting together is kind of a step-wise fashion for how you deal with this because more and more the patients coming to see us have failed multiple conventional and multiple integrative doctors. And so we kind of have to take the job as a big picture consultant guy. What’s been missed here? Is it mold? Is it gut? Is it thyroid? So our autoimmunity? Is it a diet piece? Is it a toxic piece? How do you treat all those things? Where do you start? And so what we feel our job and what we do the best job doing is taking a big picture of you of that and then sequencing and treatments to start clicking things off the list.

We start with the simplest most basic, right? If you think of the therapeutic order from naturopathy, it’s very similar. You start with the simplest treatments that are going to be usually lifestyle. We almost always are starting by cleaning up the gut and then working our way up. Once we’ve done a good job on the gut, but symptoms still persist, then we might want to start looking okay, is there a nutrient or a metabolic or hormonal issue? Okay, we’ve clicked that off. Maybe there were missing an infectious or toxic burden, right?

And a lot of what I think is missed in modern functional medicine is you have these, this idea being promoted that first of all you need a big, wide-ranging bunch of tasks you need. A adrenal, four-point cortisol tests and you need, you know, all sorts of hormones and you need micro nutrients done and then you need a gut testing that’s evil, breath test and all of a sudden patients have been asked to spend two, the $4,000 before they’ve even seen a physician.

And now you’re going to have to treat their depression.

Exactly, it’s, and what we’re trying to do is push back from that model and say, hey, look, remember, what are the nuts and bolts things you need to do? Forget wasting $2,000. We’re going to ask you to take some probiotics. Take your resources that you would have spent on that testing and let’s clean up the basics first. And then if we are stuck in a few months, we can always do a stool test, right? But let’s, let’s not go crazy at the beginning of therapy before exhausting some of the basics.

Dr. Madder, I’m loving you more and more every minute here because you’re speaking my language here.

I’ve always said, you know, we can, we can, you know, stick things in every office you have and take fluids out and measure them and study them and put them under microscopes and we can do imaging studies and MRIs and X-rays and CAT scans and, you know, fill you with dye and solutions and stuff and to a lot of things that are not good for the body as we try to diagnose and figure things or we can recognize that your body has this intelligence that is so much wiser than anything that we can even understand and somehow it works when you give it the things it needs and we know that there are things you can put in there that interfere with this and as we start cleaning things up and working with your nutrition exercise, your rest, your mental well-being, even how we think can change the chemistry in your body and tremendously affect how your body functions.

So let’s nurture these things and I would add that last that that fifth point I said nutrition exercise, rest, mental well-being or how we think some people call it spiritual wellness, I would add to that nerve function, which myself is a chiropractor that’s the one of the things that we look at, you know, can we decompress the spine and make the nerves fire more like they’re supposed to.

So as we are making these changes and in just mentioning those, sometimes I’ll say nutrition, exercise, rest, and in someone’s brain fires that are like, oh that’s the one that I’m missing, you know. Okay, let’s focus on that. Why aren’t you getting your rest? It’s such an important component in wellness and it’s easy to figure these things out by changing the things that you’re not doing right and all the sudden things get well. You know, I love that approach as opposed to, you know, sure diagnostics has its place.

But it does, but it’s secondary to listen into the patient and I think that that’s what these tests are distracting physicians from listening. The body’s wisdom will tell you what needs to be fixed at what time and in symptom patterns will change and sometimes you have to listen.

So sometimes you’ve done enough on the gut and all the side you have migrating joint pain. You better be looking for a tick-borne illness, right? And the body was not ready to treat that initially, but it might be later. And so listening is the most important thing.

And if I can just keep on this, this is like my favorite soapbox, so we can be buddies, Michael, because the people are being harmed by this excessive testing, not just on a financial standpoint, but medically, because the truth is that a lot of those tests are not accurate.

I was just reading a meta-analysis of adrenal cortisol testing, right? And that means a collection of studies, can you take those collection of studies and then get a conclusion that’s more than just one study. So you avoid cherry picking data. And the idea with adrenal fatigue is that your adrenal gland is kind of crap down and is no longer producing. The hormones need to regulate your blood sugar and keep your energy up until you’re chronically fatigued. And so doctors are testing cortisol levels throughout the day. The problem is, if you look at all these studies, 62% of the patients in this meta-analysis of multiple studies, low adrenal cortisol levels, we’re not associated with fatigue. So if you have a test that’s wrong, 60% of the time, but this is a must-do test that you’re collecting periodically through treatment. It’s absolutely insane. That harms a patient.

Another good one, you buy on them as a stool test. They were using dog poop as their reference. And you’re supposed to be using that test-to-guide therapy. That harms patients when you rely on these tests that are not validated, that are not accurate. And particularly if someone has fatigue and I want to try and adrenal adaptogenic blend, there’s nothing easier than saying, “Please take some ashwaganda. Do you feel better? Yes or no?” You don’t need to waste the time in the money on some of these tests. So this is one of the things that we’re really trying to get the message out. And we really would like to be able to shift the the ship or functional medicine back to just listening to the patient’s symptoms, or I think inside trapped by inaccurate labs.

And sometimes it gets us focused on the wrong things too. You know, we do so many tests and oh you have high blood pressure. Well here you need just to lower it. No, wait a second, wait a second why is there high blood pressure? You know, they’re not sleeping. Wait, what do you even think? So you know, we get so focused on all that numbers too high and this is how you lower it without thinking of the why is it high and how do we actually really fix the problem? So I love your approach and I quite frankly wasn’t expecting to hear that today. I love it. Oh, we’re good. How do you keep going your toes really?

All right, so I’m going to try to find something else to be controversial instead. All right. Not really. I’m not looking for that, but I do want to talk about something that no-to-health care professionals agree 100% on what is the best diet.

And there are so many influences and there’s so many reasons people think we need this kind of diet or that kind of diet. If I’m a doctor treating diabetes, I’m concerned about blood sugar levels. If I’m a doctor that’s treating cancer, I’m concerned about detoxing and making sure that we’re cleansing as much as possible and supporting the immune system. And if I’m a doctor that’s treating an Olympic power lifter, I’m concerned about maximum strength. And we all have our different focuses. gut health. I want to maybe I want to emphasize things like probiotics and less chemicals, because we’re all trying to heal the gut floor. And we all recommend things based on where we come from and our own experiences.

So we’re not going to agree 100% here. But I do want to know what kind of diet you recommend and the reason for it. And it’s the audience is, um, job to listen and pick and choose and understand so that they can figure out what is best for them. We’re all from different parts of the world too. You know, my body grew up on pasta and, and my heritage is Italian and, and we do bread’s very well, but someone with a gluten intolerance that anything I eat is the devil. You know, what kind of diet do you recommend?

I’ll answer a couple of ways. And I just want to agree with, I think, some of the underlying points that you mentioned is that number one, not every diet is right for a food patient. So if you’re just prescribing one patient, you’re doing a bit one diet, you’re doing a very bad job, right? The second thing that we like to do is we ask what have they tried before, right? And we’re looking for patterns did they improve when they went SCD or a little fog map? Okay, they might do better with really low fiber diets, maybe we want to push those buttons, or they got really much a lot better on carnivore, right? Okay, we got to pay attention to why that might be, right?

So that’s we always are looking, or doc, I felt really bad on a low fiber diet. Some people just do great with a high fiber diet, so it really does depend. That’s the first answer.

The answer I’ll give you in terms of my favorite diet will just be the thing I think that people misunderstand the most when it comes to diet and that the it’s not gluten or dairy that is the biggest problem. It’s processed food. It’s the additives and chemicals that come with processed food. So to the extent that anyone takes a look at their diet and they start systematically pulling out things with nutrition facts labels and lots of black scientific scientists, scientists, they are getting healthier. Bonus points if they can go organic on top of that, but it is the processed food additives that are the biggest detriment to health from my perspective.

So I almost always start with, we use a paleo diet, lots of foods, lots of vegetables, lots of nuts and seeds, low-one gluten and dairy because they frequently bother the gut. So we start a lot of patients on that, but the emphasis is process foods taking out first and foremost, replace that with, you know, normal food, right, the outsides of the grocery store. So that would be my first answer, and if they haven’t responded to that diet, we then we don’t have to stay doing that. We may go low-fod map, we may use a low-pistamine diet. There are other permutations that I use, but if someone is eating processed food and they’re forgetting to eat vegetables and fruit and normal meat and seafood and nuts and seeds, they’re completely missing the boat. So don’t worry about oxalots or solicelets if you’re still eating granola bars, or crackers, right?

You know, I’ve, I’ve brought it to people’s attentions many times the things that are on the process food labels, you know, artificial colors, artificial flavors, sweeteners, you know, hydrogenation, um, preservatives. And these chemicals are not fit for consumption. If you fed only those chemicals to an organic organism, they would probably die apart from food. And the justification is oh, but they’re in such small amounts.

You have to think about it. Like when it comes to the preservatives, I love people asking people too. What’s the purpose of the preservative? And a lot of people say, well, they make the food last longer. Yeah, but how does it do that? Because what the food scientists and measures is they’re actual killing potential. You know, we take something and we inoculate it and we see if there’s enough chemistry to prevent that from growing. And the preservative system is based on making sure that moldy, fungus bacteria does not grow in that food.

And the funny thing about it is is when we’re feeding that to a person, we do some digestion and we chew our food and it goes through this acidic environment. And we work in some digestive enzymes with our saliva and the enzymes continue to do their work. I’m breaking down the molecules, but ultimately we’re putting it in this microbiome that finishes the processing. And now wait a second. Isn’t chemistry in the food so microorganisms cannot consume it? How are we possibly feeding them food filled with chemicals and expecting to be healthy? And that’s your process food. All of those chemical names that are in there to make the food appealing make it seem to last longer by making it really no longer food.

I agree completely.

Yeah, so I like that approach and it does recognize there’s room for everybody. I had a guess I’m like show recently and they talked about the food mood hoop journal because as you had indicated everyone is different and if this isn’t working you know by documenting people can sometimes figure out this works that doesn’t work. We start making changes and we document the results with those changes without all the diagnostics simply making changes that are good for people. I love it.

A lot of people come in with food allergy panels and they they have really narrowed their diet down unnecessarily to maybe like six or seven foods and say well you know as you’re allergic to I had these IgE markers to egg and wheat and swordfish and broccoli and mango and so now I can only eat these foods and you’re like well what happens when you eat mango? Oh I love it it feels it’s great. Well maybe we didn’t need to turn a lie on that test maybe it’s not very accurate.

Yeah and I never know what the tests you know what the source of the antigens in these allergy tests are you know are you allergic to pasture eggs or conventional eggs? I don’t know is that you know what’s the source of albumin? You know how do you know animal foods versus our clinic?

What were when we see that in the the chart note before we’re working with the patient we just skip past it. Like hey that has no value here. Okay look at it.

Animal foods or vegetation what do we do?

Oh man, eat both of them. Humans are, I’m nervous and as long as we recognize that the people have variants, right? So the I think that the best explanation here is people whose genetic heritage comes close to the equator tend to do better on higher carb, fruity diets, right? And then you know the white Europeaner type people tend to do well on a higher seafood and protein-rich diet. That that seems to be true.

But there’s so much variation here that you know you couldn’t use that as a role. You really just have to go for as much whole-on-processed food as you can. And then work with a doctor who can kind of tight-try it, right? If you tend towards high blood sugar, you’re going to want to drop the carbs, right? If you tend towards IBS symptoms, our experiences, you were going to feel so much better on lower fiber. Even though I know all the GI doctors are telling you to take more and more fiber and that’s how you get rid of your IBS, but it is just not true, clinically. It’s a nice theory, but the vast majority of our patients with chronic GI issues need lower fiber diets. And you have to listen to the patient to get a better.

Yeah, I know Dr. Natasha, a camel and my bride would recommend thoroughly cooking your vegetables to soften the fiber, to change it, to make it so that your body can use it. And hopefully we would get you healed to a point where, eventually, you can take the raw fiber right now, obviously, you can’t. Some people would remove the fiber by juicing.

Lots of different, lots of different tools, and I don’t disagree with any of those periods. For most of my patients though, it’s rather than how are they going to cook it? It’s just get given, get the vegetable, and we’ll we can argue about steaming first, baking or hosting, you know, yeah.

Well, and her method is making soup, usually a bone stock with, you know, starting with the lesser-fiberist vegetables, and cooking them thoroughly, and maybe trying one at a time as you increase your diet and learn, and as soon as you add this one, and it doesn’t work, okay? Let’s take that out for a while, but try another one.

Yeah, that is a great approach, because we know that when patients fast, it negatively drops the amount of bacterial and yeast counts in the gut, we know that just fast in the loam can get rid of seabull. And so this is a very powerful tool for DIY health, and patients can simply ask them to do a 24-hour fast and see what happens to their GI symptoms, right? If they have overgrowth, generally those GI symptoms will drop. They might get a little like head at our hungry, but their GI symptoms drop.

And then if we see that signal, we say, aha, okay, maybe we do some bone broth fast, maybe we do just water fats, or maybe we use elemental formulas, some elemental diets, which are proteins, carbs, sugars broken down into very, very small, easily digestible pieces, right? That mimics a fast and has a lot of the benefits of a fast without just having to starve yourself. And so we use that treatment a lot in our clinic and find it really helpful. Particularly for stubborn cases that have gotten stuck.

That’s interesting. Is that like a food product that’s somehow pre-digested? What is it?

A pre-digested, it’s like, almost think of like a protein powder, but it’s got the nutrients, vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbs, sugars, all broken down. And to very easily digestible forms, so that they are absorbed in about the first two feet of the small intestine. That means they’re remaining, you know, what? 18, plus 30, whatever. Oh god, you’re going to affect someone’s going to fact-check my distance of intestines and get me wrong. But the remaining length of the small, large intestines gets a…

Oh, are the remaining surface of the tennis court? Bingo.

I don’t know. I’ve heard it, tennis court. I’ve heard it’s a football field. I don’t know. It’s a large surface area for digesting.

It was one paper that I read that made me laugh. It was not actually a tennis court. It’s a squash court. I think there might be missing the point on that one.

All right, let’s talk about fermented foods versus probiotics versus some people treat, you know, they say, well, I have overgrowth of this or that and some people, you know, use like silver protocols to kill off or anti-biotic protocols, other people look at it and say, “No, the best way to get rid of this is to flood it with good bacteria. What’s your take on it?”

fermented, so for the patients that we see that have long-standing GI issues and unable to come to a conclusion, fermented foods are just not enough. So there are healthy things to eat. So we want to encourage people to eat them if they don’t have problems with histomy. But I’ve never seen a patient who’s just taking yogurt and sour crowd and gotten better. It’s just, there’s just not enough in there. So the doses of probiotics that we use are clinical grade. They’re, they’re much much higher. And I think that’s what you need number one.

The, the other question kind of behind your statement there was, was, “Do some patients need anti-microbial? Do they need a reduction of bacterial and microbe counts?” Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s no question about it. There are certain sub-satisfaction to just absolutely you need to use herbs or antibiotics to reduce the loads before they feel better.

There’s another group of patients that we just kind of bracket it into two very big categories of patients who have come in and they’ve been on refax them in in Neil Myosin and Flagell and all bunch of antibiotics for the gut and they just maybe got a little better but they just hit a plateau. Those patients almost always need a rebuilt or regrowth and this is where we tend to use a product that I know you’ll like because it has allowing it. We call it gut rebuilt nutrients and we’ll often add this with probiotics. It’s got glutamine, allows, zinc, carnacene, slippery element is the other one and that combination in particular seems to be really, really helpful. Often when patients have done a bunch of herbal treatments then we might throw in the gut rebuilt on top and all of a sudden they get from that 75% better to 100% right? I love it.

The other one it’s good for is constipation. The allow in particular is fantastic for constipation and we often will start that earlier if someone comes in and dock. I’ve been constipated for 20 years.

Very good. Yeah. I do you know what? I’m going to diverge for just a second because I have to tell you my favorite constipation story ever.

Yes. And you know this is one of those things that makes you think oh wow it’s not always diet but so this is a chiropractic story and this is about a man who came in with low back pain going down his leg and he hadn’t had that in a long time and he had neck pain going down his arm and has a chiropractor. I remember taking an x-ray and I was young in my chiropractic years. I was pretty much just out of school almost like an internship setting. I’m right around 1995. I remember taking an x-ray and seeing this phone that was kind of crooked, functionally crooked.

You know you could tell that normally it’d be sitting like that but for whatever reason it was you know everything was just found up pulling this out of its normal position. And I remember doing a little trigger point working, setting them up on that side, posture, setting and getting on that lumbar vertebrae and just you know my I was determined to fix it in one shot. And I pushed on that and I’m telling you it sounded like sitting on a backup potato chip. So I mean just everything moved. And I know you’ve seen the show caddy shot. Well in that movie there was a scene where Rodney Dangerfields in this huge yacht going like 30, 40, 50 miles an hour.

And there’s a little black man just fishing by himself on his little canoe. And he sees Rodney coming for him on this big yacht. Rodney has no clue. Doesn’t see anything. He’s just wide open, doughnut’s fastest he can. And the guy looks and then looks away and then realizes what’s happening. Looks back again as eyes get about as big as donuts as he realizes he has to dive into save his life. And he does. Charlie on the table when I did that move on him, that’s what happened to his eyes. Just it reminded me of that movie. Reminded me of that scene. It was just a big bug guy. Oh, what just happened? And I remember saying, you know, Charlie, that’s exactly what I expected happened to come back tomorrow.

And when he came back the next day, the way he spoke to me was kind of like, Dr. Haley, something you did, okay? And he repeated, something you did. And I’m thinking that, well, maybe I didn’t explain to him that I’m going to make a change and it might make some noise and things might even hurt a little bit because it might be uncomfortable as I make a change. It’s just like if we go to the gym and we work out real strong, we haven’t done that in years, our muscles might hurt the next day. Something you did. Well, the first thing he, you know, I said, what’s going on?

He said, well, he said, and he kind of got close to me and said, a little lo, he said, I can have sex again. I was like, okay, wait a second and I looked at his entrance chart, I said, you didn’t check this box here where you were, you know, how long have you been having a problem in that area? He said for 10 years and he said it again, something you did, I said, okay, let’s go in on. He said, well, I don’t have constipation anymore. How long have you had that problem? He said, 10 years. Wow. Is it Charlie? What was that look on your face? He said, I had to go to the bathroom.

So for him, after being constipated for 10 years, it was like an instant on switch.

Do you think that was a vagal nerve?

I don’t know because I did, I adjusted his lower neck and I adjusted it, I believe it was as L2, if I remember correctly. And it was a long time ago. So I don’t know what was affected, but I know that something turned on instantly and he was calculating, wondering whether or not he was going to make it home on time. And everything just seemed to empty out. And when we had talked in that follow-up visit, he remembered recalled, injuring his spine and having some pain for a period of time and that correlating with about when he started having, you know, erectile dysfunction, and he started having constipation.

Because a lot of times the self-care practitioners, we, you know, do get tunnel vision. And that’s why going through those five points, nutrition, exercise, rest, mental well-being, properly functioning nervous system. We look at that bit possibility as, you know, something so simple like tension on a nerve. Everybody knows that, you know, you cross your leg wrong. And, and you put pressure on that nerve and your foot goes numb. You never think of the possibility that their organs are numb, from less nerve function flowing to them. We don’t feel the organ. So it’s not numbness in a physical perception. But anyway, I digress, but it’s important because we’re looking at the body as all as a whole being and say, why is this not working?

We see, I see a small number of patients whose higher sliding higher pernia is causing heartburn palpitations and constipation. And when I ask them to go see a chiropractor or show them some maneuvers that they can do on themselves that that makes a difference in their digestion. And I think it’s pressure on the vagus nerve. The vagus will wrap around the stomach. And I think when the stomach slides up above the diaphragm, it’s really crimping the vagus nerve and causing it to kind of shut down and leads to the constipation. So it’s not every case and not every sliding high to her and you will do this, but on those cases when you reduce it and you see patients say, “I can take a deep breath.

It’s something very different here. It’s true that physical form can easily be missed and in balances there just need to be thought of just in the same category is, do you have a dispyosis?” Right.

And you know for those listening saying, “Oh, now I have to run to go to the higher factor and all my problems are going to be fixed.” Now, we don’t get to do that Jesus thing that often. It happens now and then where, you know, we give someone an adjustment, everything is different. But usually just like as I’m talking to you, it’s a process of identifying what’s going on and sometimes it has to do with your spine and sometimes it doesn’t.

There’s the right tool for the right patient and our job is to identify what that is and get the patient to that right tool the right time.

Absolutely. You know, some of the things we talked about motoxicity. I’ve seen people with that diagnosis literally moving like they had cerebral palsy of it affecting them to the point where, you know, amulation walking is just not even possible. Wheelchair, people in wheelchairs with these diagnoses. What is one of your favorite testimonials related to what you do?

In terms of, in terms of mold?

Well, in terms of whether it be mold or gut dyspiosis or any of that.

I love my job because I get to see success because I think we’ve built our clinic in a way that let’s just get those type of reactions commonly. And so my mind just goes to yesterday. I had a patient come in and I know it was going to be a good visit because it was the first follow-up visit. And I see in caps infinitely better.

And the nice thing about this type of medicine is that we try to simplify it or not complicating things. And this patient had been constipated for 20 years. And this isn’t, this is a pretty routine story. Constipated for 20 years had thyroid dysfunction secondary to the constipation and GI problem. And I got around the right diet, probiotics, and then the gut rebuild. Allow, glutamine, and a month later, that was all she needed. And I honestly like those cases the best, because she been ill for 20 years, we gave her the right treatment and then a month later, she’s 80% better. She’s exercising for the first time in years. She’s moving her body. She has energy. She’s not taking naps anymore. Right, her mood is better. Her husband is happier with her. Everything shifted from just a very, very simple treatment.

So although, yes, I’ve seen people go from old toxicity where they’re suicidal to writing a motorcycle around the country. My favorite cases are, has there just been some basics that are missed and I can fix you in two months. That’s what I love the best. Trying to find those cases because, you know, it’s so much more fun to do it simply, rather than, oh, I could have had you spend $2,000 and take 30 supplements, but we got it done with $0 and $4. Like, yes, those are the things that get me going on.

I love it. I love how you went back to it. I think you said, was that yesterday or today or something, it was really recent, whatever.

Yeah, yes, today.

Yeah, that’s a beautiful thing. And it’s what fuels us to do what we do here in the Asking US daily victories, whether they’re, you know, the patient was like, thank you. I’m like, no, you don’t understand. Like, this is what gets me up in the morning. Like, thank you.

You don’t come trust me and work with me. I can’t help people. And so that was the, that was the fun. I felt like I got more out of it than she had. That’s a beautiful thing as fun.

Now, our, all of your patients coming to the clinic, are you doing some stuff over Zoom? What do you do?

We’re all remote. So, so we have the, the privilege of Michael Roushra has a nice online social media platform and podcast and blog. And so we’ve got our, we’ve got patients in all 50 states and internationally. So, we don’t have a physical location. We are all remote consultations. And so, we kick at old school and use the phone. We, we’ve, we’ve tried the Zoom consultations at the beginning of the pandemic and just bandwidth and connection and trying to see what they were saying and they were trying to look at us and it just didn’t work. So, we do phone and that let’s just really focus on listening to the symptoms and then responding appropriately. So, that’s what we do.

Oh, I love it. Now, where’s the best place for someone to get in touch with you, find out more about you absorb some of your content or just get your phone number?

Yeah, so two things. One would be our blog, uh, Dr. Michael Ruchio Radio, and the other would be our clinic, which is the RuchoInstitute.com. So, our USCIO Institute, RuchoInstitute.com. Now, that’s, that’s a way that’s our clinic web page and that’d be the best place for people to come find us.

Okay, excellent. People are going to be absorbing this content from all different platforms. If you’re on YouTube, you can check below the video in the description. If you’re on the Dr. Haley.com blog, look toward the bottom we’ll have links to all the resources. Everything that you provide me with will take a minute after we’re recording just to make sure I have it right with. Links to everything you just mentioned and probably more if you’re on Apple or Spotify. Again, look in the show description. All the links will be there.

Dr. Joe Matter, I want to thank you so much. Super awesome conversation and I had sampled.

Yeah, what I’m the same page. I love it.

Yep, absolutely. Thank you so much for joining me anytime.